Argentine church sees small group concept change people from the inside out
Primera Iglesia Bautista de Mendoza
Mendoza, Argentina

By Sara Horn

Before the congregation of Primera Iglesia Bautista de Mendoza, a large Baptist church in the northern part of Argentina, got ready to call Fabian Ruiz as their new pastor, they had a decision to make.

The new pastor would leave a church he had helped grow into a “church with purpose” in Campana (Buenos Aires). Ruiz was also a leader of the movement of “Churches with Purpose” in Argentina. So it wasn’t just a decision of accepting and calling a new pastor. By calling this pastor, as he told the church before they chose him, the 80-year-old Mendoza church would be calling for a change in vision – a vision to become purpose driven. It was a vision the church decided to embrace.

When Ruiz accepted the church’s call as pastor in 2003, he came not only with vision but also experience, both good and bad, of what it meant to lead a church to be purpose driven.

“During my ministry in Campana Church, we advanced too quickly in one year for the four levels of discipleship seminars with the whole church,” Ruiz said. Within a year, the church in Campana had gone through the entire four-part series of C.L.A.S.S. training written by Rick Warren, senior pastor of Saddleback Church, and had signed the commitment cards, but according to Ruiz, the members “had not assimilated those commitments. They had not taken it to practice. They weren’t habits or convictions. I learned that to teach the seminars can make you quick but to establish changes of habits in group (settings) takes time.”

So Ruiz took a different approach when he arrived at Mendoza, intentionally taking four years to establish the purposes to ensure that each member was grounded and committed. The key to the church’s success in reaching people has been found in establishing small groups.

“The statistics of the church showed that during the previous 10 years, the church had baptized 500 people, but the church had less members than 10 years before,” Ruiz said. “The problem was that the church was impersonal. The solution was small groups.”

In early 2004, Ruiz began to teach on the concept of small groups and by the middle of the year, the church had approved implementing small groups in 2005. Through a strategic and deliberate series of steps that resulted in the launch of 40 Days of Purpose, the church now has more than 60 small groups with an attendance average of 600 people, 80 percent of the membership according to Ruiz. Before small groups were implemented, average attendance was approximately 200 people a week for Sunday school.

“In our culture, the value of commitment and its meaning is weak,” Ruiz said. “People sign and they commit openly but (it doesn’t stick.) To overcome that, we supplement the seminars of growth – where they make the commitment – with closed groups of growth where they carry out the commitment.”

The church leadership created an intermediate level between small groups and the congregation that they call communities. Small groups are paired with others in the same stage of life the member is in (children, young, young marriages, single) and the small groups that share the same stage of life meet monthly or bi-monthly for community parties. “These meetings generate the necessary space of ownership for each different generational segment of the church and creates growth with the small groups and their leadership,” Ruiz said.

Daniel Grilletti has been a member of the church since 1980 and is excited about how the Purpose Driven concepts have energized the members.

“Purpose Driven transformed our point of view,” Grilletti said. “We changed our way to serve and to live. We understood that Sunday meetings are celebration meetings we offer to the Lord after a whole week of praising and serving him. We didn’t have small groups before the Purpose Driven model. Now, we have 60 healthy small groups. That means 60 group guides, most of them new leaders and new believers, and more than 20 deacons. The harvest is in progress.”

Since the church adopted the vision of being purpose driven less than two years ago, more than 150 people have been baptized and 80 percent of the membership participate in small groups. The church’s goal for 2006 is that the same amount of membership makes a commitment of maturity.

Grilletti said: “We are growing in number and quality. We know perfectly what God expects of us and we are fired up in order to accomplish his expectations.”

All 2006 Church Health Award winner information is correct as of Jan. 1, 2006.