Sunday School Leader Focus: Groups

- Now that we're ready to get started, I just wanted to take a moment to introduce you to Topper Reid, I won't say how long Topper Reid and I have known each other, but it was back when he had hair and it may even have been back when he was an Alabama fan rather than having those Auburn photos behind him, I don't know. Topper has served in our state, several different churches, I know he's been at Parker Memorial in Anniston, Calvary Baptist and I wanna say Topper I may have first met you as a staff member when you were at Huffman in Birmingham before going to Hunter Street, and he was there when Hunter Street relocated. It was basically he and Buddy Gray. And God poured out a blessing on him, and great things happened at Hunter Street. Recently, he's been at Westwood in Alabaster, but also, Topper is involved with Unlimited Partnerships, which means he travels our country, really as a specialist in the area of Sunday school and groups and multiplying groups, which is why, indeed, I've asked him to be on with us tonight. We started a thing called GXP, Group Multiplication Process, that Topper helps teach in our state. And we've had about three different groups going for that now. And so he is a tremendous resource for us in the area of group multiplication. Now I wanna say to you, you at the bottom of your screens, should be able to see something that says, Q&A, and I want you to go ahead as you think of a question, just enter it there and we'll have a time that Topper will answer your questions. So we're gonna allow 30 to 45 minutes for that. So feel free to go ahead and ask your questions now. You can chat with other people in the chat room if you want to, and ask them a question if you want to, but we need you to put your questions for Topper in the Q&A. If you call up the Chat menu, you'll see three little dots down close to the bottom, if you select those three little dots, you can, in fact, save everything that's put in the chat room, so should something be in the chat room that you wanna hang onto, you can save that and view that later on, okay. So without taking up any more of his time, Topper, share with us.

