By Joel Comiskey, Home Cell Group Explosion: How Your Small Group Can Grow and Multiply (2023 version)
So, what exactly is a cell church? In everyday terminology, it’s simply a church that has placed evangelistic small groups at the core of its ministry. Cell ministry is not “another program”; it’s the very heart of the church. As Lawrence Khong, pastor of Faith Community Baptist Church in Singapore, says:
There is a vast difference between a church with cells and a cell church. … We don’t do anything else except the cell. All the things the church must do—training, equipping, discipleship, evangelism, prayer, worship—are done through the cell. Our Sunday service is just the corporate celebration(Charisma magazine)
Cells are open, evangelism-focused small groups entwined into the church’s life. They meet weekly to build up each other as members of the Body of Christ and to make disciples who make disciples. The goal of each cell is to multiply new disciples who function as teams in small groups (Matthew 28:18-20). Jesus pioneered his small group, sent his disciples into the homes to evangelize, and prepared them for house-to-house ministry after Pentecost. The early church evangelized the entire Roman world through cell-based ministry.
Small group-based churches define their cells in this way:
Notice that the goal is to make disciples that make disciples.
In February 2010, I had an “aha moment.” I spoke at a cell conference in Dallas, Texas, with Mario Vega, the Elim Church lead pastor in San Salvador. I sat down, and it was Mario’s turn to speak. Mario’s theme was the biblical basis for cell ministry, and during his talk, he said, “Multiplication is the result of the health of the cell.” Mario explained that multiplication is not the goal. Instead, the goal is to make disciples who make new disciples. As those disciples are formed and developed in a caring, loving environment, multiplication results. Knowing that Mario was the lead pastor of one of the fastest-growing churches in the world, I listened intently to what he had to say about cell multiplication.
We should desire to make as many healthy disciples as possible. Still, it’s equally important to understand that multiplying a cell group isn’t the same as making a healthy disciple. As some cell churches have done, it’s possible to reproduce a cell group without even having a leader. These churches have multiplied cell groups by asking one leader to facilitate more than one group. Yet having many groups is not the purpose of cell ministry, and such activity can have harmful side effects, like burnout and discouragement. The mission is to make disciples who make disciples—just like Jesus taught.