Sticky Church

By Larry Osborne

In Sticky Church, author and pastor Larry Osborne makes the case that closing the back door of your church is even more important than opening the front door wider. He offers a time-tested strategy for doing so: sermon-based small groups that dig deeper into the weekend message and tightly velcro members to the ministry. It’s a strategy that enabled Osborne’s congregation to grow from a handful of people to one of the larger churches in the nation—without any marketing or special programming.

Sticky Church tells the inspiring story of North Coast Church’s phenomenal growth and offers practical tips for launching your own sermon-based small group ministry. Topics include:

Why stickiness is so important
Why most of our discipleship models don’t work very well
Why small groups always make a church more honest and transparent
What makes groups grow deeper and sticker over time

Sticky Church is an ideal book for church leaders who want to start or retool their small group ministry—and velcro their congregation to the Bible and each other.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Zondervan
• Release date: Dec 30, 2008
• ISBN: 9780310312994

Larry Osborne

Larry Osborne es autor de libros, pastor y maestro en la Iglesia North Coast, en Vista, California. Es reconocido por ser uno de los pastores más innovadores de los Estados Unidos. Reside con su esposa Nancy en Oceanside, California.

Book preview

The Leadership Network Innovation Series

The Big Idea: Focus the Message, Multiply the Impact

Dave Ferguson, Jon Ferguson, and Eric Bramlett

Confessions of a Reformission Rev.: Hard Lessons from an

Emerging Missional Church

Mark Driscoll

Leadership from the Inside Out: Examining the Inner Life of a

Healthy Church Leader

Kevin Harney

The Multi-Site Church Revolution: Being One Church in Many

Locations

Geoff Surratt, Greg Ligon, and Warren Bird

Other titles forthcoming

Other Books by Larry Osborne

A Contrarian’s Guide to Knowing God: Spirituality for the Rest of Us

Measuring Up (with Stuart Briscoe and Knute Larson)

The Unity Factor: Developing a Healthy

Leadership Team

Sticky Church

ePub format

Copyright © 2008 by Larry Osborne

This title is also available as a Zondervan ebook.

Visit www.zondervan.com/ebooks.

Requests for information should be addressed to:

Zondervan, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49530

ISBN-13: 978-0-310-31299-4

All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.

Internet addresses (websites, blogs, etc.) and telephone numbers printed in this book are offered as a resource to you. These are not intended in any way to be or imply an endorsement on the part of Zondervan, nor do we vouch for the content of these sites and numbers for the life of this book.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Interior design by Matthew Van Zomeren

To the congregation and staff of North Coast Church

Your love for the Lord and willingness

to do whatever he wants you to do

are an inspiration to me

Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Part 1 The Sticky Church Advantage

1. Sticky Church

Why the front door is highly overrated • A parable lots of people know but not many understand • Why stickiness is so important • The purpose and format of this book

2. Who Are These Guys?

Why it might not matter if your church stinks at marketing • Smallleaks, big messes, and church growth • Come and see evangelism • The 80 percent factor • Scalability and slow growth

3. How I Learned about the Importance and Power of Stickiness

Killing the dream—and why it was one of the best things I ever did • Tools or sheep? • Pastors who don’t like Christians • Why marketing too early can actually keep people away

4. Why Stickier Churches Are Healthier Churches

Why closing the back door can make the front door seem bigger • The tell-tale mark of a raving fan • The high price of bait and switch • How one seeker church made sure no one brought any seekers

Part 2 How Small Groups Change Everything

5. Velcroed for Growth

Why most of our discipleship models don’t work very well • How people grow • Velcroed for growth • Why the New Testament is absolutely silent about small groups

6. How Small Groups Change Everything

Critical mass—why it’s so important and what it takes to get there • The Holy Man myth • The Holy Place myth • Why empowerment needs a platform

7. Still More Ways That Small Groups Change Everything

Why small groups make a church more honest and transparent • Why they always increase the level and practice of spiritual disciplines • Thevery best gift we can give a child or teenager

8. Making the Message Memorable: How Sermon-Based Small Groups Made Me a Much Better Preacher

A bunch of stuff that didn’t work and the one change that did • The simplest way to increase attention and note taking • Why my sermons are always worth talking about • Four stages of knowledge and why lots of people tend to bail out before they’re finished