- Thank you Daniel, it's a joy to be here with you. And this is the first time I've done this type of seminar, and I've done some with some other groups, but this is a little bit different than what I've done. I'd like to go ahead and get screen if I could so that I can share my presentation with you tonight. And I'll go through this real quick. If you would like to jump in at any point in time, feel free to do so. We'll have plenty of time at the end for Q&A, and some discussion and that sort of thing. What I'm gonna be sharing tonight is just some really basic information, it's probably gonna be things that you've always heard and always have known about, that I'll remind you of, that still work, and all of these are principles so that no matter what your context is, you can take these principles and make an adaption of them, and they should be able to work for you. Our topic tonight is basically just how to multiply adult groups. And what we'll be looking at is just some basic principles for starting new traditional, on campus groups, home groups, if you will, groups that do not meet on campus, that meet at home or another location. And now, since we've been in this COVID-19, how we might think about facilitating, possibly, new virtual groups. And so these principles would apply in all of those situations. My first slide that I wanna share with you has to do with the question of why do we even wanna multiply in the first place? And it's always been my practice in my churches that I served in and with the churches that I consult with, is the very first thing that we do is we start in scripture and we hang everything that we do in scripture. And the reason for that is particularly when you start talking about creating a new group, to me, that's probably the most difficult thing we do as educators in our churches, is to expand our current organization. For some reason, adults do not want to do that, that is just something that we have to work very hard at, to accomplish, and we get a lot of pushback and resistance. And a lot of good reasons for it, as a matter of fact, I have a good friend of time, and if I told you his name, you would all know who he was. He recently retried and he's back in his church, in a small group and enjoying it. And he just remarked to me not too long ago, he said, Topper, he said, I can really see why people don't wanna start a new group, he said I'm really enjoying my group, he said, I thought I would never say that, but I can kind of see it from a whole different angle at this point. So in order for us to really get some traction, I think we have to go back to what the word says, and there's a lot of Bible verses and different stories in the Bible that we can tell that uses an illustration to give us traction for the ministry that we need to be able to accomplish, to starting a new group. That's all there. But I just gotta couple here I wanna share with you, and of course, the first one would be the Great Commission, and basically Jesus gave us our marching orders, he basically just told us to go and to make disciples, to baptize and to teach. And from this, through the years, those of you that have been in this for a while, may remember years ago, where we have what we call the Six Tasks of the Sunday School, or the Six Reasons for the Sunday School to exist or the Six Purposes of the Sunday School, and you know, that's where those came from, was from the Great Commission. And then, when we start talking about creating new groups, if you go to Mark 2:22, Jesus has been out teaching and preaching and healing and that sort of thing, it's Bell Taylor calling me right now, and the Pharisees have come up to him and they are questioning him, and basically, he answers them in verse, let's see, 22, and he says, "And no one pours new wine into old wine skins, "if he does, they will burst the skins "and both the wine and the wine skins will be ruined. "No, he pours new wine into new wine skins." You know, I think about that and if you go back, there's some meanings for that, I mean he's speaking to the Pharisees and so forth, but the picture that I see when I read that is I think we know, it's hard to put new people in an existing group, for some reason, existing groups get happy and satisfied with who they have and many times, after they've been together for a while, it's hard for them to let new people break into the group. And so, it's much better if you can get a new wine skin and fill it with new wine, because as you know, the illustration here is, wine skin as it ferment, it expands the wine skins and it gets to a certain point, if you put new wine in an old wine skin, it'll burst it, it'll cause it to burst and you'll lose the wine. Well, I don't think adding new people to a new group will burst it, but it does cause a lot of friction and resistance sometimes from your folks, and particularly, if you're trying to start a new group, often in an existing group. And then the last purpose I think, again, is what is the purpose of the small groups in the first place? It's not to become a Bible club, to me, it's groups meeting to become disciples that will make disciples and so groups can be disciple groups that can reach other groups, and therefore, reach other people and fulfill the Great Commission by multiplying groups. So this is one of the reasons why when we answer the question, why multiply? And it's really to do the Great Commission, to reach people for Jesus Christ, most effective way to reach new people in an organized way is to start new groups systematically. And so, with that in mind, let's just talk about how does that work? So the first question I would I like to throw out to you is or the first idea, I'd like to throw out to you is I took Flake's Formula, Arthur Flake, and by the way, I think it's very interesting that in 1919, following the pandemic that they had back then, back in 1919, when they had all these thousands and thousands of people that got sick with the Swine Flu and died, and it's very similar to what's going on right now, right after that occurred, Arthur Flake was just a department salesman over in Winona, Mississippi. And a Sunday School director at First Baptist Church, Winona, and he was very very successful in growing and building his Sunday school and reaching people and multiplying new groups and so forth. Eventually, he went to work for his state and his state organization, like the Mississippi Baptist State Convention and went around the state, was sharing his philosophy of how to do that. Because he had been so successful. And then, after that, he did so well that the Baptist Sunday School Board, asked him to come to Nashville and he was actually the first Sunday school director for our Sunday school board, and his formula, which was a business formula, was formulated and had been shared all these years. And so we're at the hundredth anniversary of that, and I think this is what I'm praying for, that in 1920, the Roaring Twenties began to come in, things got better and then you had the Roaring Twenties and everything took off. I'm praying that as we close out this pandemic here in 2020, that we're going to have the Roaring Twenties for us. I really sense that there's an opportunity for revival, I sense a hunger, as I talked to the people across the country, that they're ready to come back and get back in church when the time is right, and I think because we've been through such a difficult time, people tend to go back and rely on God more than they do when times are good and think there are a lot of people out there, that are very open to the gospel and I think we're going to have a great opportunity for a revival to take place, so we need to be getting ready and prepared right now so that when the doors open and we hit, go, we'll be ready and prepared to take advantage of these opportunities that will be before us. Now, what I did, I took Flake's Formula, and I just titled it Flake's Formula 2020, and it's the 100th year anniversary of this formula. I've just restated it with some different words, and more of our current vernacular. I would challenge you to look at this and hopefully maybe you can hitchhike off of this and come up with some better words and maybe we can together, as a group, come with a better way to state the formula. But the bottom line is this, it still works. I've used it for our home ministry, I came out of the seminary in 1981, and from that time to this day, I've used Flake's Formula and it's worked for me everywhere that I had been. Now let me just state it real quick in today's vernacular. The first part of the formula is to understand your current reality. So what that means is you need to look at your Sunday school, the context in which you're in, you need to know where you've come from, where you are and where you'd like to go. Now, Flake would say you need to know what your possibilities are so you need to know how many potential members are out there, who the customers would be so to speak, if you're a business man. So that you can look and see what the demographics are, where you might need some new groups and that sort of thing. And with that, as you determine where these people are, then you would go to the next point, which would be expand your organization, and that means that if you see that you got a lot of 35 to 40 year olds, then that might be a new group that you would target to create a new group for that group. Now okay, who do those folks have as children? Okay, they may have older grade school children in high schools. So if you start that group and they've got a lot of kids, well, you need to make sure you can take care of their kids over here. So that's why it's so important for you, as you do your survey, to understand your reality, and then as you plan your organization, that you take care of meeting the needs. I remember, someone told or mentioned to Arthur Flake one time, and he said, you need to start a babies' group, and they said, we don't have any babies, and he said, well, that's why you need to start a babies' group, you need to go out there, there's a lot of people with babies, but if you don't have a place for them, well you're certainly not going to reach any. So, that would be expanding our organization in order to reach people. And then, another principle that he had was that we need to recruit and train our team members. And so, you know, I think it's important, and this is going to come up a couple of times in the presentation tonight, but you need to have a plan of how you're going to create this group, it's almost like a coach of any team, whether it's a football team, a volleyball team, a girls' softball team, they have a philosophy of how that team should function and operate. And they have a way that they teach them to hit, if they're a softball team and to play defense and the pitchers and the whole nine yards. If it's a football team, they've got a defensive strategy and an offensive strategy, and they can tell you what it is, they can show it to you on paper, and they can preach it and teach it and explain it. Well, that's what we need to have as educators, we need to have a plan that we know about, that we can make work, and so what we do is we train our leaders, our teachers, the people that are gonna be working in the small group, to execute this plan. And so, we will recruit them and then we'll train them, and they will become an extension of us in their groups. Now, if you're gonna start new groups, you obviously have to have a meeting space. And so if it's a group that's starting in a home, or if it's a virtual group, you have to have a leader, and that person would be responsible for the group and would set the Zoom meetings up and that sort of thing. But you have to have a meeting space and if it's in our church buildings, then we have to have a space that's big enough to facilitate the starting of this new group. So we would provide space for them to meet, whether that's at home, at church or virtual. And then, once we have all of that in place, then we're ready to go after the people. And so you know, I think what Flake said, was go out to the people, I have recruitment people here, that's just more of a, in today's vernacular, so we would actually go