PODCAST | Transforming Your Groups Ministry (feat.Robby Angle)

Resources:

Get your copy of The Cure For Groups, https://www.trueface.org/the-cure-for-groups

For more resources, visit https://www.trueface.org

Follow Robby on Social Platforms:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/truefacelife/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robby-angle-a55b1433/

Christa Neidig:
Welcome to the Vanderbloemen Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Christa Neidig, manager of Marketing and Business Development here at Vanderbloemen. In today's podcast, I get to talk with Robby Angle, president and CEO of Trueface. Prior to serving Trueface, Robbie served for seven years as the Director of Adult Ministry and men's groups for North Point Community Church, which was founded by Andy Stanley in Atlanta, Georgia. In this conversation, Robby shares about his new book, The Cure for Groups. He shares five of the core components consistently applied by great small group leaders that can lead to transformational groups. We hope you enjoy this conversation.
Hey everybody, thanks so much for joining us today. I'm so excited to introduce you all to Robby Angle, who I get to talk to. We're going to talk about discipleship, we're going to talk about small groups and all kinds of things. Thanks for joining us, Robby.

Robby Angle:
Thanks, Christa. Fun to be here.

Christa Neidig:
Yeah. Robby, why don't you just tell people, I mean, I know your background, but I want all the listeners who may not have heard of you yet to hear about Trueface and all of the work you're doing there, the history, because you are the president of Trueface.

Robby Angle:
I am. It's a 28-year-old ministry, message-based ministry that teaches grace and identity and the power of what Jesus has made possible for us in community with others. And so they wrote a book called The Cure: What if God is In Who You Think He Is and Neither Are You, which is the signature teaching of the ministry that changed my life. I infused it into all the groups we did at North Point. And so I was buying boxes of books. I eventually got to know the guys because I was buying boxes of books and I was a fan of John Lynch, Bill Thrall, Bruce McNicol, and they asked me to take over about three and a half years ago. And the essence of the ministry is that Christians, we get stuck. We come to the end of where religion brings us. We read about peace and freedom, but we know it in our heads more than our experience. And so we helped build a toolbox of relational discipleship tools to help equip churches and individuals to experience deeper relationships with God and others, which has been a lot of fun for the past few years.

Christa Neidig:
That's amazing. And then you mentioned briefly but kind of highlight on your experience before Trueface, you were at North Point Andy Stanley's church and you were working with small groups, correct?

Robby Angle:
Yeah. I had a cool opportunity to kind of start the men's initiative there because NorthPoint is deeply passionate about small groups, but a lot of our groups we assumed was for couples groups and then men and women's groups where being treated similarly. I went on a rant about that to somebody and they said, "Hey, you can take all the men's groups." And so we had kind of this R&D part of NorthPoint which was pretty unique at NorthPoint for those of you new to NorthPoint, but we had this little crop of ground that nothing had been built on. So I had a really fun few years of re-imagining small groups, re-imagining spiritual formation, discipleship that leverages small groups as just a vehicle to help people to connect relationally, to grow spiritually. And then later took some of those learnings to oversee the adult ministries at the main campus in Alpharetta, which was a lot of fun. So I love small groups and the church and could talk about that all day with you, Christa.

Christa Neidig:
No, that's great and we're definitely going to get into that. But all of this kind of with Trueface and at NorthPoint has kind of led to your new book, which we want to hear about, The Cure for Groups. Why don't you let listeners know more about your book?

Robby Angle:
Yeah, well, when I was leaving NorthPoint, we had about 800 small group leaders and a lot of our churches rightly create pockets of smaller gathering of believers. And we call them small groups, cell groups, life groups, home, church, whatever. We gather together in order to be more known and more loved because it's a more conducive environment just like Jesus modeled with his 12 to do life together as a body of Christ. So most of our churches, if we're over a couple hundred adults, we have some type of Sunday school small group life group model that we would point to as a key component to our spiritual formation, our discipleship processes, and this is the Capital C Church in the West. A lot of us have these small group type things. Now, if the small group, life group, cell group, a smaller group that gathers with intentionality and consistency for the sake of spiritual growth is a key part of our discipleship, which is the point of the church to help Jesus followers mature and follow this way of following Jesus as this, as Jesus followers, then it's a really big question, well, how is that going?
And if a lot of our churches have these small groups, that's a major component to the effectiveness of the Capital C Church and spiritual formation that's happening or not happening. And I think a lot of us have experienced small groups that are lame and terrible, which is a major issue if this is a key component to the Capital C Church's discipleship initiatives and spiritual formation initiatives. And so I had 800 small group leaders that I got to reverse engineer and study. Do we actually know what differentiates A leader who's amazing from B leader who's terrible? What are those dynamics? What are we actually doing that results in more effective leader that's correlated to a more effective group when it comes to spiritual formation and transformation? And so there were principles after looking at 800 small group leaders that differentiated the ones that led to transformational groups.
But there was nothing, I couldn't find a resource to give to my 800 leaders to help move the needle in how effectively they created and facilitated an environment that was more conducive for transformation. And so I was given the Trueface guys a hard time about, they taught about community and grace so well. I said, "You need to write a book for my small group leaders." And then they said, "Hey, how about you come do that?" And so I had to put my money where my mouth is. And when I went to Trueface, we wrote a book for a small group leader, for a group's pastor, a lead pastor to go, "Hey, read this. It's easy, it's accessible, and it captures the principles that differentiate a great leader from a lame leader in order to help equip you in this amazing opportunity to facilitate a group for the sake of spiritual growth."

