Don't just launch groups.
Multiply them.
Your church has a ceiling — and it isn’t your preaching, your building, or your budget. It’s the number of leaders you’ve developed. Sixteen lessons on building, leading, and multiplying small groups: the complete play Jon-Michael Sherman runs with pastors to break that ceiling.
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Growth isn't a preaching problem.
It's a leadership problem.
Leaders in every healthy group.
A leader and a co-leader. Five groups isn't five leaders — it's ten. Count leaders, not groups: that's your real inventory, and the only number worth building a strategy around.
The semester leader-growth target.
Half your groups doubling in each strong semester is what outpaces the ~20% annual leader churn. Below that you tread water — which is why most churches run groups for years and never grow through them.
People in groups after five years of the play.
Start with 5 groups — 50 people — and run the doubling game for five years: 94 groups, 189 leaders, 945 people in groups. Not because you chased attendance. Because you multiplied leaders.
Stop launching. Start multiplying.
Where most churches are
- ×You did the big push. Six months later: a handful of groups limping along, and a nagging sense it never really worked.
- ×Every crisis, every hospital visit, every hard conversation still lands on you — no structure underneath to catch it.
- ×Every semester feels like scraping for leaders. You're recruiting warm bodies and hoping.
- ×Growth has plateaued — and you can't preach your way out, because the bottleneck isn't the pulpit.
- ×Your people get two hours a month with you — and thirty hours a month with YouTube.
Where this course takes you
- ✓A biblical conviction for groups you can preach from the stage with confidence.
- ✓A model chosen on purpose — free market, discipleship, missional, or hybrid — instead of drifting between philosophies.
- ✓A three-tier operating system that scales span of care from 5 groups to 500.
- ✓A leadership pipeline with a real standard, a vetting rhythm, and four leader types you can actually deploy.
- ✓A locked semester calendar and a five-year multiplication roadmap with honest math.
You can't preach your way
through this ceiling.
Your church has a ceiling.
It isn't your preaching, your building, your budget, or your worship. It's the number of leaders you've developed. Almost nobody teaches pastors how to solve that systematically — this course exists to break the ceiling.
Count leaders, not groups.
Every group has two leaders — so five groups is ten leaders, and that's your real inventory. Leaders → groups → people → growth. The chain only runs in that direction, never the other way around.
Churn is why groups “didn't work.”
Most churches never multiply beyond their ~20% annual leader churn. If half your groups double but you're bleeding leaders just as fast, you tread water for a decade — and conclude groups are a failed experiment. They aren't. You just never cleared the churn line.
Someone else is discipling your people.
Two hours a month with you. Thirty hours a month on YouTube. Discipleship is happening all week, on every platform, whether you're the one doing it or not — the only question is whether you build a deliberate strategy for it.
16 lessons. Four moves.
Conviction → model → execution → vision. By the end you're not inspired — you're running a play: a model you chose on purpose, an operating system, a leader pipeline, and a five-year multiplication roadmap.
The Ceiling You Can't Preach Your Way Through
Why groups haven't worked before — and the reframe that changes everything: count leaders, not groups.
3 minWhy Your Church Can't Grow Without Groups
The megaphone and the microscope — the biblical case, the four pillars, and the doubling math.
9 minThe Story of Discipleship
Catechism to Wesley to the cell church to digital — 2,000 years of the same two lanes.
21 minWhy Groups Fail and Why Groups Succeed
Leadership, leadership, leadership — the failure patterns and their exact inverse.
15 minThe Four Lanes
Free market, discipleship, missional, hybrid — and how to pick yours on purpose.
9 minThe Group Type Toolbox
A vast catalog, the Foundational Ten to launch first, and the six-week ask that recruits leaders for you.
15 minDigital Discipleship
The four content buckets, your core catechism, and the 30 hours a week you're currently losing.
15 minYour Group Operating System
The three-tier structure, your calendar by season, and the one KPI that tells you the truth.
8 minElite Leaders
High expectations: grow toward 20, raise up two, lead two of three semesters.
12 minThe Leadership Pipeline
Self-selection, vetting, the three buckets — and the four leader types, including the Super Multiplier.
14 minThe Power of One-on-Ones
The guardrails, the questions, the math — and how it turns every leader into a talent scout.
5 minThe Semester System
The flywheel — identify, train, market, run, celebrate — plus your six core annual events.
4 minTraining Your Leaders
The ten core skills every leader must be taught, and the five-block meeting blueprint.
9 minTroubleshooting Stalled Groups
When a group struggles, don't panic — run the eleven-point diagnostic checklist.
6 minStop launching.
Start multiplying.
Sixteen lessons. Zero filler. The complete system behind churches that multiply leaders — and let the growth take care of itself.
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“PastorCenter is building the operating system for modern ministry.”
Josh Howerton · Lead Pastor, Lakepointe Church
Start counting leaders.”— Jon-Michael Sherman
Jon-Michael Sherman
Jon-Michael Sherman is a former ARC & CMN church planter, lead pastor, executive pastor, and church-builder who has spent the last decade helping pastors break through every kind of growth ceiling — from launch teams to multi-site campuses.
He's the author of Elite Preaching and Pastoral Intelligence, and the founder of PastorCenter.com and SpiritualGiftsPlus. Elite Groups is the leadership-multiplication play behind a college ministry that grew from 100 to more than 600 through groups — and the system Engage, Pastor Center's church engagement platform, was built to run.
A running groups system — not another inspiring video.
Not someday. By the end of Lesson 15.
You'll also see the tool that runs this whole system for you.
Engage connects to Planning Center and becomes the command center for the play — your leaders, your groups, your semesters, your emerging-leader pipeline, and your multiplication progress, tracked over time. The course teaches the system — Engage runs it.
The church that multiplies leaders
is the church that grows.
Sign up once. Watch forever. Take real inventory, pick your model, and commit to the five-year play — starting with the intro in the next 30 seconds.
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