out and go after the people, and there are a lot of different ways to find these people. We have a lot of folks that are visiting or were visiting your church before the pandemic, but you'll have a lot of people, I'm sure after we open the doors, that will be coming as well, we need to make sure that we get information on these folks, and once they visit us, we need to go out immediately and make a contact with them and show an interest in them, they showed an interest in us, so we need to go back out there and reciprocate that. And try to recruit them to come and be a part of a group or whatever in our church. So this is Flake's Formula 2020, and it's very similar to the other one, but it's more of our vernacular today. So this still works and it needs to be at the center of everything that we do as far as our planning and our training and so forth. Now, how do we create a new group? Whether it's on campus, whether it's a home group or a virtual group. First of all, among our people, we have to create an expectation and when I say an expectation, that you know, we need to start new groups. And here we go back to scripture and we talk about why do we need to do this, and so we need to share this with our whole church, and we need particularly need to share it with our leaders in our Sunday school or small group organization, they need to understand what our philosophy is. Every teacher that I recruit to teach a new group or start a new group, I always talk to them about, in the same breath almost, that okay, we're gonna create this group, but at some point, we're gonna hit a trigger point, and we will need to start a new group. So there'll be certain things that we'll be working toward all along, so that we'll be ready when that trigger point, when we're ready to squeeze that trigger, that we'll ready to seamlessly go in and execute our plan, to create this group. So we're creating this expectation all along. It's also important to have a well developed plan. Now I have a plan and a philosophy of how to create adult groups, to me, creating student groups, and children's groups, and preschool groups, is a very very simple thing, you don't get as much pushback from the preschool, and children at all really, but you get some from the students, it's a little bit, and it gets a little bit more difficult when you get with adults. So you really have to have a very good plan in mind so that when that time comes that you need to be able to execute it. I've seen a lot of people through the years finally get a group ready to create a new group, but their plan is so poor and wishy washy, that when they actually, it's almost like they've got the horse ready to drink the water, but they came to the water, but they don't have any water to give it. And so, we need to have a very good plan. I think it's important for the leader and I did a lot of this myself through the years. Just recently when I was at Westwood, over a two year period, we started 15 new adult groups. And I enlisted almost everyone of those teachers myself. And I'm always looking for them. And you know, if you're in the atrium on Sunday morning and you run into somebody, anybody I talk to, I'm thinking, okay, you're not doing anything in my small group organization, let me find out who you are and what you can do. And so I'm like, you know, checking them out. And so, we need to personally enlist and train the new teachers. So, you need to have a plan that's your plan on how to train your leaders. Years and years ago when I first came out of seminary, I went to my first church in Alabama, which was in Dothan, in Calvary Baptist Church, that Daniel mentioned a while ago. And at that church, I think that was the very first thing that came up was a big emphasis called 85 by 85. 8.5 million people enrolled in Sunday school by 1985. So we had four years, so that was the emphasis that we had and every year we had training at Ridgecrest and other places like that. And that was our thing and it was hyped up and it was really an exciting time. And I noticed after going to about three or four training events, that it was the basic principles over and over and over again that they were teaching each and every year, they just packaged it a little bit different. So after about the third year, I sat down and I wrote up my own training for adults that I wanted my adults to get that was the initial training for a new leader, that was starting a new group. And so I put that together, I still have it today, I've tweaked it and changed it just a little bit, but it's pretty much stayed the same because it's basic principles. And that's what I teach and it's a three hour training course that I put together and I can do three hours or I can do an hour and a half on one Wednesday night, an hour and a half on another Wednesday night and I'm done and there's some other things that go with that, but it is my plan. And so you need to have something that you believe in that you can go through real quick and train your folks to create these new groups and teach like you would have them to teach. And then you wanna start one group at a time. And that's why it's so important to in the Flake's Formula to know and understand your current reality. Is because you need to know, do you have any existing groups that you could create a new group off of? Or are you gonna just have to start from scratch and start that one new group that understands them as with you and believes in what you're trying to do and then let that group be the beginning of the rest of the groups that you start. In a lot of the churches that I work with, a lot of the organizations are so crystallized, and they've been together for so long that it's hard for them to create a new group. And so what we work with with those education staff members is that we're gonna start one new group that understands and believes and buys into the philosophy, and we hope that within a year, a year and a half if we do everything right that that group will hit a trigger point and they'll be able to start another group. So now we have two groups, and then in another year and a half, both of those groups, will start a group, and now we have four, and then you know, if you go through that cycle over about a four or five year period of time, then you're into multiplication. So quite frankly, you can start one group, if you start it correctly, and train them, and then they will help you over three or four years, to reproduce and before long, you almost have two organizations running side by side. And that's exactly actually what happened to me at Westwood, I did some analysis on that not too long ago, and I looked at the existing organizations and in a two year period of time, we had 15 new adult groups over here and 15, 16, or 17, existing groups that were over here and the new groups had almost the same enrollment that the old groups did. Now the old groups had more, but the attendance was almost the same. And the reason the old groups had more enrollment is they've been carrying people for a long time that were on their roll, these new groups were new and most of the people that were in their groups were people that were actually coming regularly. And so, in a two year period of time, the new organization caught up with the existing organization. Now I was starting a lot of groups, I would start three or four new groups, each of those years, actually more than that, almost seven one year and seven the other. And so, you know, it was a quick thing, but, we start them one group at a time. And then the next thing is how do you grow them and that is that you introduce potential members to the new group. So you have to have a way to find out who these people are, so you're constantly looking at people who come to worship, who sign into your preschool or children's area, maybe through the security systems, you're getting their information there. And you get those folks on a list and man, you get those on Monday and you just get after them and you follow up and recruit them. So you can get a lot of people to feed to these new groups and that's what I did a lot during the week. I would follow up on these lists and then I would call them, and then I would connect them and the teachers would go after them and they would get them. And in a couple of weeks we would have these folks attending these new groups. And then another thing that's important in the how part is to continually keep up with the status of your groups. You're like a coach, watching your teams play. And so you're looking at everything that they do, you're looking at their attendance, you're looking at their enrollment, you're sticking your head in the door on Sundays, you're kind of getting a feel for the thoughts of what's going on, what they're studying and all that kind of stuff, and so you really know what's going on. And then, the last thing, I think is very important and this sounds kind of silly, but in all of my work, traveling around the country, I see a lot of groups that are studying other things than the Bible, they're studying books and financial planning, all kinds of stuff, they're doing discipleship studies, which are actually closed group studies on Sunday morning. And again, the Bible study needs to be open groups so that anybody can come in and join at any point in time. So we study the Bible and that's just very very important, very basic. Okay, so that's the how, so let's go real quick to the when. When do we start a new group? Well, the slide says start a new group when you locate a new teacher who is willing to start the new group and you have four couples who are willing to be the core group. Now, that's my formula, I usually try to start a new group with 10 people. And, all of these people have to be folks that come regularly, it can't be just an enrollment, or a name on a piece of paper, it's a solid citizen, that's going to be here, so that the first Sunday when we start, we're gonna have 10 people. So I'm constantly looking for associate teachers, one of the rules in my Sunday morning organization, my small groups, is that every teacher has to have an associate that teaches 30 to 50% of the time. And so, that way their associate is getting teaching time and so forth and giving them a little bit of a break all along. But if you're going to great a new group, that teacher, I think, part of my philosophy is, needs to come from within that existing group, if you're gonna start a new group off of an existing group. And the new wine formula, when we're starting a new container of wine, we're gonna be putting new people in that wine skin. The two teachers are in that wine skin and at some point, we're gonna take some of the folks out of that group and start another group when we hit a trigger point. And then it says, when a group hits a trigger point. You have to determine what your trigger points are because trigger points for home groups would be different because typically a home group can normally only have about 14 or 15 enrolled because that's, if they all showed up, that's about they all they could handle in a home. And so you can't get it much bigger than that, so you have to have many times a covenant and you have to talk to them and you have to stay on top of them, so that maybe it's a time limit, and they hit a certain number and that's the trigger point and you have to go to them and say, okay, we're ready to create a new group. But you still need someone that's teaching in that group that will take some out and go start another group. So, a trigger point. And the reason that you have to have a trigger point is because everybody knows what the trigger point is. You just don't say we're gonna start a new group, they know the road sign's down the road and it says, start, and when I get down there, we're starting. And so everybody knows when that is, so it just takes away a lot of the guess work. And that way you can work forward to that trigger point. And everybody understands what that is. So that's the when. Now let's look at the where. If you're starting groups on campus, new groups, in my formula for the group to start, you can start the group in a smaller room. A lot of the rooms, like we've had traditionally, at some of our older churches, where