9. Making the Message Accessible: How Sermon-Based Small Groups Made Us a Much Better Church

Reeling in the marginally interested • Why it doesn’t matter why someone • joins a group • Why even the unmotivated will spend an hour preparing for their small group • Facilitators and teachers • The death of idiot questions

Part 3 Sermon-Based Small Groups

10. Why Some Groups Jell and Some Don’t

Why size matters • Comfort zones • The me too factor • The magic number when attendance becomes predictably sporadic • Getting the right people in the right group • The difference between Christian unity and close friendships • Schooling fish • Why people are like Legos • Why friendly people can leave new people feeling frustrated • New groups for new people • Why dividing to grow might not be such a good idea

11. Flies on the Wall: What Happens When a Sermon-Based Small Group Meets

Why there is no such thing as a typical sermon-based small group • Refreshments and personal updates • Why it’s vitally important that everyone answers their homework questions ahead of time • Three types of questions • Why silly questions can be important questions • Why you always want to look at some passages that weren’t mentioned in the sermon Prayer • Freedom to digress • Worship • Service projects and socials

12. Overcoming the Time Crunch

Why most of us have just two time slots to work with • The difference between selling out and adapting wisely • Why cutting the competition is so important • What Henry Ford taught me about small groups • Cutting too much too fast can be hazardous to your ministry • Hamstringing the competition • Making leadership manageable • Why summer breaks are essential for long term success

13. Determining Your Primary Purpose

Determining your primary goal • What happens when everyone uses a different measuring rod • Alignment • What we can learn from Wall Street and LA Fitness • Making disciples • Staying healthy • The need for warmth • The dangers of mission creep • Measuring success

14. Entry Points and Escape Routes

My first small group • The dreaded weasel factor • Entry ramps and escape routes • Why ten weeks is nearly magical • How groups grow deeper • What happens when life happens • What happens when it doesn’t • Aligning sermon series and small group schedules—why it’s no big deal

15. Why Dividing Groups Is a Dumb Idea

What most church leaders think • Why those who are actually in a small group see it so differently • Small groups and steroids • Another look at Legos • What the military taught me about small groups • Mayberry in San Diego • Fresh blood • Hiving versus dividing

16. Finding and Developing Leaders

What to look for • Who to avoid • The best fishing pools • The worst fishing pools • Why you don’t want to ask for volunteers • How to scare off potential leaders

17. Training Leaders

Why staff members and lay leaders see training so differently • Bite-sized training • Time shifting • Why turning down the intensity won’t harm your leaders or your groups—and why it might help • What every rookie needs to know • The one thing every veteran leader needs to know

18. Why Cho’s Model Didn’t Work in Your Church

Why most of our small group models don’t work very well • The Korean connection • Coming to America • A nagging question, a surprising answer • Why my parents won’t walk into the Buddhist temple • Prayer Mountain, military coups, and powerful pastors • What a mobile society, extended families, Armenians, and mutts have in common—and what they don’t

19. Before You Start: Five Key Questions

What a poorly aligned set of tires can teach about vision and ministry • Who are you trying to reach? • What are you trying to accomplish? • How do these two match up? • The funnel test • Mentoring, education, and apprenticeships • Speed modeling

Acknowledgments

Appendixes

1. Writing Great Questions

2. Sample Sermon Note Sheet and Study Questions

3. Sample Growth Group Covenant

4. End-of-the-Quarter Evaluation Form

5. Leader Training Topics

6. Leader Responsibilities

7. Host Responsibilities

8. A List of New Testament One Anothers

Study Guide: Follow-up Questions for Each Chapter

Notes

Chapter 1

Sticky Church

If the back door of a church is left wide open, it doesn’t matter how many people are coaxed to come in the front door—or the side door, for that matter.

Yet most churches give the back door scant attention.

We’ve discovered lots of ways to reach people. We’ve offered the high-powered programs and slick marketing of attractional churches, the cultural savvy of missional churches, and the relational intimacy of small churches. But we’ve often become so focused on reaching people that we’ve forgotten the importance of keeping people.

