Selecting and Training Covenant Group Leaders

Part of Leadership Training by Congregational Role

By Michael J. Tino

Selecting Leaders

Five people sitting in chairs in a circle, talking

Covenant groups should not begin without leaders. In selecting leaders for your groups, it is good to invite people to leadership who have the skills and gifts to be good facilitators. What does this mean?

In a covenant group, the leader’s role is to guide the formation of a covenant and to help keep people to that covenant. While the role of meeting facilitator may rotate, the leader needs to be able to direct a group conversation without taking it over. It’s a tricky balance that not everyone can manage.

When I selected covenant group leaders, I started with people who had demonstrated leadership ability already. In my congregation, I began with the past presidents of the congregation (a large group of people going back throughout the history of the Fellowship). Each past president was invited to use the knowledge and skills they had gained being a leader of the congregation to serve the spiritual needs of the members. The letter I sent them read,
in part:

In being asked to serve as president of our congregation, you were recognized as someone with important leadership skills in our community. Because of those skills, you were given enormous responsibilities—for helping to manage the business of our congregation, for articulating a vision for our community, and, often times, for pushing the congregation to make difficult decisions that shaped its future. I’m writing to you today because those same skills are needed to help us live out today’s vision of our Fellowship as a vital center for spiritual growth and development.

Where to Look for Leaders

The past leadership of any group or congregation is a good place to start looking for these leaders, but it is
not the only place to look. Search for people you’d like to invite into larger roles in your group. Look for caring people with good listening skills. Look for tactful people who don’t dominate discussions. Being a covenant group leader is a wonderful opportunity for someone to learn leadership skills that will serve them well in future roles in your ministry. Above all, be honest about the responsibility they’re committing themselves to, and the amount of time that will take. We estimated that leading a covenant group would take 2-3 hours per week given the out-of-group responsibilities of the leaders. The list we gave the people considering answering our call to group leadership consisted of the following, some of which may be rotated to group members who volunteer to facilitate meetings:

Covenant Group Leader Responsibilities

  • Set first meeting date/time/place
  • Find an apprentice leader
  • Call people who miss a group meeting (make sure everything is OK)
  • Refer anyone in need of special help to minister(s)—they will inform Caring Committee if necessary
  • Organize the group’s response to aid members in need (cards, visits, food, etc.)
  • Make sure each group does one service project each year
  • Attend monthly group leader meetings

In Group Meetings

  • Work with the group to establish group norms and policies/procedures (i.e. the group covenant)
  • Keep discussion moving and on-topic: do not let one person dominate discussion
  • Allow everyone to speak once before someone responds
  • Choose opening and closing words

Training Your Leaders

Leader training can be done as a large group in a few hours of time—we ran our training as a sample covenant group, with check-in and reflection on group leader issues. Important parts of it include a reflection on what it means to be a facilitator, training on how to refer group members in need of pastoral care, and a discussion of how to perpetuate the leadership of a group.

In our model, one of the responsibilities of each leader was to identify and train an apprentice leader in their group. This person served as a back up (in case the leader could not attend the group meeting), and was chosen as someone who could one day lead a group himself or herself. In this way, leadership was perpetuated without the same group of people always having to do it. Following a rotating covenant group model, in each round of covenant groups, the available leadership doubles (and that doesn’t count new people you recruit from outside of the groups).

Pastoral Care: Referrals and Follow-up

Covenant groups are not group therapy sessions, but sometimes someone tries to use them as such. “High-need” people will sometimes gravitate towards these groups for the validation they need in their lives. Group leaders are responsible for balancing the needs of the group with the needs of each individual. No person should be allowed to monopolize the check-in or reflection time, and a reasonable effort should be made to keep the discussion on-topic.

Given this, sometimes things happen in our lives that we need support to deal with. Over the course of several months, any covenant group will have members who are in need of pastoral care. It is wonderful when a group can support and care for one of its members having a difficult time—I’ve seen groups bring food to the homes of sick group members, and provide each other transportation to appointments and such.

Sometimes, great need manifests itself in withdrawal from a group. Thus, group leaders must be prepared to contact everyone who does not show up for a group meeting. Sometimes, an absence is easily explained; at other times, an absence is a signal for help.

Group leaders must also feel comfortable discerning whether someone’s needs are too great for the group to handle. If that is the case, it is appropriate for the leader to share information with the minister (or, if there is not one, a mutually agreed-upon professional therapist or counselor).

Thus, it is necessary to do some training around pastoral care, follow-up and referrals. In some cases, covenant group leaders will develop a covenant for themselves about these issues.

Leaders’ Groups

It is important that your covenant group leaders not be asked to do their jobs in a vacuum. Even if there are only a few groups, start having the leaders of those groups meet on a regular basis (I suggest monthly) with the covenant group coordinator and, if possible, your congregation’s minister.

Leader group meetings are often run just like covenant group meetings, the only exception being that the reflection question or focus reading is always about how the groups are going. Sometimes, topics will emerge from check-in about such topics as group facilitation, dealing with difficult people or finding appropriate readings. The leaders’ leader can use her or his discretion on whether those are appropriate topics for the entire group to consider.

Leader groups also allow you to care for your leaders. People who take on important positions in our congregations need care themselves, and it is appropriate for us to provide this care through a covenant group setting.

In an ideal covenant group program, the leaders group leaders would eventually need their own group. When I helped begin a covenant group program, we had 15 group leaders; we split those folks into two monthly meetings—I
facilitated one and the minister facilitated the other. The minister and I met regularly as the leaders’ leaders to check in on how things were going. A program like this can go on indefinitely, with each group leader being responsible for no more than 10-12 people.