we had the room that will hold about 15 people. That's about a 12x14 size room, 12x15, something like that. That's okay to start the new group in, but, as the group is successful and it reaches people, in my formula, I am going to need what I call an incubation room, which is at least a 24x16 room. And because what we're gonna do is we're going to let the group grow to about 25, that's the trigger point, with an associate teacher teaching regularly. And typically in a year, year and a half, two years, if everything is being done right, the ministry is being done right, the groups are being, they've had their, I call them, are you okay groups and all of that ministry is taking place. The group is thriving and they're growing and they're reaching people, people want to be a part of that. So, what we do is when it gets to about 25, that's the trigger point that we go in and we start to plan to create a new group off of that group. That's not in this presentation, that's a whole another presentation, but that, you know, again, has to do with the where. So if you're gonna start a new group in a home, then you have to have actually a home, you know, that you could start the group in. A virtual group would not be an issue because you could, all you really need a leader and maybe a couple of folks to go with that person to create that new virtual group. Okay, now, these are just kind of enclosing some of the things I think that every small group leader should do. And so, this small group leader could be the teacher, but it's really more of the education person that is leading the whole organization of small groups. And so again, I think it's very important that the leader will, among the people, create an expectation, this is what we're going to do, we're going to do the Great Commission, we believe that groups should multiply and start groups, and make disciples. And so, we have an expectation and then when we are successful and we're ready to start that group, we need a very good plan that we can execute to take that group to fruition. I think everybody needs to develop your own personal training plan for new teachers and new leaders that come on your team. For instance, if you use the traditional Sunday morning group, you would probably have a teacher, an associate teacher, you might have someone that's executing the prayer ministry in that group, someone, of course, that keeps records, that's usually pretty easy to get that, it's pretty easy to get the prayer person. But one that you may have a little trouble getting would be someone that does the ministry to the group and make sure that that happens and then the other one that I think, this would be basic, would be an outreach person. And then finally, there would be someone that plans social events, if it's an on campus group. So that the group can do things together off campus which would also include some ministry projects and things like that as well. So, that would be some of the things that you would wanna put together in your very basic training plan. And then of course, you would wanna set some goals. I think goals for ministry, goals for outreach, these are things we used to do a long time ago, that's one of the things about Arthur Flake that was a hallmark of his ministry, was he was a definite goal setter. I even remember early on in my early days, as a minster of education that was back when, how to have a standard Sunday school was what we called it, that Arthur Flake put together and under each of the areas of like teaching and outreach and ministry, and prayer, he had some little checkpoints. And you tried to meet the criteria under each of these and if you checked them all off, there was probably about 30 things altogether that you had to do, then you were what we called a standard Sunday school, which was really make sure we're hitting on all eight cylinders and things were going well and you were executing the ministry as you should. And quite frankly, when you did all those things, you would see your Sunday school grow, you would reach people and some really vibrant things would happen if you were meeting that criteria. Okay, train teachers to lead small group discussions where each leaner is engaged. Now that's a key word, engaged. Even in our virtual formats that we have on Sundays now, or whenever we have them when we do our Zoom, like right now, I'm lecturing, you know, you can do the breakout groups and things of that nature, I would encourage you to do that, so that you would have a couple of times during the course of your presentation where the groups were in groups of five or six, and maybe they all have the same assignment, but they're talking together and sharing together. If I'm a room, I'm just gonna say, hey, I want y'all to kind of get in groups of three or four, and I want to answer these three questions. And I'm gonna give them maybe six or seven minutes to do that. And then we'll call them back and they've all talked and shared, the goal is to get everybody participating. And not just sitting there and listening and not doing anything. Because, again, we go back into a whole another presentation about what is learning and what is teaching, and you know, and the learner has to be involved and engaged, so that they're grappling with what you're sharing with them and not just hearing it, because it basically goes in one ear and out the other ear. And in 72 hours, it's gone. And so, that's just basically one or two senses and the whole idea is to get as many of the senses involved as possible, because that's how learning takes place. So engagement would be a part of my training plan, because all of our groups are going to be discussion groups and my teacher's really going to be more of a facilitator rather than a lecturer, I really don't want someone that's gonna lecture. And so, we wanna train all the leaders to fulfill the purpose of group, so that means if you have an outreach person, they know what they're gonna do, if you have an are you okay leader or a care group person, whatever you wanna call it, then they know what they're gonna do. And by the way, right now, during this COVID-19, there's many churches that have let their care ministries go by the wayside and this would've been a wonderful opportunity for the groups to really dig in and be in contact with everybody on their roll on a weekly basis. If they had had that organization, but as a result, I've talked with a lot of my friends where you know, they get calls from their staff and different people, but their groups, they send out group emails and group texts, but there's nobody in many cases, checking on each one of the people. So if you're a seldom or never attender in a group right now, and you're not really tied in, then your main contact with a group may just be a group email, maybe another person that you know, that you happen to be close to, and zooming into the Zoom on Sunday, and that's it. You're just floating out in space, all by yourself, during this time, so it's very important that we train our leaders to fulfill the purpose of the group. So that way we'll be part of the whole philosophy. And then, another thing that's important to be successful with our small groups is that we need to meet regularly to plan and evaluate the group's work. So that means that every time that we have a presentation on Sunday, we need to be evaluating how well that went, the hour that we had our group, or hour and 15 minutes, whatever it is, if we are back on campus, then we're looking at every part of it, did we get the learners engaged? Was the fellowship time more than people just talking to each other? How did the prayer time go? Did we do a good job on making the guests feel welcome? And how well did we cover the teaching material and so forth. And so we're looking at it every week, almost like a restaurant would look at how well they did that night, on serving their patrons and preparing the food and everything. Because if you have one bad week of business and service, then that could affect your attendance the next week, so it's really important to plan and evaluate your work every week. And then, we need to recruit new members every week, and see, that's something that we don't do. Unless you got some prospects that somebody has given you, in many cases our groups are not even looking for people anymore, they're happy and satisfied with what they have. And they become more of a, what I call a Bible club, then they have a small group that's vibrant, that's doing the Great Commission and it's a group that's trying to multiply to make another group, to reach more people and continually do the Great Commission. So we need to recruit new members every week, so there needs to be a strategy for that. And then we've already talked about ministering to group members weekly, that would be through your are you okay groups, or your care groups. I have a whole ministry for are you okay, if you're interested, I would be glad to share that with you at some point in time. And then another thing I think is important with our groups, particularly when you start a new group because it's a great time to do this, and that is to use what I call a time allotted Sunday morning agenda. Which means for me, all of my adult groups are gonna be doing basically the same thing through the hour. And there's four, five different things on this agenda and there's so much time. So we wanna make sure that the leader that's teaching, the teacher, if it's 35 minutes that they're supposed to have to do their presentation, they're preparing for 35 minutes. We don't want them to come up because somebody took too much time or the prayer time went 15 minutes over, and now they've gotta cut 15 minutes off of their presentation, that's setting them up for failure. So we wanna make sure that everybody does their part and they do it well, so we train them to do that and to stay within their time allotment and the group can decide that leaders, when they meet to plan what they're going to do, and to evaluate, they can set their agenda, so that everybody is on the same page or another. And then this sounds silly, but lead your group to be friendly and caring to everyone. We recently came back and joined a group back at Hunter Street and it's a group we've been in off and on for 20 years. And it's a great group, we love everybody, but I'm looking at everything through a whole set of different eyes and for a group of people that's been together for a long time, man, some of them, 21 years, they've been in that same group. We're friendly to each other, but many times we're not really open and friendly to new folks that wanna come in and be a part of it. It gets back to that Mark 2:22, a while back. Here comes new wines trying to get in the old wine skin and they can't in because they don't wanna let them in, they don't see the need to. So that sounds kind of silly, but it's something the we have to talk about at our training meetings and leader meetings all along. Is to make sure that we're friendly and caring to everyone that's coming to our group. It is possible to come to a small group bible study and be the most lonely person that's in that group. And so anyways, that's just something to think about. One last thing I wanna share with you, just to throw out there. We have a ministry that Daniel alluded to a little earlier and it's called GXP. And it's through our State Board of Missions, and this is a picture of a group that we just met with, last fall, and that was the group out of Bessemer, Hueytown and it represented four different churches, and we took them through, it's about seven, actually seven months, but it's one meeting each month and then the last two months we skip before we have our last meeting. So it's really only five meetings, but there's a two months gap, because we're giving you time to actually do some things that we've been working on during that and so this is the picture of that group. So we'll go into a lot more detail of creating groups and how to do that, in the GXP, as a matter of fact, that's the purpose of why we meet together is to help them facilitate one new group on their campus. So Daniel, that takes care of my presentation, now I'm ready to have some dialogue.

