Why Your Small Groups Stay Shallow (And It’s Not the Curriculum)

Three Churches, One Question

Recently, I had the privilege of leading a working session for Practicing the Way’s pastor cohort alumni. For this session, three very different churches each submitted a case study, which turned out to be variations of that exact problem. One was a suburban congregation already piloting smaller, more intimate groups. One was an urban church whose groups met faithfully but stayed strangely guarded — polite, a little performed. One was a large church that had built a deep space just for its leaders and wondered what to do for everyone else.

Three settings that couldn’t look more different. Underlying all the case studies was one question: How do we help people become deeply known — really known — without burning out our leaders or breaking what’s already working?

Why the Program Instinct Falls Short

Every one of them first moved toward a program. A better curriculum. A new group format. A new structure. That instinct is so universal we barely notice it as a choice.

It’s also a move that doesn’t work in the long run. You can hear the frustration in the wider church conversation right now — leaders openly admitting their groups cultivate relationships that look serious but aren’t. The study guide gets richer. The relationships stay thin.

One pastor gave a name for what fills that gap: fauxnerability. Performed vulnerability. People do share — but it stays managed, edited, safe. Or the group goes quiet and conflict gets carefully avoided. A program can require disclosure. It cannot manufacture being known.

And then the negative cycle starts to really gain momentum. The harder a well-meaning leader presses for depth — more pointed questions, more “let’s really go there tonight” — the more performance they tend to get, not less. Pressure produces more guardedness, not intimacy.

There’s a second fear underneath all of this, and it’s the one that keeps pastors up at night. If depth really does depend on the leader, then surely the leader has to become some kind of expert — a counselor, a therapist, the emotional engine of the whole group. That road leads straight to the exhaustion they were trying to avoid in the first place.

So the church sits at a fork in the road. You can keep doing what you’ve been doing — better materials, new formats, more pressure to be vulnerable — and keep getting performative depth and depleted leaders. Or you can stop trying to engineer depth through structure in the first place.

Which raises the real question: if a better program can’t produce people who are deeply known, what can?

Depth Comes From a Relational Environment

Here’s the shift I walked each of those churches through. Depth doesn’t come from a deeper program. It comes from a deeper relational environment.

This idea rests on some of the most established findings in relationship science. Decades ago, psychologists Harry Reis and Phillip Shaver proposed what’s called the Interpersonal Process Model of Intimacy, and it has held up across an enormous body of research since.

The finding, in plain terms, is this: intimacy doesn’t come from self-disclosure alone. It stems from self-disclosure that is met with responsiveness — when you reveal something real and the other person responds in a way that leaves you feeling understood, validated, and cared for. Researchers call that perceived partner responsiveness. Reis’s longtime collaborator Shelly Gable extended it further still, showing that responsiveness matters not only in how we respond to someone’s pain, but in how we respond to their good news.

And the stakes go well beyond relationship satisfaction. One national study that followed more than 1,200 adults across two decades found that feeling genuinely responded to is linked to better health — and even to how long people live — largely through its effect on how the body handles everyday stress. These findings also track perfectly with attachment theory. Responsiveness is a key ingredient in secure attachment.

I want to invite you to reflect on what that means for groups or teams you lead. You can program disclosure. You cannot program responsiveness. The first lives in a curriculum; the second only lives in a relational environment safe enough to hold it. This is the missing mechanism in nearly every “how do we get our group to go deeper” conversation. And it’s exactly why fauxnerability happens — disclosure with no responsive, safe place to land has nowhere to go, so it stays performed.

In the language I use, that environment is a secure base: a relationship offering both comfort and challenge, created by a non-anxious, warm presence.

Form the Leaders First

That’s the lever — because here is what we tend to forget. We recreate our own relational world with the people we lead. A leader who has never been deeply known will, without meaning to, build groups where no one is deeply known. So you don’t start with the group. You form the leaders first — and depth flows back into the community through them.

Once you see it this way, a few things change.

First, you can be gentle about fauxnerability. It’s most often a protection pattern, not bad faith. It softens with safety, vulnerability, and modeling — never with pressure. So the leader’s job is to go first, not to press harder.

Second — and this is the part that visibly relieves the pastors I work with — you don’t have to be an expert. You don’t have to be a therapist. You have to be a warm, non-anxious presence who knows when to refer someone for more help if needed (e.g., therapy). That’s a role a volunteer can grow into and sustain.

Four Things to Try This Week

1.    Go first. Before you ask anyone in your group to be known, let yourself be known — in one safe relationship of your own. You cannot give away what you have not received.

2.    Trade pressure for safety. Stop trying to pry the group open. Lower the bar for performance and raise the felt sense of safety. Your own realness quietly sets the ceiling for everyone else. I am reminded of this often when I lead group sessions. I often focus too much on the content and have to remind myself to be present, vulnerable and real. When I do share some of my own story in a way that’s real and vulnerable, I find the connection deepens because people feel safe. This allows and invites them to reflect on their own story.

3.    Respond before you fix. When someone shares, resist the pull to give advice. Practice responsiveness instead — reflect back what you felt and heard, that what they said matters, and that you’re with them. That single move is what turns disclosure into being known.

4.    Right-size the space. Being known needs a small, safe-enough container. Don’t ask a structure to do a job for which it was never built.

What you get on the other side isn’t a slicker program. It’s groups where people are known, leaders who last instead of burning out, and depth that spreads through formed people rather than through pressure.

The Gospel in Miniature

This is what I mean by relational spirituality, and it’s the gospel in miniature: we are loved into loving (1 John 4:19). We can only give away what we have first received. A leader who has been deeply known becomes someone in whose presence other people can finally stop performing — and be known too.

Key Takeaways

•       Depth in a group doesn’t come from a better curriculum or a new format — it comes from a safe, responsive relational environment.

•       Decades of research on the Interpersonal Process Model of Intimacy show that being known requires self-disclosure met with responsiveness — feeling understood, validated, and cared for. You can program disclosure; you can’t program responsiveness.

•       “Fauxnerability” (performed vulnerability) is a protection pattern, not bad faith. It softens with safety and modeling — never with pressure.

•       Leaders recreate their own relational world with those they lead, so form the leaders first. A warm, non-anxious presence matters more than expertise.

Ready to Go Deeper?

The Attachment Filter Matrix — a free one-page guide to the four patterns (secure, anxious, avoidant, fearful) and how each one shapes the way a person leads, connects, and responds under stress:

relationalspirituality.co/resources/attachment-filter-matrix

The RS Coaching Readiness Quiz — about three minutes, with a personalized next step for how your attachment patterns shape the way you lead a group:

quiz.relationalspirituality.co

References

Reis, H. T., & Shaver, P. (1988). Intimacy as an interpersonal process. In S. Duck (Ed.), Handbook of Personal Relationships (pp. 367–389). Wiley.

Gable, S. L., Reis, H. T., Impett, E. A., & Asher, E. R. (2004). What do you do when things go right? The intrapersonal and interpersonal benefits of sharing positive events. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 87(2), 228–245.

Stanton, S. C. E., Selcuk, E., Farrell, A. K., Slatcher, R. B., & Ong, A. D. (2019). Perceived partner responsiveness, daily negative affect reactivity, and all-cause mortality: A 20-year longitudinal study. Psychosomatic Medicine, 81(1), 7–15. https://doi.org/10.1097/PSY.0000000000000618

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