What makes a group grow?

We could make a long list. Friendships matter. Outreach matters. Invitations matter. Fellowship matters. A warm and welcoming atmosphere matters. All of these things can help get people into the room.

But once they are there, somebody needs to say something worth listening to.

That is the central idea of chapter six of my book, You Can Double Your Class in Two Years or Less. The chapter is called “The Importance of a Halfway Decent Lesson.” I deliberately chose the phrase halfway decent because I want to make two points at the same time: teaching matters enormously, but you don’t have to be a world-class communicator to lead a growing group.

You do, however, have to give people something worth coming back for.

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Good Teaching Is Essential to Group Growth

I make a strong claim at the beginning of the chapter: “The number one variable in predicting the growth of a class is the teaching ability of the teacher.” If the teaching isn’t good, eventually no amount of outreach will compensate for it.

Think about it from the perspective of a newcomer. A friend invites you to a group. You get up early, drive across town, find the room, meet a collection of people you don’t know, sit down, and listen to someone teach for thirty or forty minutes. At the end, you make a decision—consciously or unconsciously—about whether the experience was worth repeating.

Friendliness will influence that decision. Relationships may eventually become an even stronger reason to return. But the lesson matters.

People don’t expect every teacher to be brilliant. They do expect the teacher to say something that helps them.

You Don’t Have to Hit a Home Run Every Week

One of my favorite illustrations in the chapter comes from baseball. You don’t have to hit a home run every time you teach. You do need to hit singles consistently.

That ought to be tremendously encouraging to ordinary group leaders. You don’t have to prepare the greatest Bible lesson anyone has ever heard. You don’t have to leave everyone speechless. Nobody needs to walk out saying, “That was the greatest exposition of Romans 8 in the history of Christianity.”

But they ought to leave with something.

Perhaps they understand a verse they didn’t understand before. Maybe they see something about God they had never noticed. Perhaps they recognize something that needs to change in their marriage. Maybe they discover a practical way to deal with worry, temptation, anger, or discouragement. Perhaps the discussion helps them see how the Bible speaks to something they will face Monday morning.

If people consistently leave thinking, “That helped me,” you are hitting singles. And a lot of singles will win ball games.

Outreach Cannot Compensate for Bad Teaching

Imagine a restaurant with terrific advertising. The owners put up billboards all over town. They send coupons to every home. They have a beautiful building, friendly employees, comfortable seating, and plenty of parking.

There is just one problem.

The food is terrible.

Advertising may persuade you to visit once, but it won’t persuade you to keep eating bad food. In fact, great advertising might make the problem worse because it gets more people to discover how bad the food is.

Something similar can happen with groups. You can have a terrific outreach strategy. You can organize fellowships, encourage everyone to invite friends, contact prospects, and create a warm environment. Those things can bring people into the room. But if nothing helpful happens once they arrive, eventually they stop coming.

As I put it in the book, “In the long run, good advertising will never cover for a bad product. The label is important, but it’s what is in the bottle that counts.”

Outreach gets people there. Good teaching helps give them a reason to return.

Good Teaching Is About More Than Group Growth

There is a much more important reason teaching matters. The goal isn’t merely to keep attendance numbers moving upward. The goal is to make disciples.

Jesus said, “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:32). Paul wrote in Romans 12:2 that we are transformed by the renewing of our minds. Christian transformation involves learning to see God, ourselves, other people, and the world differently.

People come into our groups carrying all kinds of ideas that need to be challenged by Scripture. They have ideas about money, success, marriage, sexuality, forgiveness, happiness, suffering, parenting, work, and relationships. Some of those ideas are biblical. Many aren’t.

Week after week, we open God’s Word and allow biblical truth to reshape the way we think. Eventually, changed thinking begins producing changed living. That is why the book argues that the disciple-making process depends upon good teaching.

A growing group with shallow teaching may create a crowd. A growing group with solid biblical teaching has the opportunity to create disciples.

You Don’t Have to Be Chuck Swindoll

When I tell group leaders how important teaching is, I immediately run into a danger. Some teachers hear this and become discouraged.

They think, “Well, I’m not a great teacher.”

Neither am I.

Most of us aren’t Charles Spurgeon, Chuck Swindoll, or some other unusually gifted communicator. We shouldn’t pretend that everyone has the same level of teaching ability. Some people are extraordinarily gifted. They walk into a room, open the Bible, and people naturally want to listen.