Christa Neidig:
That's incredible. That sounds like such a helpful resource. When I was looking into it, and I think someone suggested the book and I was looking into it and reached out to your people for this conversation, and it was one of those things where I was looking at, I was like, "This is such a great thing for someone who is a small group's pastor or leader to gift to all of their small groups' leaders." Because I think everybody can learn and a lot of times the leaders, sometimes it's their first time, a lot of them don't have ministry backgrounds and it's a great space for that, but there's a ton of room for growth.

Robby Angle:
It is an art, and I'm a licensed professional counselor. I spent two years to get a master's in the art of facilitating an environment that's conducive for change, which is group therapy. And so you have classes on group therapy and the art of understanding what is effective or not in a group environment for change. And then as the church, we say, "Okay, spiritual formation, discipleship, that'll happen in small groups. Hey, you have a heartbeat and love Jesus, you're going to lead. Awesome, here you go. Here's a 30-minute PowerPoint on how to have a hard conversations and a couple ideas are linked to right now media. Go for it." And then we, Sunday's coming, so we're all busy and we assume that spiritual growth and discipleship's happening in the small groups and to pop the engine and actually look at whether or not that's happening is way too difficult, takes way too much time, it's too messy and Sunday's coming. And so there's a reason why this is difficult and a reason why it's so important.

Christa Neidig:
Well, I'm curious, obviously, I don't want you to have to give away too much of the book, but what are some of those principles that you found or some of those big things?

Robby Angle:
Yeah, and another way to think about this just for anybody listening who has a connection to small groups is a way to think about how well you're doing at your leaders is you've got to answer a couple questions. What's my leader development pipeline for the quality and quantity of leaders? And then how do I support and equip those leaders with tools, trainings, best practices? This is the easier work we're talking about in regards to equipping and supporting a healthy leader. And these are the principles that differentiate a healthy leader and facilitate more effectively. We can talk next, come back to it about the pipeline because that's the heavy lifting, but this is the easier. So we'll start there out of, if you lined up a hundred leaders and said, which ones would you recommend your brother, your sister, your little brother to join in regards to their desire to grow spiritually?
You might think a 20 out of your a hundred small group leaders. And what are the components of those 20? That's kind of the framework of reverse engineering. And we saw five patterns in the 20 out of a hundred that were amazing and we built it around a sailing metaphor. So it'll be easier for you to remember. But the first one is whether a group and whether a facilitator, a leader helps determine the destination. So the first one is determining the destination, determine the goals for your group. And there's really practical guidelines on how to facilitate a conversation where people get to weigh in order to buy in, to verbalize their expectations and determine why you're going to commit 60, 90 minutes a week for the next year or two. That's a big assumption and all of us gauge opportunity costs, but we just as expect people to commit to that without clarifying why their meeting and what their expectations are for the goals.
The second component is the captain. So think sailing metaphor, the captain is what everybody in a group gets to do to impact the rest of the group. And that's how you lead with intentionality and vulnerability. That's more to the core of a leader. The third component is the crew. Have you clarified your group culture? Every group, every leadership team, Christa, you at Vanderbloemen, you've got a set of spoken and unspoken rules that dictate the teams you're a part of. That's the culture that of spoken and unspoken rules. So this process allows the great leaders. The great leaders are the ones that do a process to verbalize the spoken and unspoken rules, the goals, the hopes, as well as the guardrails of, "Hey, we're not going to fix each other in this group. We're going to try not to preach at each other."
That is a expectation. That's part of clarifying your group culture. The fourth is the ship. So you got the destination, the captain, the crew, what's the culture of the crew on the ship? And then what's the structure of the ship? How have you designed your 60 or 90 minutes? Are you designed to get to where you actually want to go? And that's leveraging the time together with intentionality. And the fifth is planning out the route. It drives me crazy in small groups, so it's like, "Hey, we're getting together, prioritizing this and hoping to grow spiritually. What do you want to do next week?" It's like, "No, no, no, no. If your leadership team at work didn't plan out a route of how to incorporate different milestones to get to where you want to go, you would be missing it."
And so planning ahead to get to where you want to go is planning four to six months at a time as a group and so you know where you want to go. And then you have readjustment points. Again, these are five principles that we saw the amazing leaders doing naturally that we tried to codify and put into a conversational tool that will equip all of us as small group leaders to evaluate and implement some of these principles into the groups we're facilitating.