- All right, Topper, I appreciate that, you gave people a lot to think about, Jay has been doing what we thought Jay would do, and that is put in some questions for us. We wanna invite everybody else go ahead and put your questions in as well. Topper one question that Jay had, I'm gonna answer for you, he says, how much do you charge for your training manual? He put a little smile after that. So I would Jay, the answer to that question is if you have to ask, you can't afford it, okay.

- I can give them a real special discount on that.

- Okay.

- A five finger discount and I'd just hand to them.

- There you go, I did put Topper's email address, but you also see it on the screen, but his email address is there in the chat should you want to contact him or any resource that you heard him mention tonight. And then, Jay did ask, is the multiplication trigger point, enrollment or attendance? And with people attending less often these days, could that be a consideration?

- It's always been attendance for me and so it's not an enrollment because we're actually trying to get a certain amount of people to come. And if you used enrollment, and sometimes, one of things that we've seen Jay, is that the enrollment, we have to allow it to be a little higher than we're used to in order to achieve that attendance. So, it's still attendance.

- Okay, yeah, and of course, to have the trigger point of 25, Topper what is the square of anything, square foot room.

- Each adult requires 12 square feet per person. And if you divide 12 into, if you take a 16x24 foot room, that's 384 square feet, you can divide that by 12, that's 32, and if you take 80% of 32, it's 25. And so, that's where we come up with that number, so it's really all based on science, that square footage number. And so that's why you need a certain size room in order to hit that 25 mark, you're hitting your 80% of capacity.

- And we've talked about Topper, that right now, with social distancing, instead of using 12 square foot for adults, you might have to move them more toward 25 to 30 square foot and I think you've told some folks in my presence, the best thing to do is go set up chairs and measure and know for certain what you can do, remembering that in some of those classes, if it is a co-ed or a couples class, you can't put two chairs together, because husband and wife could sit together, so you have to think of who's going to be in there and probably set it up and visualize because it's just a different time. But you'll probably wind up with more like 25 to 30 square foot per person right now. But, the mark normally is about 12 foot as Topper mentioned. Jay also asked, Topper, would you prefer to start from scratch or go get a group to multiply?

