Small Group Communication and the Asset Mapping Methodology: Enhancing Participation in the Small Christian Communities in Nigeria

This article which references the importance of communication in small groups with regard to good use of members‟ talents for the sustenance of the group is drawn from my doctoral dissertation presented at the Pontifical Gregorian University, Rome, 2008.

2.1.6 A People of Faith that Announces the Word to the World: The mission of the Church is that of evangelization; "She exits in order to evangelize" (EN,no. 14). Through the mutual love and concern members show to one another in the SCCs, the communities not only proclaim the Word to the world but they also offer practical examples on how to build a more caring society and therefore become models for others.
These characteristics show participation to be inherent in the ideal SCCs, whether through sharing the Word of God or the practical application of that sharing to the life of members.
In the sharing, the experience of a member articulates and clarifies that of the other and there develops a resonance between each member and the group at large. The same is true of the practical activities such as visiting the sick, care for the poor, self-help projects etc. Through joint participation in these activities people feel the presence of Christ in their daily situation and their participation is enhanced. To what extent has this been the case in the Nigerian SCCs and what is their present situation?

The Nigerian Experience of the SCCs
An excursion into the emergence and present situation of the SCCs in Nigeria can not be separated from the global and continental experiences of the communities. O"Halloran traces the origin of the base communities in modern times to Latin America (1984:9). Here, the communities emerged out of a need to merge the socio-cultural and political realities with the religious experience of Catholics. One of the factors responsible for the formation in Latin America of the communities known as the CEB 1 was the struggle against the capitalist system that was perpetrated through the colonial masters (Ribeiro, 1980:74). It was an attempt to merge people"s faith and life situation.
In Africa, the effort at establishing the communities started in the 1970s when the bishops of AMECEA resolved to make the systematic formation of small Christian communities their key pastoral priority in the years ahead (Kalilombe, 1976:261). For them, the African Church must become really local. That is, self-ministering, self-propagating and self-supporting (AMECEA, 1974:9-10). In their view, the SCCs are, A small group of the people of Godsmall enough to be manageable in life and work … it is in this community that Christian commitment is fully lived, deepened and becomes the leaven and light of its members. It is in this small group that the Church of Christ is as it were, given a "human face" in its fellowship, service and witness; for here authentic Christian life and work emerge. Thus every member of the people of God assumes his or her mission in the Church (AMECEA, 1979:288).
For these bishops, the formation of the SCCs in Africa must follow the African culture of care for every member of the community. They hold that, SCCs are means by which the Church is brought to the daily life and concerns of people to where they actually live. In them, the Church takes on flesh and blood in the life situations of people. In them, people are enabled to recognize the mystery of Christ among them, "Emmanuel", God with us. In them, Christians experience joy and freedom of the forgiveness of their sins, in baptism and penance, and they are "made alive" in Jesus Christ, in an environment of fraternal love and personal faith. In them, they can truly experience the Church as a new way of being together and it is in them that they are saved in hope (Ibid, 266).

Formation of the SCCs in Nigeria: Fulfilling a Pastoral Need
Drawing from the experiences on the universal and continental levels of the SCCs, dioceses In his research on the SCCs in Kaduna archdiocese 4 of Nigeria, Eje holds that the reason for their formation is pastoral (Eje, 1989:138-139). In Warri diocese the formation of the SCCs was in 1988 as a way to forestall the mass exodus of Catholics to the New Age denominations (Ikpiki, 2005:55 (Faleye, 1985:13 The formation of the communities is as a result of the need for small groups where people can get to know each other on a more personal basis and where their pastoral needs could be readily met. Thus, the communities have been effective in assisting the Catholic population to overcome the effects of anonymity in many of the big cities in Nigeria and they have aided the pastoral needs of such people. Nevertheless, there are certain challenges which hinder active participation in these communities in Nigeria.

