Book review "Making Small Groups Work"

I think I've had this book for about ten years, but I've only just read it now. And I'd like to recommend it to others. The author's will be familiar to some because of their series of "Boundaries" books, which are also highly recommended. This book has a different focus, but some of their skills shine through. The book is "Making Small Groups Work" by Drs Henry Cloud and John Townsend.

It's easy to read with 55 short chapters divided into six sections.

What this book will teach you is how to deal with some of the people and issues that come up in leading a small group. These can be planning issues like 'what will this group be?', 'who will this group serve best?', and 'how should this group be structured?' But more than this, you can also learn how to deal with the person who won't say anything, and the person who won't stop!

What this book won't teach you is how to teach the Bible better, now how to prepare a Bible study. As that is not the main aim of the book, that's ok. There are other resources that can help with this.

That being said, those who believe that the best thing we can do in our groups is to study the Bible and see how it applies to our lives will still learn a lot from this book. In fact, I would even suggest that reading this would greatly help your group to be a more interactive group and stop you turning it into a lecture. 

Here is one quote from the chapter on Discipleship that helps to show the direction of the book:
"Sometimes people are confused about the nature of a group: Is it recovery? growth? discipleship? Often, terms such as  recover and  healing refer to the process of addressing broken parts of a person's life, while growth and discipleship are used more in the context of moving toward maturity. . . However, in any type of healthy group, these lines become a little blurry. A group of people who want to become disciples of Christ must also deal with their hurts and injuries." (p112) I would put an emphasis on the last sentence.