And that’s the thesis of this book: Our churches need to be stickier.

Stickier churches are healthier churches. They not only draw in spiritual window-shoppers and lead them to Christ; they also grow them up to maturity.

And that, after all, is what Jesus called us to do. He didn’t tell us to go into all the world and sign people up. He didn’t tell us to draw big crowds. He told us to make disciples—a task that includes baptizing people and teaching them to obey everything he commanded. ¹

Frankly, that’s a task that takes some significant time. To pull it off, we need to be sticky.

Why Stickiness Is So Important

In one of Jesus’ most famous parables, the parable of the sower, he told of a farmer casting seeds onto four types of soil, each representing a different response to the gospel.²

One of the soils was so hard that nothing could germinate.

Another was so shallow that the plants sprouted quickly but couldn’t dig their roots deep enough to withstand the furnace blast of a Middle Eastern summer’s day.

The third kind of soil was weed infested, resulting in a crop that once again looked good for a while but eventually was choked off by what Jesus called the deceitfulness of riches and the desire for other things.

Only the fourth type of soil, the one Jesus called the good soil, produced a harvest.

Now, the point of this parable is straightforward: A great spiritual start is no guarantee of a happy ending.

But somehow many of us have missed it.

Just look at the way we typically respond to a burst of church growth or the baby steps of a new believer. We’re quick to rejoice at the first signs of spiritual life—and rightfully so. But in most cases, while we hope that the growth lasts and continues, the sprouting of the seed is the main thing. That’s what we count; that’s what we celebrate.

If the seed dries up and dies at the first sign of hardship, we’re bummed. But we’re hardly devastated. At least it sprouted and popped out of the ground—and that’s a lot better than never having started at all.

The same goes for anyone who starts out well and lasts for a while before being choked off by the weeds of worldly concern. We wish it hadn’t happened. We wanted better for them. But at least they got off to a good start.

Here’s the problem. Unlike Jesus’ original audience, few of us know much about farming. For most of us, the produce aisle is a close encounter with agriculture. So we completely miss the emotional response that anyone raised on a farm would have had to this parable.

No farmer would ever be satisfied with initial growth killed off before harvest. If the soil in any portion of his field produced that result, he’d never plant there again.

A crop that didn’t last all the way to harvest was a financial disaster. The response wouldn’t be a shrug and an Oh well. It would be more akin to sackcloth and ashes.

I realize that most scholars see the soil in this parable as representing the condition of individual hearts—and I agree. But the underlying principles are not only true for individuals; they are also true for the ministry of a local church.

I also realize that this passage could easily springboard us into a centuries-old debate about eternal security. But that’s not my point or within the scope of this book. Wherever you personally land on that one, the question of the day remains the same: What does Jesus’ parable about the four soils have to say about the way we do church?

To my thinking it says a lot. And one of the most important things it says about our churches is that stickiness matters.

The Purpose of This Book

Don’t take what I’ve said to mean that I’m against trying to open the front door wider. I’m not. I’d like to open it as wide as possible. It’s just that I’ve learned that if left alone, the back door never closes itself. We have to intentionally slam it shut.

In the following pages we’ll explore how to do that. We’ll see what makes a church sticky, from its values and priorities to its structures, programs, and practices.

In particular we’ll look in depth at sermon-based small groups, a lecture-lab model for studying the weekend sermon in-depth during the week. We’ll see how they work. We’ll explain why they have the power to make your church especially sticky. And we’ll discover why so many of the traditional small group models we’ve tried in the past sound great but don’t work all that well in real life.

My goal is to provide you with a working model that you can adopt and change until it’s ready to be put into play in your unique ministry setting.

I’ve deliberately written in a conversational tone. I hope you’ll feel like we’re hanging out, discussing the ins and outs of ministry, sipping a latte at our favorite gathering place. I’ll tell you my story. You decide what works for you and what doesn’t.

Much of this story will be told through the lens of North Coast Church, located in a suburb north of San Diego. Since 1980 I’ve had the privilege of pastoring an amazing group of people who’ve been willing to innovate but also—perhaps more important—abandon programs and traditions that no longer work.

That means that these insights, programs, and principles have all been hammered out on the anvil of local church ministry, not only at North Coast Church but also in the many churches that have already adopted their own version of sermon-based small groups.