But you don’t have to be extraordinary.

In the book, I try to strike a balance between emphasizing the importance of good teaching and encouraging the teacher of average ability. I want teachers to strive for excellence, but I also want them to understand that they don’t have to be famous communicators to lead effective, growing groups.

You may never hit many home runs.

Learn to hit singles.

Think About Your Favorite Fast-Food Restaurant

I use fast food in the chapter to make this point. Ask people to rate the hamburger from their favorite fast-food restaurant on a scale of one to ten. Most aren’t going to give it a ten. Many won’t even give it an eight.

It might be a four or five.

In other words, it is halfway decent.

Yet fast-food companies have sold billions of those halfway decent hamburgers. Why? The product is good enough, and it is combined with convenience, clean facilities, predictable service, effective advertising, and thousands of accessible locations.

The same principle can encourage group leaders. Your lesson doesn’t have to be the best Bible lesson available anywhere in your city. It does need to be solid, biblical, interesting enough to hold people’s attention, and practical enough to help them live. Then surround that lesson with friendship, fellowship, invitation, prayer, care, and outreach.

Halfway decent teaching combined with extraordinary love can build a pretty remarkable group.

But “Halfway Decent” Still Requires Preparation

There is a danger in the phrase halfway decent. Someone might use it as an excuse for laziness. That isn’t what I mean.

The chapter includes an example of a teacher attempting to teach John 17:12, where Judas is called the “son of perdition.” The teacher somehow turned “perdition” into “predestination” and then launched into a discussion of predestination. There were two problems: the text didn’t say predestination, and the teacher apparently hadn’t prepared well enough to notice.

We can do better than that.

People are giving us something extraordinarily valuable when they attend our groups: their time. We ought to respect that gift enough to prepare. Read the passage several times. Understand what it says. Think about what it means. Ask how it connects with everyday life. Develop some good questions. Find an illustration or story that helps people remember the truth. Pray over the people who will hear it.

You don’t have to be brilliant, but you shouldn’t be careless.

Teach People, Not Lessons

One of the easiest mistakes for a Bible teacher to make is to become more interested in covering the material than helping the people.

We can become obsessed with getting through the outline. We have seven points and forty minutes, and heaven help the person who asks a question during point three. We have material to cover.

But the people in front of us are more important than our outline.

Good teaching asks, “What do these people need?” Where are they hurting? What are they struggling to understand? What questions are they asking? What does this biblical passage say that could help them become more like Christ?

That doesn’t mean we twist Scripture to say whatever we want. Quite the opposite. We study Scripture carefully and then build a bridge between biblical truth and the lives of the people sitting in front of us.

When that happens, people begin to discover that the Bible isn’t merely an ancient book containing interesting information. It speaks to life.

Something Helpful Needs to Happen Every Week

If you want to grow a healthy group, make a simple commitment: every time your group gathers, try to say something helpful.

Not something brilliant. Not something nobody in church history has ever discovered. Not something that will make people stand and applaud.

Something biblical. Something true. Something clear. Something people can take home with them.

You may teach a lesson on forgiveness, and someone decides to make a phone call that afternoon. You may teach about prayer, and someone begins praying regularly for the first time in years. You may teach about marriage, and a husband realizes how carelessly he has been speaking to his wife. You may teach about God’s sovereignty, and someone walking through a frightening season finds courage to trust Him.

That is what good teaching can do.

And when people repeatedly experience that kind of help, something else often happens: they start inviting their friends.

Great Groups Need Good Teaching

Growing groups need outreach. They need friendship and fellowship. They need people who invite others and leaders who care when someone disappears.

But none of those things eliminates the need for good Bible teaching.

As the chapter concludes, solid teaching is central to making disciples. If you can teach better than “halfway decent,” wonderful. Strive for excellence. Keep learning. Study great teachers. Work on your communication skills and never stop trying to improve. But don’t convince yourself that you must become a world-class communicator before God can use you.

Hit a single this week.

Then come back next week and hit another.

Over time, faithfully opening God’s Word and saying something helpful can change people. And changed people invite other people into the experience that is changing them.

The obvious question is: What makes a lesson good? That is where the next chapter of You Can Double Your Class in Two Years or Less takes us. Chapter seven identifies “Ten Marks of Great Teaching,” beginning with one of the most important qualities a Bible teacher can possess: passion.

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