- Well, that goes back to understanding what your current reality is. And so I think what you do is you look at your current Sunday morning, if you're on Sunday morning what that organization looks like. And what I would do with my organization, what I always do when I go into churches, is I just run a list of their attendance and any group that's around 25 in their attendance regularly, I'm looking at that group as a potential group to go ahead and talk to them about creating a new group. However, again, what I found most of the time, that takes some time to cultivate that because these folks are not going to be open, they don't wanna create a new group. So maybe the best thing for you to do is to find you a good teacher and four couples that will go with you and you may have to steal them out of some other groups and go start a new group in a demographic that are possibilities for you and start that way.

- I think always when I went I church and I was new, wasn't a new church, but I was new to the church, typically I did start more for looking for a fresh new group and I would maybe find two over here, two over here, that kind of thing. But then as you get the multiplication process going, like you said, you're looking for the group to actually start a new group. So, early on you maybe a little more, you're working with scratch material. I remember, Dwight Moss, a buddy of ours, he took a old box of cereal and called it Arthur Flakes, and so sometimes you have to go back to the scratch formula to get the ball rolling.

- Right and I think what you can do, like I said, if you start your first group, and they're with you and they buy into your philosophy, then you can go from there. I'm gonna give you one quick example, I had a guy call me back in January, he was on a Pulpit Search Committee, and he just called me out of the blue, and he said, hey, do you remember me? And he told me who he was, I had done a consult in their church about six years ago, and I said, well sure David, I remember who you are. And he said, when we get through, I need to give you an update on the new group that we started when you were here. And I said, okay fine. Well we had started a new group off of his group at another hour and he left and started it himself. So he jumped from where his group was, they were on like 37, and he took 10 people out of that group and went to the late hour to start another group in that demographic because we didn't have a group in that demographic at that hour. And he said, in a year's time that that group had grown to where it could start another group. So they started another group in a year. He said a year and a half went by and both of those groups were able to start another group. Anyways, long story short, they started six new groups in six years, off of that one class.

- That is awesome.

- But see they were bought in to that philosophy and it was running parallel to the existing organization.

- Okay, kind of a followup on that same line there is, how do you go about finding couples to help be the core group? Do you announce it? Or you just go personally to couples you think will fit the bill?

- That's a good question, I think it's personal and I am looking for them, I recruit them myself. And every Sunday, when I'm walking in the crowds, I'm not just shaking hands, I'm looking for certain people for certain things. And it may take me a while, but they're there, the Lord will give them to you and then you start talking to them there and then you may take them out for coffee. And you can't go by their house now because of the ways things are, but back in those days, which was a few months ago, you could go to their house and meet in their living room and talk to them, you know.

- Okay, what are some ways to help create, if you will, a culture of multiplication in the church?

- I think in all of your training meetings that you have, you have to talk about it all the time, and you use statistics, you use other stories of other churches that have been successful and really positive stuff and you're happy about it and you're not beating people up or anything like that. You're just talking about having fun and reaching people and doing the Great Commission, it's through your training meetings.

- All right, and then, after calling prospects, how do you connect them to the small group?

- Well, I think every church has either an app or something in their software system where they can create an online prospect file. And we still, at all the churches I've ever been at, even though everything was on computer, we still divvied everything up and assigned certain people to certain groups and then what I did a lot of, because like at Westwood, we did not have an outreach person. So I had to do a lot of things that other staff people might do. So what I did, I got the list of those folks that had been visiting and I kept the outreach list and every week I was going through that and I was calling people and asking if they were interested in being in a small group. And so I had my six new groups that I just started and I was recruiting for every one of those groups. So if I called you and by the way, I found out calling on Wednesday night from six to eight, I would get about 90% of the people that had been visiting, and they were just home on Wednesday night, from six to eight. And so I went in my office, we didn't have an office, but I went in a room, and did my calling, and I was making notes. So I could get on the app, as soon as I called and talked to you, and I would say, Daniel, would you mind if Brian Whittal calls you before Sunday and invites you to his class because you would be in his group and you love it. You'd say, sure, let Brian call me. So I would text Brian, send you his information and the next day, Brian would probably call you. And all this was on our app, and then, he would let me know before Sunday or I would check with him. I would say, did you get Daniel on the phone? He'd say, yeah, he's coming Sunday, I'm meet him in the atrium and we'll going to walk to where my group meets. And then that happened all the time.

- One of the followups I did with a lot of my leaders was to say when you do that, connect with them, like you were talking about before, if you can meet them for a cup of coffee, before that next Sunday or something like that, so, anything, you make a little more personal. One of my leaders came to me one time and he said, you know what, if I get them to go to coffee or lunch with me, I've got them. Because a lot of it is building that relationship and so that's one of the most important ways to get people connected, if you're struggling, to get them in the group, maybe meet them outside the group first. If it's a man, take another person from the group, go play golf, go have dinner together, whatever, whatever's appropriate and make a connection outside, that'll even help a little bit more in getting them inside of the group. A friend of mine also did what he called dinner for eight. And so he would get his wife and another couple from their group and then they would get two people that are not coming to the group, two more couples and they would have dinner for eight. He said, work continually, successfully and we tried some of that and I found it to be successful also. Followup question here, do you use Sunday school directors to help accomplish all of this work?

- Yes, well again, depending on the context, when I was at Hunter Street, we had three Sunday school hours, in a very very large organization. And so I had a overall Sunday school director and then I had one at 8:30, one at 9:45 one at 11. And then I had division coordinators that had four, three or four adult groups that they were responsible for. So I might have 10 or 11 coordinators at one hour and then 10 or 11 at another. And then the small one, I may only have six or something like that. And each one of those had sometimes up to four groups that they were responsible for. But we had a monthly training breakfast, and we would meet, we met at the Pancake House which was a little place that was not very far from the church and it was open early, opened at six, so we would go over through once a month and we would have our coordinator's meeting and I would meet the 8:30 one morning and the 9:45 at another time and we would go over all the stats, we would go over, we had an agenda that we followed, and I actually did training with them and everything, go them out there by 7:30 so they could go to work. But I think you have to put together an organization that supports what you're trying to do. And that didn't start out that big, it started out with one coordinator and one Sunday school director and it grew from that over 15 years, okay.

