My wife and I were working with a husband-wife team of ministry leaders a few days ago. They felt that their group wasn't moving forward and they weren't sure how to proceed.
They told us that most of their students weren't really interested in growing or becoming more involved with things like daily devotions and scripture memory. When they had lesson time during their meetings, the students wouldn't bring their Bibles or participate and many would talk or whisper the whole time.
To deal with these issues, they would talk to the group as a whole. During the lesson if the group was overly talkative, whoever was teaching would stop and take a minute to tell them that they really should be more respectful and that the things they were talking about were important. However, these talks had little lasting impact.
To top it all off, there were a few students who didn't seem to be saved, but it seemed hard to make progress with them.
The issues
Let's break this down a little:
- Lack of growth in their group, mostly because there was little interest in growth from the students.
- Students not interested in the lesson.
- Some students have "heard it all before" and some students don't even know the basics of Bible truth.
- Students talking during the lesson.
- Unsaved students who aren't being reached
A few answers
People don't grow for 2 primary reasons:
- Our process is broken (too complicated, disorganized, or missing pieces)
- We're missing ingredients (we'll talk about these in-depth in a later post)
In this case, the process didn't seem to be the issue. The group met on Wednesday night and for Sunday school with a few events scattered throughout the year. While it's not the most comprehensive plan, it didn't seem like the cause of the issues here.
The big deal was the 2 missing ingredients.
- Missing God's Word - boring Bible lesson: one of the 4 ingredients in growth is the Word of God. This ministry was faithful in teaching God's Word, but they failed to do so in an engaging way. The lesson was usually just read off of a page pulled from whatever curriculum they happened to be using at the time. No wonder the students aren't growing and aren't interested in the lesson.
- Missing Relationships - no small groups, no confrontation: another key ingredient is Biblical relationships. While they had done small groups in the past, the idea had kind of fallen by the wayside. As a result, most of the leaders had very shallow relationships with their students. They were in no place to challenge them to move forward spiritually because they had not built the relational bridge necessary to have those kinds of conversations. Similarly, the leadership of the group was only dealing with problems on a group level (from the lecturn during lesson time) rather than on a one-on-one basis. We counseled them to challenge their students with loving, biblical confrontation when they saw areas in their lives that needed to change (for example, lack of desire to grow or disrespect during the lesson).
