Case Study with Ray Johnston at Bayside – “Born For This”
The church went from 400 groups to more than 1,700 groups and 2,000 hosts!
Gil Steiglitz, small groups Pastor at Bayside, says working with Lifetogether helped Bayside see the critical steps needed to implement a strong small groups program and create a new culture. Instead of asking âHow can we get more people into groups?â Gil and his team are how asking, âHow can we recruit more people to gather their friends and grow together?â The focus has shifted to hosts, with the church even creating a quick text option for people to respond that theyâll lead a group.
Bayside Church in northern California has a strong weekend worship experience, with 15,000 to 18,000 people gathering each weekend across five campuses. However, the pace of small group development had lagged behind with âonlyâ around 450 home groups that connected fewer than half of Baysideâs attenders. The senior leadership wanted to have as many as 1000 groups â a âstretch goal,â they said â and to create a sustainable model for moving forward. The Bayside team worked with Lifetogether in August 2016 to produce âBorn for This,â a seven-week video and print curriculum campaign focusing on the book of Philippians and designed to correlate with the pastorsâ weekend teaching.
Through the partnership with Lifetogether and the coaching and insights from the Lifetogether team, Bayside has made other changes that are transforming their small groups program. In addition to recruiting new hosts, the church has also created a strong orientation and training program, with video training filmed by the Pastors as well as personal training from Brett Eastman and Dave Stewart. The Senior Pastors also prioritized small groups in a new way, with a sustained push over weekends in July, August, and September.
Bayside expanded that commitment to the small groups vision by hiring great leaders at each campus and bringing them into the planning and campaign implementation and, of course, by filming the video curriculum as a team. As Brett often says, âThe sheep like to hear from the shepherd;â with this project, the Bayside âsheepâ were able to hear from all of their leaders with high-quality teaching that extended the culture and values of the church.
The entire experience created FOMO â fear of missing out â among the church members, Gil says. People understood this was one of the significant things Bayside was doing, and they wanted to be part of it.
IMPACT BEYOND SMALL GROUPS
Because of the churchâwide emphasis on âBorn for This,â other programs and Pastors are pulling together around the vision. Bayside positioned the groups as a âboth/andâ solution, releasing the pressure for everyone to conform. Small groups in the student ministry, menâs ministry, and womenâs ministry are all growing.
Bayside has not only surpassed its stretch goal, but has hopes to grow toward more than 2,000 groups in the months to come!
A WORD FROM THE PASTOR
The conversations and plans that you have introduced us to have allowed us to move from 400 groups to 1400 groups and climbing. Â We are excited about how this new direction and these new ideas will allow us to build a church that has more in groups than come on the weekends.
I would suggest that any church look at your system and its powerful ability to put more disiciplemakers in the game. There is a freshness to the groups campaign that comes from Lifetogether: the high quality videos, the expert guidance about what to say in the videos, the plan for emails, commercials, and training. Thanks very much for what you have given us and what you have taught us. We have been stretched and challenged but also renewed and deepened through this groups campaign.
– Gil Stieglitz
Over the last twenty years, we’ve had the privilege of working with hundreds of the largest and fastest-growing churches in the country, including 50 of the top 100 listed in Outreach Magazine’s annual list.
The number one event in any local church in America is the weekend service, and it requires most of the staff’s best efforts- all the more reason to leverage that experience far beyond the weekend. What if there were more and better ways to leverage the impact of the weekend sermons? What if we turned one weekend into more of a “catalyst” to next steps vs. merely a weekend event?
The greater opportunity is to challenge any new or existing attender to continue the conversation with a friend or two with the short video segment based on the weekend sermon. If we can motivate unconnected attenders to take this step, many will grow into being a small group over time.
When I got to Willow Creek we began hosting on-campus events to connect unconnected people – it worked but compared to what? We would have hundreds of people come and get in a group and we would hope and pray it stuck. Upon further analysis, “the sign up to show up” was embarrassing and the “stay up” was disaster.
Letting people sign up for groups on the weekend or go online to get in a local group is not as effective for connecting people into community.
When I served on the Saddleback staff, mid-week worship was the number one thing recommended as a next step off the weekend service. Many churches still host a mid-week service on either Wednesday night, Sunday night, or some other night of the week. But this was taken over by Saddleback by a small group experience and we eventually shut down the mid-week worship experience. Most of the growing churches we are working with now are doing the same thing.
Hosting a “40 Day-like campaign” has long been an outstanding strategy to build momentum into the fall, new year or spring seasons in any church. There are hundreds of best-selling authors and Christian publishers with a handful of off-the-shelf campaigns to choose from.
After trying to create small groups in a church and still producing a weekend service, a new integrated model is emerging. We are calling it the “Conversation Service,” which is the best of small groups and a weekend service. This new service is not traditional, nor contemporary, but in a new conversational format that we believe will emerge as the new contemporary service in the future. The teaching is taught in the round with an audience surrounding the senior pastor. It starts like a small group with an icebreaker and some brief interaction from the audience, then proceeds with the teaching by the senior pastor, and then ends with audience interaction that is open, authentic and unplugged. We can produce this live and make it available for the small group to discuss or just produce it as a brand new curriculum format.
Small groups driven by a video teaching experience can be the best of the resources provided by the attractional service and the integration of the best of the missional model. At Seacoast Church, Greg and Josh Surratt had a “Missional Ministry” developing but it wasn’t very comprehensive or effective in its approach. We aligned their weekend content by providing video curriculum resources and saw an exponential number of groups launch that were not just effective for assimilation but evangelism and outreach as well. We are working with a number of churches around the country that are integrating the best of both of these models.
Over the last 25 years, we have hosted more live small group leader training sessions than anybody in the country. The initial training may include 75% of those registered but the follow-up training only has a fraction of the response. That’s why we are seeing a growing trend of producing small group leader training and volunteer training online in a variety of new formats. The clear winner is to produce a video training versus a print-only handbook. Some may simply be a video of frequently asked questions, some are taught by small group pastors and some are topical or developmental. But the most effective is a whole new approach to training.
Over the last 25 years we have cracked a new code on how to start more groups but the constant struggle is how to sustain those groups, and we are learning a ton in this area as we work with the bleeding-edge congregations.