And unlike many books on ministry, this isn’t the result of a rush to publish. It’s not about the newest next big thing. It’s not based on an unproven track record of two or three years. It’s the result of decades of successes, failures, refinements, and midcourse corrections.

Even more important, these principles scale. They (and the sermon-based small group model) worked just as well when we were a small church of less than two hundred adults as they do today in a multisite megachurch with more than seven thousand in weekend attendance.

They’ve also

Reviews for Sticky Church

[wbc3_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I don't believe I've ever read a book on Church growth that I agreed with more. The basic premise of the book is that church grow best by retaining people through small groups rather than by attracting lots of new people. Growth best happens through small groups done well (closing the back door) rather than fancy marketing and programs (opening wide the front door). Osborne does a good job of telling how to do small groups well using his church's example. I recommend this book to pastors and church leaders concerned about the future and direction of their churches.

[deusvitae · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A fantastic book describing the sermon-based small group method for maintaining and encouraging church members. The author uses his experiences at his church to provide lessons he has learned in developing such groups, training leaders, and avoiding various pitfalls. The sermon-based small group concept allows for greater interest and relevancy of the sermon in the life of the believer along with the ability for the believer to be plugged into a group of fellow believers for maximum encouragement.The book is worth examination by anyone who is interested in closing the proverbial back door of the church.

[johntgrant · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Great book! Practical insights on how small groups can integrate with congregational life. It offered great concepts that clarified my thinking on Christian small groups - people "Velcroed" to the Bible and to friends (42-46), like legos people having limited space for connecting (80), the funnel of what a group can do (152).

[bsanner_3 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

In this simple introduction to the philosophy and practice of sermon-based small groups, Osborne wants to help churches "close the back door" - as churches often fail to integrate visitors and new members into the life and ministry of the church. The Sticky Church (via sermon-based small groups) attempts to bond believers to what they need most: scripture and one another. Osborne presents a compelling vision. A-

[enygren_6 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I knew I wanted to read Larry Osborne's new book Sticky Church as soon as I read the title. I would guess that that every pastor and every church has wrestled with the question about how to get people who visit their church to not only stay but how to get them connected. As Osborne points out we've tried just about everything but we still see too many of our people leaving through the back door.The solution for Osborne and the folks at North Coast Church was to help people "stick" by getting them to be a part of their small group ministry. But the small groups at NCC were not your typical Bible study group or multiplying cell group. Osborne details the process that led him and his ministry team to focus on Sermon based small groups. As a result, those involved in small groups at NCC were given an opportunity to make application from what they heard the previous Sunday in the context of encouraging, accountable relationships.I found Osborne's book to be extremely helpful in developing my own vision and strategy for ministry but probably not in the way Osborne would have imagined when writing this book. I pastor a rural church where we don't have small groups--we are a small group. I found many of Osborne's comments and principles to be very relevant to our situation and the ministry we are trusting God to develop. Osborne covers everything from preaching, to church health, to relationships, and leadership training. I imagine the principles I gleaned will be most beneficial to the way I give leadership to the local church.My copy of Sticky Church is now marked up and well worn. My goal now is to go back through the book so I can process again the principles Osborne has shared. Let me share one principle that I found worth the price of the book (although thanks to the good folks at Zondervan I was given this copy to review for free!)Just recently my kids have discover the joy of Legos, a toy that was a favorite of mine growing up as well. On pages 79-81 Osborne explains why we see such difficulty among people to "jell" with others when forming new relationship. The answer: people are like Legos. Like the little plastic bricks, there are only so many connectors to go around. When those connectors get filled up we find it difficult to make any new connections. When I read this and Osborne’s further application (you’ll just have to buy the book) I felt that both a light bulb went on and a weight was lifted at the same time. It’s not so much that the church is full of cliques; it’s that many of us already have our connectors filled (p.80). Brilliant!Even if yours is not a church of small groups, or small groups are not yet on your ministry horizon this book is well worth reading. It will stay on my shelf and deserves a second read. Here’s hoping that the Lord uses this book to help our churches become even “stickier”.

[vanjr-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Another way to do small groups.