I was on a flight coming home from a Group Life conference and as I was talking to a guy on our team about some important issues, I overheard a comment behind me from a guy on our coaching team:

“We need to do a better job at training our leaders.”

About 18 months before the conference, I had accepted the position of Group Life Pastor at a church on the East Coast. It was a big move from Michigan for a number of reasons. At that time, Group Life had not been as integral a value in the church as I had been led to believe. When I arrived, I quickly found that those who had expressed a desire to lead a group were essentially told, “Great, go with God!” No training, no direction and no common vision!

When I arrived as the Group Life Pastor and started scheduling training sessions, I began to get pushback from almost every direction. The analogy of herding cats came to mind very vividly! I backed off and began to investigate why I was getting the pushback. I kept hearing about ‘not enough time,’ and ‘I’ve been leading my group for ten years, I don’t need no stinkin’ training.’ Then a leader would catch me in the hallway of the church facility and ask me how to handle a situation. Urrgh.

It’s Time to Step Up

As we were waiting for our luggage to come up the beltway, I challenged the two guys I overheard talking:

“I heard some of your conversation. I totally agree. It’s time for you to step up.”

From that point on, we began meeting every few weeks for a couple of hours and discussed what the leaders needed training in. Then we hit the inevitable question: How are we going to do the actual training?

After much brainstorming with a lot of ineffectual ideas, someone mentioned the concept of taking the training materials to the leaders instead of attempting to get the leaders to come to us. We began to flesh it out and came up with a plan to record a monthly CD that we would mail to our leaders. The basic format would include three segments, one 15-20 minute value-specific teaching time, one 3 minute ‘what you need to know’ announcements segment, and a 10-15 minute ‘encouraging word’ segment.

Core Values

The actual teaching segment would rotate around the three core values we are striving to build our groups on: Spiritual Formation, Authentic Relationships and Missional Living. Occasionally this segment would be an interview with a group leader who was excelling in that month’s focus. Sometimes we’d interview our lead pastor to hear his heart about how group life was incorporated in the bigger vision of the church. We decided on the 15-20 minute time frame because it fit most people’s commute time to and from work.

One of the big obstacles that we faced in producing these CD’s was the constant nagging feeling that no-one was listening to them. However, our coaches would follow-up with the leaders under their care and encourage them to listen. We got enough positive feedback from the leaders to find that taking the training to them was clearly reaching a wider audience than attempting to get the leaders to a training session.

Long-term Success of CD Training

We’ve been doing these CD training sessions for a couple of years now and it seems to be doing the trick. We still do on-site Initial Orientation of new leaders, and a couple of times each year we ask the leaders to come together for on-site training and vision casting. These on-site sessions are being better attended than prior attempts and we believe that is, in part, due to the monthly CD’s we mail out. We’ve made the recordings available online in the past but it isn’t nearly as useful as the CD’s. Who knows, your church setting may eat up the online delivery of content. Whatever the vehicle, give serious thought about taking the training to your leaders!