Group's adult-resource developer Roxanne Wieman tells us about a new resource that will help get your small group out of the living room and into the world around them.

• Steve Sjogren and Dave Ping. Outflow: Everyday Outreach for Everyday People. Small Group Leader Kit. Contains: Outflow book (236p.), DVD (run time approx. 50 min.), and worship CD (approx. 38 min.). Group Publishing, $24.99; additional books $14.99 (quantity discounts available).

When it comes to outreach, many leaders feel stuck a rock and a hard place. They want the people in their group to reach out to others with God's love, and to help others become better at outreach, to empower them to spread God's love. So leaders set up events and programs for outreach, but in the end those programs become... well, programmatic. Group members participate out of obligation and guilt, serve their time and go home -- relieved that their "outreach" is done for the month (or year).

That's not what these leaders wanted, nor what Jesus wants. But for one reason or another -- and there are many -- people don't want to do outreach. So the programs stop, the leaders sigh in discouragement, and the people still feel unfulfilled in their relationship with God and with his call to make disciples of all nations. In short, no one is happy.

In their new book Outflow, Dave Ping (Executive Director of Equipping Ministries International) and Steve Sjogren (founding pastor of Vineyard Cincinnati) suggest that all of the reasons people don't do outreach really boil down to one big problem: Satan has people focused on self. Ping and Sjogren suggest that it isn't a problem to fix, so much as it is recognizing that we need a new pattern of living.

Throughout the book, Ping and Sjogren use the metaphor of a four-tiered fountain, representing different kinds of relationships in our lives: God, friends and family, community, and world. The first bowl that catches and distributes the power of the Spirit is your relationship with God. So Outflow suggests that in the very beginning, it's about God filling you up with blessings and joy. But that's only the beginning -- self-fulfillment and gratification are not the end goals. Once your bowl is full, it's your turn to overflow those blessings to the people around you: your friends and family, your community, and your world.

What I liked about Outflow is that, while there's some great small-group material in the DVD and the daily readings, it doesn't feel programmatic. It's not a one-time event. It's a lifestyle. It's an everyday, day-in and day-out, shift in the way you live your life. It affects the relationships you have now, and the ones you'll make going forward. It affects the way you shop, the way you notice people in the park (and maybe even smile at them), the way you listen to people, the way you pray... even the way you buy fast food. In other words, it's a shift outward -- toward God and toward others.

And as I read through Outflow, this that struck me most: I could do this.

They're little things, sure. But they're the beginning of something bigger. Once I started noticing people, I started caring about them. Once I cared about them, I started praying for them. And once I was praying for them, I could be confident that the Holy Spirit was interceding and helping me know how to continue reaching out to that person.

Just small, subtle, everyday shifts in focus. But they make all the difference.

Here's an excerpt from Outflow that stopped me dead in my tracks. I kept mulling it over and talking about it with friends...it was so true, and yet so easy to forget...to brush over in a busy schedule:

"Loving your community to Christ means making a deeper commitment to it than most people ever do. It means putting down deep roots and really caring about the physical and spiritual welfare of everyone who lives there....

"Of course...the 24/7 media blitz around us keeps telling us we've got to 'shop around.' We get so busy hunting for the best deals and the most convenient locations that we never commit to being a part of the place where we live. We need to get involved in what's happening locally. Shop at the same stores. Eat at the same restaurants. Get to know the clerks by name. Request to sit in a certain server's section (and tip generously!). Be willing to stand in the longest checkout line in order to chat with a clerk you know. Sure, it may cost you time and a few more pennies to shop at your local grocery or eat at a local restaurant, but the opportunity to get to know people makes it more than worth it." (Outflow, Reading 18)

The Outflow small-group kit contains everything you need to lead an Outflow small group. You get a copy of the Outflow book (group members will need to purchase their own additional copies, as the book also serves as the study guide), as well as a DVD to lead your small-group time. I'm not always into DVD-led small-group studies, but this one was great. Instead of just watching "talking heads," the DVD's five sessions included interviews with outreach experts, and (my favorite part) a panel of everyday Christians discussing together the pros and cons of outreach. My group responded so well to that panel that it was as if the panel started our discussion, and we simply continued it after stopping the DVD. The questions on the DVD are thought-provoking and personal, and helped people to really take hold of and apply the concepts.

The daily readings sometimes felt long, but I got a lot out of them-and they really informed our small-group discussion times as well. All in all, the Outflow Small Group kit was affordable and easy to do with a small group.

In order for church outreach to be successful, it has to be owned by the members of your church, not just by the leadership. The thing about most church-sponsored outreach programs is that they're church-sponsored. Individual people have to be living lives of outreach; overflowing with God's love into their own worlds -- that's when outreach is most powerful and most effective.

And that's what Outflow does best. Outflow starts with the individual, grows in the small group, and blossoms in the church. It's not a top-down thing -- it's an individual heart thing. When the individuals in your group are filled to the brim and overflowing with God's love and joy, your group will naturally be filled with outreach ideas and activities. Your members will be coming up with tons of ways to share God's love in practical ways.