Challenges facing the SCCs in Nigeria
In his research on the SCCs in Warri diocese, Ikpiki argues that most of the communities have not been effective on their mission based among other factors on the lack of effective communication skills in the way the facilitators coordinate the meetings (Ikpiki, 2005:73).
Thus, present situation of the communities in many dioceses in Nigeria shows a rapid decline in membership and an extinction of many of the communities. What obtains in many communities is leadership which employs the one-way, top-down model of communication (McQuail & Windahl, 1981:43;Melkote & Steeves, 2001:108). Here, the leader knows it all and members" capabilities are neither recognized nor employed for the group. With this situation, the group becomes the property of the leaders as members feel alienated.
Leadership and their inability to harness the talents and assets within their communities is a major bane to the African continent in general and Nigeria in particular. Here, leaders insist on being obeyed without question on the understanding that they alone know what is best for the others (Kalilombe, 2002:11;Kiriswa, 2001:101 Commenting on the problem of low participation in the SCCs in Lagos archdiocese, Cardinal Okogie says, "when the SCC functions properly, the communities are good to their parishes and thus to the archdiocese but we are still a long way from the goal… participation in the BCC in the archdiocese is a sorry tale because it depends on very few individuals". 7 Fr.
Louis Odudu of the CSN 8 sees the inability of the leader to harness the talents and capacities of group members as a major reason why many have left the SCCs. According to him, It is true that generally there is this mentality or attitude that the leader knows it all; he has the solution to everything. Sometimes you see it happening in the SCC and that is why we try where possible to let people know it is not all about I am the leader, it is rather more of service. But you do not rule out the fact that this attitude definitely influences the community and sometime it can bring big problems when some self-made leaders run the communities as if it is their personal business and they don"t want to allow others to have input.
They will be the one to read the Bible, they preach, they will be one to pray, they want to be the treasurer, they want to be everything, you see this happening. Leadership is not just one person doing it all, it is about functions, and that is why shared leadership comes in. If the basic things that have to be done are shared out of course people will be more committed. They will feel part of it and be more responsible for the community itself. 9 With the present situation in the Nigerian SCCs, this study attempts at examining how leaders can become more participatory to the extent that they employ the individual and community assets so as to enhance participation in their communities? This will be explored in the next section which examines into the asset mapping methodology.

Asset Mapping Methodology
The asset mapping methodology was developed by John Kretzmann and John McKnight and it is one of the latest approaches to enhancing participation in small groups. A community asset is defined as "a person, physical structure or place, business, service or other accessible resource used by local residents for their personal, social, economic or cultural benefit" (Arundel et al., 2005:5). The theory holds that there are two approaches people employ towards building of and confronting problems in the community. One is to begin by focusing on the needs, deficiencies and problems of the community while the other begins from the point of view of discovering a community"s assets and capacities (Kretzmann & McKnight, 1993:1).
This methodology was employed by Arundel et al. (2005) 10 in their study of three communities in Toronto. Here, they identified the following as important to understanding a given community: -Physical assets: neighbourhood infrastructure, housing, transit and mobility, shopping, public and private spaces.
-Social assets: neighbourhood connectedness, participation, engagement, neighbourhood development, pride of place, neighbourhood voice and influence.
-Diversity-related assets: supports for diverse population groups and interests, including language, settlement and employment supports.
-Service assets: range of programs and services and locally based neighbourhood planning and service coordination/collaboration assets.
-Safety and mobility assets: ability to participate safely and without fear (Arundel et al., 2005:6-7). These researchers developed a model at the end of their study which was based on five asset variables of availability, proximity, accessibility, capacity and quality of the community assets. They found out that these variables were useful in understanding the barrier and facilitating conditions that influenced the use of an asset (Ibid 84). They also linked participation in community to social and economic factors. According to them, "individuals can not participate in and contribute to local neighbourhoods if they and their families lack basic income and housing. Neighbourhood assets can play a critical role to support and encourage local engagement and participation" (Ibid, 85).
The methodology of asset mapping could also be seen in certain skills identified in individuals, such as playing musical instruments, drawing, singing, acting etc (Allen, 2006 After the training, it is believed that the leaders will possess certain capabilities which they will look for in their members. These are:  Know their strengths and weaknesses.
 Show their concern for others by sharing their time, talent and treasure.
 Adjust in any situation.
 Identify and analyze SPES problems of their small group and the larger community and provide solutions to them.
 Facilitate their own group to become a Christian community.
 Realize the importance of personal prayer and practice it.
 Facilitate the making of group decisions.
 Articulate the reason for their Christian involvement.
 Sacrifice other priorities for the sake of Christ"s mission (Bernas, 1988:268).
Thus, for active participation in the group, leadership must involve the people by identifying their capacities, coordinating such assets and employing the assets for the good of the community. Consequently, this study hypothesizes: Communities where the capacities of members and the group assets are recognized and utilized witness active participation of members in community activities than communities in which these assets are neither recognized nor utilized.