- One of my best Sunday school directors and it was a smaller church, not real small, but a smaller church than what I had been in before, but he would go and during worship, he would look around and see people that were not in Sunday school and he might come tap you on the shoulder and say, you know, look over there, during our time of reading, you need to go. Or if it was even before worship, he said, why don't you go sit with them because they oughta be in your group. And so a lot of times, if you have sharp leaders, they can watch during worship, and if nothing else, go up to somebody that you haven't met, introduce yourself, before, during or after the worship time, as appropriate and just simply ask, are you in a group? I've remember another friend of ours, he was asked to start a young adult class there at First Baptist Hendersonville, and that's the way he started, he looked for young adults in the worship hour and just walked up to them and said, he introduced himself and Donna, he said, we're starting a group for adult young adults, are you a part of a group? And so, if you got good leaders and good Sunday school directors and they're tuned into that, they're watching because you've got people in every church, you've got more people coming to worship than you do into your Sunday school class, so it's a great place to go look, to always be inviting in, and building your group. Another question, what do you do with very large groups who aren't interested in multiplying?

- Leave them alone.

- Yeah, no weapons allowed. What do you do?

- You share the vision with everybody, but now, another seminar, and I'll try to say it real quick, I found out that once you get past 50 in age, you're much more resistant to do anything. And then the further past 50 to 65, you know, I would tell my leaders, that are in those age groups, look, if you're 65, here's the vision, I'm not gonna make you do it. But with everybody else, we're gonna try to do it. Now, if you're 49 and younger, we want you bought in and we want you to go with us. But now, I had an opportunity, when I went to Hunter Street, by the way, to start with a very very small group, and grow that into a large group. So I grew a culture. As I added, and the snowball rolled and got bigger, everybody was buying into the philosophy, they didn't come onboard unless they bought in. And so when we started talking about groups and doing certain things, they were in. Now, I had in my 80s ladies group at Hunters Street, that didn't wanna do anything, and I'll just say this after five years of me being there and just talking about everything, one day the lady from the 80s group came to me and said, can we start a new group? We have 22 ladies in our group and we have four teachers, and we've already divided it up and put them half and half is what they did, but two teachers and one to another. And she said, there's a vacant room down the hall, do you mind if we start? And so, I didn't say anything, I actually couldn't believe it when she told me that, I asked her to repeat the whole thing all over again, I thought I was delusional, you know. But she did it and then what's so funny is, Daniel, about six weeks later, one of the husbands in the men's class, it was the mirror class of that women, the women had been bragging about it and talking about it, and I don't think the men had the right, did it for the right reason, but they started a new group because they couldn't be outdone by the women, and they actually grew several men and this was our oldest group. But I didn't push them, they did it on their own. You see what I'm saying? So I think the older they are past 50, you need to share it with them, and just be honest with them, I'm not gonna make you do it. But sometimes, the Holy Spirit will get ahold of them and they'll do it.

- I had a similar experience with one of mine that indeed, they heard me say over and over again, you got friends, and they're not gonna come to an existing group, you're gonna have to start a new group, so they can get connected and feel like they're a part of it. And sure enough, my senior adult ladies' class came to me and said, we've gotta bunch of friends who are not coming and if we understand you right, they're not gonna come unless we start a new group. Now I was smart enough not to go ahead and say, yes, you start a new group. I say, well, that's what I teach, and so they came at it again. And said, so we need to start a new group? And I said, well, that's what I teach. And they said, you're not listening, we wanna start a new group. And I said, well, okay, here's what you're gonna need. And they said, we got everything, we just need a place to meet and when can we start? And so I gave them a room, told them, you can start next Sunday, and they brought in their friends and so that was great. Jamie, I think you've gotta question there or a comment you wanna make.

- Well, it's more of a comment, another exception that I have seen, and you tell me if you've seen the same thing, Topper, when it comes to starting new groups and training leaders and things of this nature, go after new people in your church, because I found that new people, they are more open to training, they are more open to new ideas and thoughts, that you being able to pour into, and to disciple them as opposed to someone that's been there, 10, 20, 30 years. So the new people are your prime targets for helping you in the leadership and in the starting new groups, is that we've you've seen as well Topper?

- Yes, we would always start with a core group, but then once, when the group hit the trigger point, that means that everybody that came in after that original eight or 10 people, were all new people. Most of the people that came in were not existing church members, unless, in some cases we were able to go and find some church members that had become inactive and haven't been in a small group for a long time, and when they found out we were starting a new group in this demographic, they were interested in it. But by and large, most of the other people were people that were coming in the door, hadn't even been coming very long. We were just recruiting them. So, you know, that's something that we've gotta get back to is recruiting, actually going after people. And, not that we pester them or anything, but we ain't pestering anybody a whole lot today. We need to.

- Yeah, I think that's true, we used, of course, like you, you know, you would have what you call an apprentice, an associate or whatever, and a lot of times when we would launch a new group, we would have the experienced teacher kind of lead out and take that group. But we had a few times where the apprentice, we thought leaving him with an established class, or her with an established class, might make them feel better than going out with a smaller group, start up. But we had an apprentice that was new, fairly new, in the church and they said, can't I go start the new class because I'm new to the church and I think I'll connect better to newer people and they were right, they absolutely did connect much better. Another question then, have you ever done a campaign in some way to get church members to get in a group? What did you do and did you have success?

- Yeah, a lot of folks in the old days, one of the things that we had done was on a particular Sunday, we would, we had a large room, and in one case it was fellowship office and in other case it was the gym, and another one of my churches had a chapel that we could take all of the chairs out of, and we set up some little kind of booths. And we asked representatives or teachers from each one of the groups and we set up placards that identified each group and what their demographic was, and we had an open house that morning and a coffee. And people could come by and browsed and talk to actually the leaders of the group and they would have some of their members there as well, and it was kind of like an open house and you could actually kind of test drive who was in that group and if you liked that leader, at least from a face to face meeting for the first time. So that's something that we have done and that seemed to work well. There's a lot of different things that you can do but that's something that you might consider.

