Activate: An Entirely New Approach to Small Groups

Church leaders want to know how to make small groups work for their church communities, yet a quick look around shows that while small groups are all the rage, much of the time they create more problems than they solve. Nelson Searcy and Kerrick Thomas, founding pastors of The Journey Church in the heart of New York City, suggest that this failure is due to widely held beliefs about small groups that just aren’t true—and they aim to debunk the myths and set the record straight! Drawing from the startling success of small groups at The Journey Church (which has had over 100-percent participation in small groups for more than 4 years) Searcy and Thomas show how church leaders can implement a life-changing small-group ministry that gets the maximum number of people involved and solves many of the important (yet irritating) problems facing churches of all sizes.

Nelson Searcy and his wife Kelley founded The Journey Church of the City in New York in 2002. In a few short years, it has become a dynamic force that brings God’s message to over a thousand 20- and 30-somethings each week. Nelson trains church planters through his own seminars as well as through Saddleback Church training events. He is the publisher of the online resource Evangelism Online and prior to starting The Journey, he was the founding director of the Purpose Driven Community at Saddleback Church. Nelson is the coauthor with Kerrick Thomas of Launch: Starting a New Church from Scratch.
Kerrick Thomas is a teaching pastor at The Journey Church and regularly co-leads training events with Nelson Searcy. Prior to his move to New York to plant The Journey, he received a Masters of Divinity from Princeton Theological Seminary.