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Here is a key tool for accountability, spiritual growth and community impact—even if right now you have to meet online.
Though some tried to disrupt John Wesley’s preaching, many, many more were converted. John and Charles Wesley along with George Whitefield all received numerous preaching invitations, which soon led to the development of preaching circuits or specified routes through which they would ride and speak.
Yet because there were so many towns and so few preachers, a preacher’s circuits might not bring him back to a town for several weeks. In the absence of solid teaching and preaching, a problem arose.
When preachers returned after an absence of many weeks, they often found a large number of those who had been converted had lapsed back into their old lives. John and Charles concluded this was due to the lack of a follow-up strategy to their open-air preaching.
They recalled their Holy Club days, when their small group had sustained them through trials and persecution. John increasingly emphasized the need for participation in small groups between preacher visits as a way to help new converts grow in faith.1
John had seen firsthand the power of small groups. After his conversion in a Moravian small group, he had traveled to the Moravian community of Herrnhut, located in what is now Germany.
There he witnessed a simple system of discipleship based upon small groups called “choirs,” which were divided according to age, sex and marital status. Each had a director chosen by the members. Their purpose was to encourage spiritual growth while keeping the Scriptures at the center of the process.2
While the Moravians emphasized small groups, they downplayed the importance of preaching conversion. However, by wedding the two (evangelism through preaching and small group discipleship), John saw an effective method for helping people move from the faith of a servant to the faith of a son or daughter. He developed a small-group system as the primary method for following up on the masses that were being converted. Soon the small groups, or classes3 became a widely known symbol of the emerging method.4
John Wesley’s new method was a significant benefit to the poor, working class for two important reasons. First, field preaching enabled hardworking factory laborers and miners to hear the good news locally and then grow in their faith through local class meetings. Second, the accountability of small groups helped people comprehend their faith and relationship to God as that of a son or daughter rather than a servant.
The class meetings began to embody locally the care and need-meeting of Jesus’s words in Matthew 5:3–6: “Happy are people who are hopeless, because the kingdom of heaven is theirs. Happy are people who grieve, because they will be made glad . . . . Happy are people who are hungry and thirsty for righteousness, because they will be fed until they are full.”
As the small-group format developed over the years, even smaller groups of two or three people called “bands” were created to train leaders and to help those struggling with life issues.5
Five characteristics of effective groups
Based on Wesley’s experience and practice, we can discern five characteristics of fully developed small groups. Effective discipleship takes place in groups that exhibit these features.
1. They met regularly.The intimacy and candor of small groups make them uncomfortable, which can dissuade some from participating.
Therefore, small groups must be regularly scheduled. The Holy Club met several times during the week. For people who were converted at the open-air meetings, small groups met once a week.
2. They provided a safe environment for sharing.Often the meetings would begin with questions, some written by John Wesley, intended to help people open up about their spiritual struggles.
Here are some questions that were used to spur discussion:
• Am I creating the impression, consciously or unconsciously, that I am better than I am? In other words, am I a hypocrite?
• Am I honest in all my acts and words, or do I exaggerate?
• Am I a slave to dress, friends, work, or habits?
• Did the Bible live in me today?
3. They provided biblical answers for the trials people faced.The leaders of Wesley’s groups were not expected to have all the answers.
Sharing spiritual struggles was an opportunity to dig into the Bible together and discover a scriptural answer. This maintained the focus on God’s Word.
4. They enhanced, but did not replace church attendance.Because John and Charles had a high regard for the sacrament of communion, they insisted that communion be received only at the parish church. This had the unplanned secondary benefit of encouraging their followers to attend a local church and to influence it.
If given a choice between attending their small group or going to a large worship service, many will choose the intimacy of the small group. It is vital to insist that the group not replace church attendance.
5. They were an organic way to meet the needs of others.Small groups were flexible, easily deployed teams that could rapidly seek out and meet neighborhood needs. Ever since the days when John, Charles and George rode with the condemned to the gallows, small groups were their primary method for showing compassion for others.
Today, mobilizing an entire congregation to go out and minister to the poor can meet fewer needs firsthand than small groups embedded in neighborhoods can.
I’ve observed when entire congregations attempt to reach out to the needy, only about 10 to 15 percent of congregants show up for large-scale events. But when small groups are mobilized to reach out to the needy, participation soars dramatically.
Excerpted from Enthusiast!: Finding a Faith That Fills, by Bob Whitesel (Wesleyan Publishing 2018).
1. Small groups had been a hallmark of John Wesley’s method since his Oxford days. But now the small group discipleship method became the increasingly important follow-up feature to the public preaching.
2. David L. Watson, The Early Methodist Class Meeting: Its Origins and Significance (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2002), 77.
3. John did not think of the term classin the modern sense of a school classroom. John chose the word from the Latin classis,which meant a division, such as in an army. One wonders, though, what might have occurred if John had chosen the more spiritual sounding term used by the Moravians, choir,to describe the small-group foundation of the method.
4. Watson, Early Methodist Class Meeting, 77.
5. Ibid., 78.
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Bob Whitesel (D.Min., Ph.D.) is a foresight coach, professor, and award-winning author of 14 books. For over 30 years, he has guided leaders and churches to pivot and engage what’s next. He holds two earned doctorates from Fuller Theological Seminary and teaches on leadership foresight, church health, and organizational change. His website is www.ChurchForesight.com. Learn More » |
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