Derek Irvin is the Small Group Pastor at Northview Christian Life Church in Carmel, Indiana. They are a church of about 3300 on the weekends with 170 small groups. Amazingly, 55 of those groups are less than 6 months new, and roughly 70% of the congregation is in a Group! Derek would never say this about himself, so I’ll say it: Derek is a brilliant strategist and has a great ability to intuitively see how things fit together. I have a ton of respect for him as a leader and think all of you should know who he is.
I recently did some work with Derek as he was developing affordable, decentralized, online small group leader training. We started out wanting to build training modules using Zoomerang as a platform (I wrote a post about Zoomerang training a while back), but we found that Zoomerang disabled one of the most critical features.
Fortunately, we were able to find a new (and better) solution, so I’ve asked Derek to write about it here today. Enjoy!
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Two staples of Small Group ministry that I’ve struggled with are leader training and implementing a coaching model that works.
My issues with small group leader training revolve around over-training and getting all my leaders to show up for training. Perhaps it’s because I’ve been through one-too-many Saturday morning training events in a church basement that I hesitate when the topic of leader training comes up.
My struggle with the other staple, coaching, has been that it looks great on paper, but rarely do I see it effectively implemented. My observation is that the best coaching strategies are formed out of a relationship.
Part of our solution to these problems is to take leader training to the leaders rather than having the leader come to us. We are creating on-demand video training that will equip our new Life Group Leaders and create a context for coaches to connect with Leaders.
Our direction with coaching is focus our efforts on newer leaders. Each new leader is assigned a coach and the training tool creates a context for conversation revolving around the four training modules.
The idea (“borrowed” liberally from Alan Danielson) uses a tool called Form Site, which makes it possible to embed video and questions and send a link to leaders. The training module is set up so that the leader responses are sent directly to the specific coach who follows up with a phone call. Here is the first of four trainings we’ve created – TRAINING MODULE 1.