People need community—we were not created to live in isolation. Although people today may be the most connected generation of all time, we are also one of the loneliest generations.
Here at Life on Life, we’re convinced that discipleship groups are one of the best ways to cultivate community. Not only does community help cure our loneliness, but biblical community can help us grow in our faith and even point non-believers to Christ.
In this article, we will explore 9 effective strategies you can use for cultivating community in your small group Bible study or discipleship group.
2) Establish Expectations
If you want to cultivate an authentic community, you need to establish expectations with your group. It is ideal to do this when you’re forming a new group, but you can also re-establish new expectations at any time if you don’t think your group is growing closer together.
Here are a few key expectations you’ll want to establish with your discipleship group:
- Express the importance of genuine community in the small group and share how it can impact each person.
- Encourage people to be authentic and open, to share what is really going on in each other’s lives.
- Remind everyone about the essential nature of keeping things confidential. A lack of confidentiality can instantly ruin trust and people’s willingness to be open.
- Highlight the importance of balanced participation to ensure everyone has a chance to share and feel heard.
- Ask everyone to commit to attending as often as possible. As we’ll discuss later in this article, good community takes time. If members don’t attend the group regularly, it will be hard for other members to trust them or open up around them.
Once you’ve established those expectations, it is important that you as a leader live these expectations. You need to lead by example, you need to be open and authentic, you need to keep things confidential, ensure everyone participates, and attend as often as possible. If your group recognizes your authenticity, they’ll be far more likely to open up themselves and your community will grow stronger.
3) Share Your Story
One helpful tool for cultivating genuine community is to share your spiritual journey. The Journey curriculum includes a simple diagram for writing and sharing your spiritual journey with your group.
Sharing your spiritual journey gives people a chance to share both their ups and downs throughout life, it pushes people to be open, and it establishes a strong bond from the start.
When you know where people are coming from, it becomes much easier to invite them to join you wherever you are going.
Once again, group leaders should lead by example and be the first to share your spiritual journey.
4) Life-on-Life, not Curriculum-on-Life
If you’ve been in many Bible studies, odds are you’ve experienced a group where the leader insisted on answering every single question in the study guide. Someone wants to dig into a particularly confusing topic? No time! We’ve gotta get through all the questions. Another person is worried about their sick mom? We’ll pray about it at the end but we’ve gotta get through all the questions!
This style of small group is not very effective for spiritual growth or for cultivating genuine community. For this reason, we often remind people that it is life-on-life discipleship, not curriculum-on-life.
A good discipleship curriculum can be an incredibly useful tool for helping your members mature spiritually. Like all tools, however, you need to make sure you’re using it the right way and you know when it is time to set the tool aside.
If someone is close to a spiritual breakthrough, it is much better to keep digging into that topic vs skipping ahead to other topics that may not actually be as relevant. If someone is going through something difficult in life, it’s important to take time to listen and give them space to share.
In the end, discipleship is about people, not curriculum. As the leader, do your best to listen and understand what the people in your group need – that may mean you spend extra time in the curriculum or it may mean giving people extra time to share what’s going on in their hearts. As you focus on the needs of your group, your community will grow stronger.
5) Nurturing Accountability and Support:
One important piece of genuine community is biblical accountability. Although accountability can evoke a range of thoughts and emotions for people, it’s important to understand the nature of biblical accountability.
Accountability can cultivate a stronger community when it is done with both truth and love. Speaking the truth in love involves confronting sin and encouraging righteousness, all while showing compassion and grace. This balance ensures that accountability is both corrective and supportive, leading to true transformation rather than discouragement.
Above all, accountability should be anchored in the gospel and the grace of God. This foundation reminds us that our efforts are not about earning God’s favor but responding to His infinite love and mercy. Accountability becomes an expression of gratitude and devotion, motivating us to support one another in our walk with Christ.