Christa Neidig:
I love this. I like how these are tangible things. It isn't just these leaders are better than you and you can never be that person. No, they set goals and you can set goals too. They communicated about the culture. You can communicate with your people too. Things like that feel very tangible. It's a lot less intimidating. I feel like when you're comparing yourself to these top leaders and you're like, "Well, I've never done this before."

Robby Angle:
It's pretty surprising. The people you would think were amazing if they don't implement facilitation, best practices like this, they could have terrible groups with miscommunications, a lack of direction. They would be healthy leaders but not understand these principles. So these principles, any of us can apply in our small groups and as well as in our families, in our leadership teams at work, I use these framework of these five principles with my leadership team here at Trueface and say, "Hey, are we clear?" And we check on these and they transfer.

Christa Neidig:
That's great. I like what you were talking about, the culture had me thinking of our leadership team here. Something William always says is our culture is the values when we're operating at our best. And so those things that really happen and we have kind of some written values and we have them each on our desk. We have a little block with our little core values at Vanderbloemen and we hire around these things like that. But what we do every once in a while is a family meeting. We're like, "How are we doing on this? How are we handling culture?" Those kinds of things to check in. And it's so helpful. It makes such a difference.

Robby Angle:
That is a big deal and you can't check in unless you have clarity of what you're checking in on. And are those things aligned to get to where you want to go? And the ship piece, the structure of your time together, we've all been in leadership teams at work that are just like, "Okay, just kind of floating around." It's an incredibly dishonoring and a waste of all of our time compared to having a framework of leveraging and honoring each other in a meeting to maximize that time in order to help you get to where you want to go.
That ship piece as well. A lot we use entrepreneurial operating system or system and soul. It's a framework for small businesses and ministries and that shaped a lot of this. System and Soul is a operating system for small businesses that I think churches and nonprofits could learn a ton from. Entrepreneur Operating System pinnacle, there's different small business frameworks that add some of these components of helping determine destination, the ship, the culture. There's some best practices in the business world that we can learn from in churches to be more effective in how we steward our time in the right ways with the right efficiencies.

Christa Neidig:
When your team isn't whole, it disrupts your mission. We have staffed over 2,500 missions of faith. Build your best team through our customized executive search. Go to Vanderbloemen.com/get-started to talk with our team today.
That's great. I love that. William always says it's kind of become a tagline because he says it so much and it just kind of became one of those things that stuck of our job is to help the church go further and faster. And it's like things like this where it's like, "What can we learn that's going to help and how can we contribute to that?" So I think that's great.

Robby Angle:
I love that.

Christa Neidig:
I want to talk a little bit and shift onto, because we've talked about the book a little bit and the benefits of small group, but I want to talk about, I think the huge trend we're seeing right now, and especially as younger generations are getting into this, but the idea of relational discipleship and just the importance of that. I know this is something huge on your heart we were talking about earlier and I want to dive into that.

