Have you ever envisioned what it looks like for a small group to bear the weight of spiritual friendships? What carries a small group experience from week to week without crumbling under the weight of conflict, pain… in short, people? Sustainability is very important for healthy small groups, but we need to sacrifice something in order to move towards it.

Whether you already have a vision for a sort of "small group culture" where small groups just organically happen, or are still in a more "engineered" small-group model, one mark of a healthy small group is the ability to sustain itself while pursuing the purpose of small groups. So what's your purpose, and how do you pursue it?

And maybe that's where you need to begin. A purpose statement can work on a few different levels. One, it can help small-group leadership articulate what it wants to see happen in the small-group community. Two, if effectively grafted into the small-group experience, group members will understand the purpose of the group and will be able to protect the group when challenges arise. Lastly, purpose statements help the group establish life-giving practices, rather than simply falling into patterns.

It's helpful to distinguish between a pattern and a practice. An example of a practice would be the simple communal activity of reading the Scripture. A pattern would be consistently breaking up into pairs in order to read the Scripture passage. Put another way, a practice can take on several different forms, while patterns tend to look the same from experience to experience.

So if practices are what we want to pursue, what do we hope to accomplish? In a word: sustainability. While sustainability has become a bit of a buzzword over the last few years, the fact is, one of the most important values for the majority of small groups is their ability to sustain themselves. Small groups built around practices have a much greater chance of becoming a community that can bear the weight of time, friendship, pain, and joy - all of which come with a small group.

Here are three different things to keep in mind as you help your small groups move from patterns to practices:

1. Have a clear and easily communicated purpose for everything you do in your groups. It's amazing the things we'll do when we don't know what we're supposed to do. With the busyness that comes with our society, we should be continually checking and tweaking our purpose within our groups. A very simple example could be groups that share a meal with one another. A wonderful purpose for that time would be to practice hospitality and generosity with one another in community.

2. Redeem and revitalize your patterns. Notice I said redeem, not replace. For some, those patterns represent something comfortable. But in creating a space where spiritual friendships can occur, we need to provide practices that can carry the weight of those friendships-then, discover how the patterns we have can be changed up.

3. Envision together what a practice could look like. The practice of reading Scripture, prayer, or hospitality looks very different from group to group. And it should. Remember, it's a practice, not a pattern. So discover together how to develop your group's practices. Have group members come up with ideas for  prayer activities, for example. This will begin the process of allowing the group to take ownership of its practices.
  
In the end, practices are a more responsible way to create spaces for spiritual friendships to grow. People will be constantly driven back to the purpose of small groups; they'll feel their group strengthen as it takes on practices; and spiritual friendships will flourish as they as built up in spiritual virtue, not just traditional patterns. No matter what happens, trust that God will lead each and every small group experience towards greater intimacy with one another and most importantly, with Jesus.

Tim Balow has been involved in church ministry for the past six years in a variety of roles including children, youth, and family ministry, and will be relocating to Minneapolis in the Fall of 2010. Tim also serves as an ambassador for Group Publishing.