Today on the podcast, Sean speaks about the idea of scraping small groups (kind of) from your service.
Sunday mornings used to be all about the small groups for Elevate. Recently there was a change to that. Elevate still uses small groups on Wednesday night but Sunday’s there has been a shift away from that. Sunday mornings had a weird thing that continued to happen, a group would have 6 or 7 preteens one week and the next week would have 1 or none and there was no consistency to the numbers that would attend from the roster. The inconsistency with the preteens and on the flip side the inconsistency of the leaders that who were committed but would have something come up. For this reason, Elevate decided to scrap small groups on Sunday mornings. This does not mean that the preteens don’t meet and have a discussion time in small groups of people. It just means that consistent, scheduled small groups are no longer an element in those services. That relationship development that would occur in a long-term group dynamic does not occur during the Sunday mornings but does occur on Wednesday nights.
The new look on Sunday includes tables with a leader at each table. By using two different color chairs they are able to distinguish the specific seat the leader will sit in compared to the rest of the chairs the preteens sit in. The preteens then have the opportunity to sit at whatever table they want to sit at. They can sit with a specific leader or a group of friends, but they cannot add or remove chairs from a table. This allows for Elevate to end up with good size groups every week. This also allows them to not be concerned with the consistency in the groups while still allowing for the small group discussion dynamic to occur. This idea is working well because it still limits the amount of preteens in a group while making sure there is not just one student you are trying to have a discussion with.
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