Communities
To test the aforementioned hypothesis, this study employs a mixed method of social research, that is, the qualitative and quantitative methods. The instruments employed were documentation, participant observation, in-depth interview and questionnaire. The work was designed to investigate two principal groups of people, that is, the leaders and members of the respondents. In analyzing the findings here, I shall begin with the members" capacities as assets for the community.

Members' Capacities and Talents as Assets for the Communities
The importance of members in any group can not be over-emphasized. This part of the study examines the various capabilities which members possess and how these can be channelled towards their active participation in the communities. Here, I examined relational factor since the human person is a relational being. Thus, we shall begin our analysis with the idea of having relationships.

Relational Factor as an Asset
The first issue here borders on marital status since our aim is to get the level at which members of the communities participate in other social gatherings and how this helps them to better understand the group life (Keyton, 1999:192). The AMECEA bishops pointed the familial relationship out as the foundation upon which the SCCs in Africa are built. Apart from the benefit of having familial relationships, many of the respondents claim to belong to two or more other societies or groups in their parishes. The table below gives the response from the part of leaders and members.  The other way of ascertaining this dimension of the variable is to see whether members of the SCCs belong to other societies or groups in the parish. Belonging to other groups mean they have other avenues of relating with other people apart from what they have on the SCCs level. All the leaders and members claim to belong to one society or the other and their level of participation in these other groups is seen below: However, to further explain active participation in relation to the number of groups they belong, I made a cross-tabular examination of the responses for members with regard to their level of participation in these groups. The finding shows: The highest total percentage with reference to the number of groups which members belong to and their level of participation is found in those who claim to belong to two other groups with 25.4%. Even those who belong to four have a high percentage of 24.2%. The number of other groups they belong is therefore not an excuse for not attending the SCCs. The highest rate of participation here is also in the category of active with 90 members or 36.3%.
With this background of having the experience of familial relationships and participation in other groups, the question is why is it difficult to put the same experience into practice in the SCCs? Thus, I examined the community asset in terms of participation which should derive from the familial relationship.

Community assets
A vital asset to the community is the active participation of the members. This is so since we have established in the introductory part that the survival of the whole depends on the strength of its individual parts. However, members" participation is a function of the satisfaction they derive from the communities" meetings/activities. In most of the communities, meetings are held once a week. While some members pick and choose when to go for meetings, for others, late coming is a major problem which draws the community back in its activities. The findings on this aspect are given below.

Active Participation of Members as an Asset
To ascertain the level of participation, I formed questions based on the number of times the communities meet and the average number of members" attendance at such meetings. In almost all the extant communities in Nigeria, meetings are held once a week. Since the communities meet weekly, I asked members to rate their level of participation based on the times they attend the meetings. The response to this is seen in the table for leaders and members that is given below: to miss only one meeting on the month. The same is not true for members since the highest rate of attendance here is 28.6% for those who attend two times out of the four meetings in the month. On the whole, a total percentage of 28.1% for both leaders and members attend meetings twice out of the four times the communities meet in the month.  Moreover, while many communities claimed to have as many as 20 persons on the register, different persons appear each week. Jan laments the situation in her community thus, "it is off and on as it is today. At the time when we newly started, we had 20 persons or even more but now little by little we begin to decrease". 13 Jude goes beyond the issue of irregular attendance to that of imbalanced level of participation at the meetings. According to him, I think in the community itself, there is an imbalance in terms of participation.
You don"t actually have a balanced participation in terms of members of the family: father, mother and children, educated, uneducated and what have you.
The community I participated more in at the Holy Cross Cathedral, you probably have 10, 11 children and 2, 3 adults coming in; there is an imbalance. 14 Based on the aforesaid, how can leaders map out and utilize the various capacities inherent in their communities so as to achieve the active participation of members? This will be our concern in the next section of this work.