- Okay, I like that idea by the way of kind of an open house, the opportunity to do that. In churches I've served have done a few different things. We intentionally, we probably had the greatest growth, would have two or three times during the year, that we would do kind of like a Sunday school sponsors a breakfast. So that you would bring people in, mix and mingle and they could, and so you could say, even if you're not a part of Sunday school, we're having a big breakfast bar next week, you bring a guest and come. And sometimes that's when even some class members would bring a prospect, they would invite them to come to that breakfast bar. I think you've done some tailgates and things like that occasionally to put emphasis on this is a good time to invite, to get them to meet some leaders that they may connect with or kind of shop the leaders and see who they do connect with so.

- Well you know, Jay was a part of starting this at Westwood, when he was there, Jay Gordon, and that was a fireworks tailgate that we had. Usually, the week before the Fourth of July, and we had it on a Sunday in the parking lot and all of the small groups set up tailgates and of course, we identified each one. And then we had a staff one that was kind of like the outreach tent, and any new person that came, we directed them there and it was promoted for them how to find that and there was signage and so we connected with them with the sat and then we took them to the tent and they were actually in on the tailgate with that group. And of course, the group rolled out the red carpet and they had all kind of good food. And then at about nine o'clock when it got dark, we had fireworks for about 30 minutes and so that was a real cool deal right there.

- Yeah, I think providing opportunities like that is great, Jay's asked kind of a fun question here, I'm gonna answer it first 'cause he says, if I'm a leader, won't it hurt my class to multiply, because I'll lose my best people? I used to tell my folks, no we don't want your best people, we want your worst people. That's really how we're going to start something great, is give of your worst to the master, it's sure to be a disaster, that's what the song wasn't it? But that is a real problem for some folks. You're always wanting my best people and they do wanna mother hen and keep them, so how do you kind of address that with your leaders?

- Okay, let's just say we started one new group and they hit the trigger point. And we see it coming because we know the trigger point is 25 so we've talking about it and kind of projecting, during this period of time the associate teacher's been teaching regularly and has built a rapport with the existing group. So really, there's not a favorite teacher you know, necessarily, because they've both been teaching regularly. The teacher that's lead teacher will tell the group as they approach the trigger point that things are going great and they're so proud of them and that the Lord has blessed them, they have a lot of folks come in and now we're at the point where we create a new group. And so what I need you to do now is I want you to begin to pray about who our core group is gonna be, because our associate teacher over here, Daniel and his wife are gonna go out and create this new group, when we get our core group we need four couples to go with them. And so we need you to be praying about that and so Daniel and I, myself the lead teacher, we're gonna be praying about this and we're gonna sit down and look at our roster and we're gonna go through it and take in a lot of considerations, and we're gonna come up with some names of some folks that we think might be good possibilities, so that we don't strip the leadership out and we don't take a dynamic or put all the dynamic over here and leave the other ones over here which could cause the other group to die. So we systematically go about it and then Daniel and I will be contacting you individually and talking with you about possibility being in this group. So it's all done behind the scenes. And then when we get ready to, when we've got the four groups then we announce it. And then the last Sunday before they go to start the new group, we put the core group in the circle and we lay hands on them and we pray for them as they leave and then they're gonna be creating 10 empty new chairs when they leave. And then we're also praying that the mother group will be able to fill those. And so what happens now is you get into multiplication because now all of a sudden, you've got 10 empty chairs where you had 25 people come and 26 people and now there's 10 of those chairs empty. And now they got 15 chairs empty over here in the new group. So it's the way you approach it and again, it all comes with training, it all comes with communication and keep it out front, nothing's hidden, it's all out in front.

- Yeah, I think where you talked about goals, when they know that the goal is to start a new group. Now admittedly, when you start a new group, it does hurt, okay. But Josh Hunt used to say it this way, he said, if it doesn't hurt, then you didn't love the people enough.

- That's right.

- And so you know, you like to be with your group on Sunday morning, that's to be expected, and everything else, so you know, it hurts to send somebody out. But even back in my United Parcel Service days, and I was in management and I would train my team and I finally had an area manager come to me and he said, we're about to add to our management list. And there a couple of guys that are in your area that we're targeting. And I just wanna know how you're gonna feel. I said, complimented, because that says I've done my job well and you recognize that in the people that are in my area. I said, I want the people that work for me to be able to advance and do those things that they wanna do. And sometimes, we gotta realize, we got a potential teacher, leader in our class, and if we don't start a new group, we're hurting them and we're holding them back, and not allowing God to do in them what he wants to do in them, so we oughta feel complimented when somebody is called to God, to go out from our group, and start a new group. We, as ministers, always look to those guys that came up in the ranks that are now serving in another church, pastor, minster of education, and we feel really good about that. I want my Sunday school and small group leaders to feel good when they see people that came up out of their group and now leading and doing well. And we oughta help remind them of that's what God has called us to do, to equip the saints for the work of the ministry. Question here, do you ever use Sunday school or groups to teach people how to share the gospel?

- Well yes, probably the lowest attended Sundays we ever had was a gospel presentation time that we spent four weeks preparing our testimonies and I say that, that's true. We promoted it and made it a big deal and we had four weeks of what we call, Evangelistic Sundays, and basically the outcome was that at the end of the four weeks, everybody is gonna be ready to tell their story. And so we had it set up so that the first Sunday you got the outline and then you picked a partner and we kinda gave the preliminary, had a Bible lesson everything on it. Next Sunday, you went home and did your homework, write it down, and then you practiced with your partner. It really wasn't a big deal, but it scared everybody to death, we would've done a lot better if we had planned it and told nobody nothing and just worked through our teachers. And we would have had a lot better turnout. But seriously, our attendance went down about 10% those four weeks. Because it scared everybody to death.

- Yeah, well, it is one of the most fearful hurdles people have to overcome, is being able to share their testimony, but it's necessarily that we train our people to be able to do that.

- We had the 31, 51, when you guys came up with those things, we used that at Westwood, and we had several different ways that folks could tell their story or use a pamphlet or something like that, you know a gospel track, a certain type of a method that was proven, so we shared all of that during that time. That was very successful, we had a good response on all of that.