New Way of Keeping Small Groups Stats

One of the major statistics we watch closely at Five Oaks is our percentage of participation in small groups. The way we do the count is by taking the number of people enrolled in small groups over against our total number of regular attenders (that's anyone who has attended about four times or more and continued to attend). 

Finding our enrollment number is super easy now that we're using GroupFinder online. But getting our regular attender number is always more difficult because the database is cleaned up only periodically. (It's a time consuming job, as you can imagine.)

So we're going to go with a method that is used in a growing number of churches. I think it may be the new standard. With it, we can almost instantly do an assessment, and we will be able to compare over against other churches that excel in small groups since most use this method.

The way most do it to take their small group enrollment and compare it to their average worship attendance over a given period of time (usually a month). The average worship attendance only includes people in the worship center and excludes children's ministry numbers.

Using this method, we were at 62% involvement in September. 

How does that compare with our other way of calculating? Not sure yet because our database needs some cleaning up right now. But when that clean up is done, I'll do a calculation and we'll see see the difference and then have that as a measure to use when making comparisons to the past.

More Comments on "More Larger Small Groups?"

Here are some more comments sent my way:

• Great post Henry. I appreciate you testing things that we do. Just because a given formula or recipe for doing something in the past has worked well, doesn't means it's always going to keep working. Your post to me demonstrates creative thinking and flexibility, thank you!

I do like the thought of being able to have larger groups. For groups where they are large and it's "working" I'm a fan to let it keep on "working" and not force a multiplication to stick within some arbitrary size guideline.

I wonder about the implications on people's commitment to the group. Will people just skip more if they think there are so many others in the group that they won't be noticed or missed? It's harder to host or entertain a larger group or to get enough room to sit people down in the same room. On the flip side, if the small group location rotates within the group, then the host would only have to do it a couple of times per year which takes some of the load off, so maybe it balances out. Anyway, thanks for sharing.

• Just some thoughts ..

...We have a large group. It works well.  [Our leader] talked about group multiplication previously. Multiplication works when there are willing and able leaders.

Throughout the year, we almost never have a full group. It may happen 3 or 4 times a year. On the flip side, the group is at it's smallest, will meet for at least twice as often as when the group is at it's largest.  With kids and life, it's difficult for everyone to meet at the same time.

In my humble experience, people tend to prefer larger groups because they do not feel like they are the outsider.  Some may say there is a lack of intimacy however, the larger group may break down to smaller groups.

If hosting constraints are an issue, perhaps the church can be used. I understand that's an liability for the church and some may argue that it's an attendance hinderance for new people. However, the child care facilities and meeting rooms already exist.  For people who are checking out small groups, the church is a known location and environment.  I've heard that some people want their neighbors to know they have a small group and hope they want to come by, out of curiosity.  However, in our compartmentalize and busy lives, most will only notice the streets clogged with our cars.  A more productive neighborhood outreach would be to help them rake their yards.

Just some thoughts.