North Point Community Church is, I’m told, a big church. I confess I know very little about them, what they believe or don’t believe.  However they do have a strong focus on small groups.

Creating Community: 5 Keys to building a small group culture is their ‘how to do what we do’ book on small groups. And let me air this gripe right away, Andy Stanley’s name is not on this book because he wrote it but because his name is higher profile. This book is written by Bill Willits so it was a bit of a bait-and-switch move right there on the cover.

Anyway that gripe aside there are a lot of good things to commend about this book and much that is in common with missional church and missional communities. I found the overlap and common ground as interesting as the areas of difference.

The team at North Point asked three questions that gave them focus as a church.

1. What do we want people to become? Disciples.
2. What do we want people to do? Love God and love people (in the church and outside the church)
3. Where do we want people to go? To community groups

Now there’s obviously a lot of common ground here and if you used different language then you’d think we were talking missional communities. The first is shared and the second is essentially Up, In, Out and the third is the agreement that small groups of committed people are the best place to become the first and do the second.

So far, so good.

The biblical thinking is shallow not deep; being alone is bad (Gen 2), Jesus wants us to be one (Jn 17) and people need it just look at Starbucks. It’s good as far as it goes which is to say, not very far. There are more examples of the North Point team reading & discussing a business book and applying it than there were examples of them reading & discussing the Bible and applying it. I’m not saying that doesn’t happen, just they haven’t put those examples in the book.

I’m also not familiar with the adult Sunday school class system that many American churches seem to use. I’ve never experienced that and it all sounds a bit strange to me but the book advocates for emphasising small groups over service teams and Sunday schools. Anyway…

The key differences are that as a megachurch the small group system is a highly managed, staged process. So while they say being relational is key, the actual process of managing small groups is anything but.

They operate a closed group system which means typically new people aren’t allowed to join for the first couple of years and then the group multiplies. This says a few things to me, first the small groups are not the missional engine of the church – that’s their Sunday meetings and discover faith courses. Small groups then function as first base pastoral care and community. So while individuals are encouraged to have influence with their non-believing friends it’s not a function of the group per se.

People are connected to groups through what sounds like to me an absolutely horrendous evening called Grouplink, where you essentially speed date your group and form friendships based on, well, nothing really.  These Americans are crazy and there’s not a chance that would work in the UK, let alone, Sweden.

As I said, this is a book that explains how to do what North Point does. The positives are a strong healthy awareness that small groups where people love one another, love God and seek to love their neighbour are vital for the health of the body. That training people to lead these groups is key and making the process as simple as possible to connect.

On the downside the book takes no account of differing contexts; as a result if you’re a large North American church that doesn’t have small groups and you want to, this might be helpful. Otherwise, not so much. If you want to equip people to see their lives as on mission every day, or their groups as vehicles to bless a community, to have a deeper appreciation of how this method shows and shares the Gospel, then look elsewhere.