Robby Angle:
Yeah. If there's one thing I'm going to give my life to, it's this. There's a principle that more time with fewer people equals greater kingdom impact that a mentor of mine organized his life around. And I have adopted that and I use that as a bearing, a destination piece in my own life to evaluate does my calendar actually reflect this? And we have ministries and responsibilities, but more time with fewer people equals greater kingdom impact. Jesus modeled this way of life with his 12 and the master plan of evangelism is, "Hey, go do likewise." But one of my greatest passions is [inaudible 00:17:02] is how the church has struggled to implement this relational discipleship way. And to put a point to this, if we lined up a hundred men and women who got grace, loved Jesus and wanted to fulfill the great commission of going and making disciples and pour their cup into others from a hundred different churches, and we lined them up and said, "Hey, how's your disciple making going the past 12 months?"
It would be terrible because we don't know what to do and who to do it with. And the discipleship resources given to us the past couple decades are like, "Check this box, read this, fill in the blank." And that's like sin management, behavior modification stuff, which is very different than Jesus's stuff. And so really the core of leader development is rooted in our theology and our identity, how we see God and how we see ourselves. And this is matured in the context of relationships. So when I was at NorthPoint, I was like, "Where are the best practices of the art of relational discipleship that really develops the core of a leader?" Because I needed more and better leaders to lead our small groups. And so if the leader is the key to a small group, I had a problem. I looked around and said, "We don't have enough great leaders."
That's the number one problem that would change a culture of groups leading the transformation and therefore discipleship in the church. So I build an advisory team of eight of the wisest people I could find. And we spent three months developing a framework and we said, "We're not going to do anything other than deeply invest in seven or eight guys, seven or eight girls, three to four couples over the next nine months." And around the core in a group relational framework that makes it easier for us to pour our cup into others. And at the end of that nine months, we had 64 people come out and spouses were saying, "What happened to my spouse?" Transformation was happening because we just shared ideas as a group of 10 people leading groups of six to eight people, we were sharing what works doesn't work in this journey.
And so I spent five years studying 500 surveys, seeing it happen in a dozen churches. And so over the past couple years, that's where the real focus of Trueface has been. We've been building a framework, a relational, a group relational discipleship framework to make it easier for churches to develop a leader development pipeline. And so it's once a month for three hours over nine months. There's some books in there, some homework stuff, but it's a free resources. Churches can white label. We don't care if people fall in love with, as long as people are fall in love with Jesus, you can call it First Baptist Leader Development Pipeline. We'll give you everything because the power of just a framework to make it easier for those of us who want to pour our cup into others to develop the next generation of leaders has been the game changer.
And at NorthPoint, within a year, it started in the men's groups, within a year we had a problem which was too many leaders and not enough people to fill their groups. And they were the best trained leaders because they had sat for nine months at the feet of the elders, some of the incredible men of our church. And so I got Andy Stanley to lead one of these groups. And so they were seven or eight guys that sat with Andy Stanley for nine months as he opened his life in his heart to them and wrestled with how they saw God and saw themselves.
So this framework just made it easier and it developed a pipeline of leaders that changed the culture of our groups. And that's the hard part, how to develop a pipeline of quality of leaders. It's easier to support those leaders, a healthy leader who sees God in themselves correctly with things like The Cure for Groups. But the Trueface journey is this tool that anybody, it's free, it's accessible, we're a donor driven ministry to equip the local church with tools in the mission God's put you on to do. And so we hope this tool helps you and anybody can reach out and find more about that. And you can call it whatever you want, take it all. We're here to serve you.

Christa Neidig:
That's so great. I love that. And just for all of the listeners, I usually mention this at the end of the podcast, but we will make sure to link all of those resources onto the show notes. So if you have any problem finding it at all, just let us know, but we'll have it on the website so that people can easily access that because I know it's a great resource and will be so beneficial.

Robby Angle:
Yeah. At trueface.org, this nine month leader development pipeline is called the Trueface Journey. And that is meant for churches to develop the quality and quantity of small group leaders in your church because we believe that is the foundational component of where the formation, the discipleship will happen because Jesus modeled it and he built us to grow through the context of relationships. And so gathering with intentionality and consistency in smaller groups from three to 12 for the sake of being known and loved and practicing love at a deeper level. I think all of us listening, that's harder the more we're in leadership, and that's harder if we're leading stuff because leadership is lonely and isolating. But my prayer for anybody listening would be for us personally before we go, "Hey, Trueface journey, Cure for Groups, I'll grab this stuff and implement it in the leaders in my church."
It's like, "Nah, nah, nah, let's do all this stuff in our own lives." How is our current community? Who do we have people we're pouring our cup into? Men and women and couples a season behind us that we're pouring our cup into. Am I in community where I'm fully known and fully loved with intentionality and consistency? Because if we're not modeling that we know how dicey and risky it is for us as ministry leaders to get taken out. And I think the evil one's not original. He's consistent, but the evil one is like, "I'm going to wear them out. I'm going to isolate him and I'm going to take him out that way." So his tricks are pretty consistent in how we can be intentional and prioritize relationships with each other is a heart that I have for anybody listening starting with me because I'm not going to replicate a culture of relational discipleship if I'm not doing it myself.

Christa Neidig:
Robby, thank you so much for just sharing about all of this. It's such great resources. Where can people get their hands on a copy of the book?

Robby Angle:
Amazon, Trueface.org. We got a lot of small group studies on right now media under Robby Angle or Trueface or you could check in the podcast, the Trueface podcast. We talk a lot about this stuff of how to follow Jesus.

Christa Neidig:
Wonderful. Thank you again so much, Robby.

Robby Angle:
Thanks, Christa.

Christa Neidig:
Thanks for listening to the Vanderbloemen Leadership Podcast. At Vanderbloemen, we help Christian organizations build their best teams through hiring, succession compensation and diversity consulting services. Visit our websites Vanderbloemen.com to learn more and subscribe to our Vanderbloemen Leadership Podcast wherever you listen to podcasts. Keep up with our newest episodes. Thanks for listening.