Do Online Small Groups Work?

Short answer: Yes, when they are built like real small groups: three to fifteen people, a host who facilitates rather than teaches, a weekly rhythm, curriculum, and a plan to move the group toward face-to-face community over time. Saddleback has run online groups since 2010 and has roughly 1,500 of them. The most-asked question I get from pastors is how. This page is the answer.

Online small groups are the spark. A worship service alone gives you a crowd. Groups give you a community. If I can get somebody online into a group with other people, their care becomes far more sustainable and healthy than anything a pastor can do one-on-one. That is why every strategy on this site eventually points here.

What is an online small group?

A group of three to fifteen people gathering regularly through a text platform, an audio call, or video software, doing life together with curriculum and training from your church. It is not that different from a group that meets in a living room. The two differences are the medium and the fact that the video teaching is usually watched before the meeting rather than during it.

The early church model in Acts 2 and 5 was small groups: teaching, fellowship, everything in common, temple courts, and adding to their number. Online groups are just one more place that pattern can live.

How do you start online small groups at a church?

The easiest way is a large online group that you lead, which becomes the launchpad for many small ones:

1. Invite a large number of people into one group you lead.
2. Create a private Facebook group as the home base.
3. Meet weekly at the same time on Zoom as the meeting space.
4. Use Zoom breakout rooms to split into groups of three to five.
5. Engage in the Facebook group throughout the week.
6. When the study ends, encourage the small breakouts to keep meeting as their own groups.
7. Capture one story from the experience and use it to launch the next round.

Want to test this without buying a curriculum subscription? Build an email list of everyone willing to host. Every Sunday afternoon, send three to five discussion questions based on the weekend message. Hosts watch the service as normal and use the questions in their group. That is the whole system. Saddleback.com/TalkItOver is the polished version of exactly this.

What platform should online small groups use?

People are opinionated about technology, so do not over-restrict it. I think about groups with four P's:

• Programming: on-demand individually or real-time as a group. Synchronous or asynchronous.
• Platform: let groups choose what they already use.
• Process: text, then audio, then video, then face to face. Groups mature along this path.
• Places: every group needs a home base (a Facebook group, a text thread, WhatsApp) and a meeting space (Zoom, Google Meet, FaceTime).

Most of our groups meet on Zoom. Some use Slack, WhatsApp, WeChat, or Facebook Groups for text-based groups, and a few are audio-only. Two things we learned the hard way: bandwidth becomes a real problem as you expand globally, and showing your face on camera is a big step for a new follower of Jesus, and in some countries a security concern. Text and audio are not lesser groups. They are the first rung.

What does a typical online small group meeting look like?

1. Welcome everyone. Your preparation ahead of time sets the tone.
2. Warm up the group with an icebreaker.
3. Optional: watch or read the study together, if it was not watched beforehand.
4. Discuss the questions, and get everyone to unmute and share.
5. Prayer requests.
6. End with prayer.

Leave open time before and after. That unstructured conversation is where friendship actually forms. And keep online meetings shorter than in-person ones. Screens are more tiring than living rooms, so plan for less content and more conversation.

How do you train online small group hosts?

The single most important decision we made was a host strategy instead of a teacher strategy. We are not looking for Bible teachers or expert counselors. We are looking for a host to play a video and walk through prewritten discussion questions. The host facilitates. Everyone, including the host, is part of the transformation process. This lowers the barrier to leading so far that you can start many groups at once, and it is the reason our count reached a thousand and kept going.

You create healthy groups three ways. Train the host with a video course you offer online. Train the whole group through the curriculum itself. Check in regularly to answer specific questions. A Facebook group for hosts to share ideas with each other helps enormously. Whatever you do, do not be the bottleneck to growth.

Health still needs guardrails. At Saddleback, hosts must become members of the church within sixty days. A group is removed if the host stops communicating for forty-five days. Every host completes leadership training, and each groups pastor coaches a set number of groups with regular monthly contact. Low barrier to start, real accountability to continue.

What is the end goal of an online small group?

Face to face. Our desire is for every online group to eventually connect to in-person community. But many of our groups are scattered across the world, so the goal is not for the group to meet in one room. The goal is for each member to start a home group in their own city.

We call it crawl, walk, run. Our pastoral job is to slowly encourage text-based groups to try audio, audio groups to try video, and video groups to start something in a home. It is remarkable how often someone in an online-only group realizes they are missing face-to-face community, and that realization only happened because the online group exposed them to community at all.

Take it one step further and you get house churches connected to online church. Since 2012 people in our online community have hosted what we call Extensions: a service streamed into a home with in-person community around it. Watch parties become house churches become, sometimes, campuses. Every international campus Saddleback has launched had people from the online community on the launch team.

What about Zoom fatigue and groups that fizzle?

Both are real, and both usually trace back to running an online group exactly like an in-person one. Shorten the meeting. Try fifteen-minute Zooms for a season. Lean on the home base during the week so the meeting is not the only touchpoint. And grow your core before you chase your crowd: if you host one monthly "How to Connect with Our Church Online" Zoom and three people show up each time, that is thirty-six people a year and 180 in five years who will share their faith and double your online community for you.

Where do I go deeper?

• 9 Questions Before Starting Online Small Groups
• Online Groups Are the Spark (video, with the four P's and a sample meeting)
• Video Course: How to Start and Sustain Healthy Online Small Groups
• Watch Parties and House Churches, Oh My
• 15 Minute Zooms
• 2X Your Church's Online Audience
• The 10-Week Hybrid Ministry Cohort, if you want to build this with other churches