For this kind of accountability to be possible, you need to start by building trust. As James 1:9 (ESV) says, “Let every person be quick to hear and slow to speak.” By cultivating an environment where everyone feels heard and understood, we can better address the underlying issues at hand and grow closer together at the same time.
6) Sustaining Community Over Time:
In order to cultivate genuine community, you typically need time.
Great friendships don’t happen overnight. Instead, they are built over weeks and months and years of connection. Life can be busy, and it’s hard to maintain regular friendships with people.
We typically recommend that discipleship groups meet on a weekly basis. We also recommend smaller group sizes of 4-6 people for life-on-life discipleship groups. By keeping the group small, participants are able to go deep with a few people rather than keeping it surface level with many different connections.
We also encourage group members (we even provide a covenant form in the Journey curriculum), to attend as often as possible. There is simply no replacement for time together, so when some group members are inconsistent with their attendance it can make it difficult to create those bonds of trust.
Everyone in the group benefits when everyone is committed to attending every week.
Lastly, it’s worth noting that the official group meeting is not the only time or place to spend time together. Here are 11 opportunities for spending time with your discipleship group outside of the typical meeting times. These shared experiences bring people together and make for a stronger sense of community.
7) Cultivate Spiritual Maturity
A mature faith is central to a thriving community. The more we love God, the more capable we will become of loving others.
C.S. Lewis explained it this way, “When I have learnt to love God better than my earthly dearest, I shall love my earthly dearest better than I do now. In so far as I learn to love my earthly dearest at the expense of God and instead of God, I shall be moving toward the state in which I shall not love my earthly dearest at all. When first things are put first, second things are not suppressed but increased.”
This is true of marriages, it’s true for parents who love their children, and it is also true of friendships. When you grow in your love for God, your capacity to love others will increase.
One of the primary goals of life-on-life discipleship is spiritual maturity. As you and your group grow in faith together, you will grow closer as friends as well. Spiritual maturity doesn’t happen by accident; it requires intentional investment in one another’s spiritual growth. As leaders, fostering an environment where members are challenged and encouraged to grow in their faith is crucial.
Learn more about cultivating spiritual maturity in our resource, How to Train Disciples.
8) Foster Missional Growth
The natural result of spiritual maturity should be a desire to live missionally. This can mean sharing the gospel with your neighbor or co-workers, it could mean serving at your church, or it could be serving those in need in your area.
Serving with others is an incredible way to cultivate genuine community. There is something unifying about joining with your group to demonstrate Christ’s love to others.
Not only that, serving in a physical way provides great opportunities for conversation. Incredible moments of connection happen when you’re painting a wall, doing yard work, packing food, or passing out blankets with others. Look for ways you can serve your community, and commit as a group to serving together.
Need help getting started? Check out our article on evangelism training.
9) Pray for One Another
Have you ever been upset to find out that someone is praying for you? Of course not! We appreciate people who pray for us—it shows that they are thinking about us and care for us.
Check out these words from Paul in Colossians 1:9-12 (ESV)
“And so, from the day we heard, we have not ceased to pray for you, asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, so as to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him: bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God; being strengthened with all power, according to his glorious might, for all endurance and patience with joy; giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in light.”
Paul cares for these people so much he prays for them without ceasing. Not only did this encourage the Colossians, but it also helped Paul care for them even more. When we pray for the members of our group, everyone benefits. We care for each other more, and we feel more loved. Most importantly, God hears our prayers and they make a difference.
So, pray for each other—not just during the group meeting, but throughout the week and as often as you think of each other.
Conclusion:
In John 1:35 (ESV), Jesus said the following words, “By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”
The world is desperately hungry for genuine, authentic community. They want to see people who love each other well, and we need it ourselves! When we cultivate genuine community and love each other well, it honors God and points people to Christ.
There are many different ways you can cultivate an authentic community in your small group or life-on-life discipleship group. We hope the strategies in this article prove useful to you, and if you would like to experience community yourself and learn more about discipleship, then consider joining one of our upcoming discipleship training cohorts.