This is our second survey on the missional nature of our church (read the first one about Sunday service & individuals) and we wanted to examine how missional our small groups are and the people who attend. We sent out a request to people in our church to fill out a 10 question survey asking them about the small groups teaching, community and missional aspect. We want to (1) learn what people felt about the missional nature of these small groups, (2) their response to the teaching and group accountability and (3) see what suggestions and recommendations that had to make them more missional.
Here are some observations:
1. Accountability is a tricky thing in small groups. At Kaleo, small groups are open to anyone. With new people showing up, the groups growing larger and the changing environment, many people struggled having an environment of accountability. (To remedy this we created Gospel Christianity discipleship/accountability groups and limited the size to 3 people who meet regularly. Many people in our church have been very blessed by this environment.)
2. Being Missional doesn't always happen spontaneously. Many of the responses to How well do you feel your home group is preparing you to be on mission? requested more specific, creative tangible ways to be on mission. Simple suggestions like having dinners together to invite others to, having one night a month be social only for visitors, adopting a mercy ministry and inviting other to serve.
3. It is challenging to teach a range of Christians. Some people felt like the teaching would go over their heads. Others wanted to ask more deep theological questions.
4. People do not attend a small group to be on mission. Most people are looking for teaching and community, being missional was not a reason people cited as why they attend a small group.
RESULTS: If you'd like to see the rest of the results, I've attached a pdf summary of our Small Group Missional Survey. Again, this does not include the pages of comments we got that were quite helpful.
HOW-TO: If you'd like to do a similar survey, here is the online form & questions we used to conduct the Small Group Mission Survey Form. We used Wufoo to build our forms.
