How to Divide Your Small Groups

Photo by Jesus Loves Austin on Unsplash

If you’ve been doing small groups in your kids service for any length of time, you may be asking what is the best way to split the kids up? Do we do it by grade? Gender? Favorite candy? Random?

The truth is there is no perfect answer and depending on the size of your ministry and how many kids show up per service the answer will be different.

I’ve studied churches like Northpoint Community Church and Church of the Highlands and asked them what they do. In addition, I've spoken with several Orange Specialists on what are the best practices for small groups.

Here’s what I’ve found.

Group Size

Before we dive into how to split up the groups, the first thing we need to ask is, “How big should the groups be?” There’s a lot of science on this, especially when you dive into optimal class size, but in my experience, less than 3 is too small and more than 12 is too many.

One to two kids aren’t really a group. One kid will dominate the conversation while the other will stay silent. In addition, there’s not enough to do group games and get different opinions and experiences.

On the other end of the spectrum, more than 12 is getting into medium group territory. You’ll have many kids checking out of the conversations and smaller groups will form within the larger group. Also, it becomes extremely difficult for the leader to truly know and care for each student.

With this in mind, 8 to 10 kids is the optimal size. I’ve talked about tracking the small group sizes before, and when the group is regularly having 8 or more kids attend, I start looking for another leader to split the group. If it’s tracking more than 10, it becomes urgent. Group cohesiveness starts to fail, and the leader can begin to lose control.

A quick note about leaders.  

I always tried to have a male lead the older boys and a female lead the older girls. Kids in fourth and fifth grade are starting puberty and are dealing with certain challenges that the other gender may not understand or the kids may not be willing to share.

Even though leading a small group is not my strength, I found myself leading the older boys because I was the only man in the room.

Finding guys who work with kid are rare. Cherish them. Thank them. They’ll bring a lot to your ministry.

No matter how many kids you have, I suggest you split kids by gender, then grade, and finally location.

Here’s what that looks like.

For groups of 20 kids or less

At my last church, the 11am service was way better attended than the 9am service. Many times, I’d have less than 20 kids come to 9am whereas 11am would be in the 40 to 60 range. Because of this discrepancy, I couldn’t have the same small group structure in each service.

For services that have less than twenty kids, I divided by gender first. This is best because an older fifth grader won’t really want to open up about their problems if a cute boy or girl is in the group.

Also, splitting by gender allows their personalities shine through. The boys groups is always more rambunctious and louder than the girls group. Many times, the boys opted to play a game as opposed to doing a craft. Because we had all boy or all girl groups, it allowed the leaders to reach the kids on their level.

Sometimes, even with less than 20 kids, I needed to create three groups and didn’t have enough boys or girls to split up one of their groups.

So, my third group would be mixed-gender but combined grades of K-2. The other two groups were split by gender with third through fifth graders.

Studies have shown that there’s not a lot of difference in a child’s experience in those ages and the social dynamics you get with older kids haven’t kicked in yet.

I rarely had problems with this type of group. The biggest problem I’ve run into is a mature second grader didn’t want to hang out with 5-year-olds. This was rare but did happen. In this event, I’d move them up early to the next group.

Once you get above 20 kids, you’re going to need more than three groups and you really need to start splitting by grade.

For groups of 20 to 120 kids

I imagine most medium to large churches fall into this category. When you get more than 20 kids in a service, you’re going to have to split them more than just by age, but by grade.

Building off the three groups I mentioned in the point above, ideally, I would split that younger group by gender and have 4 groups, K-2 boys and girls, and 3-5 boys and girls. Then as the ministry continued to grow, I would continue to split the groups until I had one group for each gender and grade i.e. third grade boys, fourth grade girls etc.

Unfortunately, we don’t live in an ideal world and the kids that come don't fit into neat little boxes no matter how much I want them to.

At this stage, the overall goal is to have one group for each grade and gender. Each service will look different resulting in different structures, but that’s ok as long as you’re working toward that goal.

This is where tracking your numbers becomes essential. On my dashboard, I would track how many boys and girls attended each grade and watch the average attendance for each service.

In my last church, pre-COVID, we had three services each weekend. Each service had its own demographics and needed it’s own small group structure. The dashboard helped me to know what that structure needed to be.

For instance, my third through fifth grade girl group at 11am was getting way too big. They were regularly averaging 15 or more girls each week. After I finally found some leaders to split the group, I had to figure out how to best split three grades two ways.

The cleanest way would be to split by age, but that would add an unnecessary step for new kids going to group for the first time because we’d have to ask them their age instead of grade like everyone else. In addition, as girls would turn 10, they’d want to move up, resulting in overloading the group again.

So, after looking at the average attendance for the three grades, I determined that pulling out the third grade girls to create their own group would be best.

It wasn’t the perfect solution, but when you’re working with people, there is no perfect solution, and you just go with the best one available.

By the time you have more than 120 kids in a one service, you’re going to have to have more than just one third grade girl group. You’re going to have to get creative.

For groups of 120 kids or more

Full disclosure, I never had a group of more than 120 kids in a Sunday service, so I can’t speak to the reality of this dynamic on a week to week basis.

However, I have had this many at VBS before and focused on splitting by friendships rather than where they live or go to school. VBS is such a microcosm of children’s ministry, I didn’t really have time to see it work all the way out.

For groups of 120 kids or more, you’re going to have too many kids to have a group of boys and girls for each grade. A kid’s worker at Northpoint Community Church (Andy Stanley’s church) told me that they split by region. Instead of just plugging a kid into a group because that’s their grade, they look at where the kid lives and try to put them with other kids that live near them or go to the same school.

There are several ways to do this but looking at your local school district assignments may be your best bet for finding a way to split up your area.

I know many churches will create a new-comers small group for kids of any age and gender. This allows the kids to get acclimated to the culture of your ministry as well as give the leaders time to find the right group to get them plugged into. The new-comers usually stay in this group for two to three weeks.

Having a new-comers group also helps the integrity of your current groups. Instead of constantly having new kids coming in and out of the group, the kids have a chance to really build relationships as they spend time with the same people week to week. It also allows the group leader to build the group culture like the way a teacher will build their classroom culture.

This way when a new student joins the group, they can assimilate them for a week or two and move on as opposed to having to assimilate new kids every week.

Whether you do small groups during your service or have a dedicated Sunday School hour, I would strongly suggest you follow this model. It follows the latest child development psychology and many of the biggest churches in the country follow it.

Whatever you do, remember to keep the main thing the main thing. It’s about Jesus and discipling our kids to follow him. Groups are a great tool for doing that. Thank you for what you do.