Recognition and Utilization of Individual and Group Assets
Here, leaders were asked if they noticed any form of special talents in their members and the members were asked to state whether their leaders recognize the talents they possess.
Coupled with the individual and community assets that have been examined in the section above are the talents for the small group which this study has earlier brought out to include ability to recount group process, singing, acting drama, drawing and other gifts that contribute to group life. The response is given in the table below. From the table, a higher percentage of 58.8% leaders responded positively to the question of recognizing the talents of their group members but the same is not true from the experience of the members whose percentage of 62.1% claim not to notice this declaration by the leaders.
The same is true of the total percentage which shows 54.3% under the category that the talents are not noticed from the point of view of leaders and members. In a situation where leaders fail to recognize the talents of members, utilizing these talents become more difficult since one has to know what he wants to use before employing such a thing.
Jan is an ex-leader in her community who comments on the need for the talents of members to be recognized and used for the group. She narrates how this assisted her community at the initial stage and how the lack of this has brought a reduction in the participation of members thus, By then, the Rev. Sr. promised to help us so that we can be doing little things.
For those who do not have anything doing, they asked us to be teaching them sewing. By then I was not having much work but when they came to give me people to teach they were paying me. Although the money was not too much but I enjoyed it and I took the little money on a monthly basis. I was training Since leaders were not able to utilize members" talents, they found it difficult to turn community challenges into capabilities as proposed by the asset mapping theory. Thus, when asked about the challenges faced by their communities and what they felt should be done to turn the challenges into opportunities, they simply maintained that they have done all they could and no change has been noticed, hence nothing can be done again. This therefore explains the decline in participation in the Nigerian SCCs. Based on the findings so far, the study"s hypothesis which states that communities which recognize and utilize members" and group assets bring about active participation of members has been confirmed. What then can be done to enhance participation in the SCCs in Nigeria?

Recommendations
Based on the aforesaid, this study affirms that identifying and utilizing the talents of group members contributes to their participation in any group and that this depends to a large extent on the leaders. The leaders are therefore enjoined to be more participatory in the way they animate their community meetings. One way of identifying members" talent is through visitation as attested to by Ebby who describes the experience in her community thus, "that time, our leader wasn"t putting more effort into visitation. It is now that people know what the SCC is all about and they want to join. By the time we go to some of them they will tell you they are happy you are visiting them and this has given them the sense that no matter what they belong to a group of people". 16 In visiting both the old and would-be members, there talents are not only discovered but their sense of community is heightened. When this was not employed in Ebby"s community participation of members reduced but immediately they resorted to this, a marked positive difference was noticed on the level of participation.
For the leadership to be participatory, training is expedient. The form of leadership training given by Bernas above, presents a challenge to leaders of the SCCs in Nigeria who undergo little or no training. Sandy is one of such leaders who when asked whether she attended any training before leading the community simply said, "No, nothing like that … I had no training before I was elected". 17 Leadership training has been linked to group effectiveness (Burns,  Another way of enhancing participation in the SCCs is through the presentation of the community"s needs in small group media which involve all the members in the planning, production, evaluation and distribution of the media production (Kawaja, 1994:134-143). In his study on the need to involve small local groups in development, Tarawalie concludes that community media "makes people conscious of themselves as not just an isolated action group but part of a larger district and regional organization" (2008:83). The high point of the small group media is the practical application of the communities" presentation to the life of individual members.
In the present Nigerian society, the evangelicals have been effective in the practical application of their message to the life of their members. The unemployed get job, those seeking admission to higher institutions are assisted by their Church members etc. In this way, the challenges the communities face are turned into assets through the joint effort of everyone. The SCCs could be more successful if they really merge the faith and life situation of the people within their communities (O"Halloran, 1986:17). In this way, the activities of the SCCs will resonate with the members and it is this resonance that leads to satisfaction which enhances participation.

Conclusion
This study is timely as it is crucial considering the importance of the SCCs to the universal Church in general and the Nigerian Church in particular. This is so since the communities bring about an increase in the number of parishes within the dioceses where they are operational. The importance of this study is further brought out in the fact that it is the first attempt at employing the socio-scientific theory of Asset mapping to address the problem of low participation in the SCCs in Nigeria. The study therefore builds on researches which link membership satisfaction to the way they are actively involved in group activities (Bass, 1990:21;Burns, 1978:4;Shin & Zhou, 2003:704;Goleman et al., 2002:15).
The thesis of this study is that communication in small groups depends on a variety of factors out which the use of assets plays important roles. The way these factors are channeled for the good of the community contribute to a large extent on the level of participation in groups.
With special reference to the African continent and Nigeria in particular, where people tend to lament their problems and challenges without charting a positive way forward, this study can not come at a better time. The asset-mapping theory has been employed here as a way of helping people to turn their challenges into opportunities so as to bring about better participation in their communities.
In conclusion, this study echoes Cooke who holds that, "To be a Christian means to share the life of the community, a life that is based on faith in Christ. It is as a member of this community that the individual Christian will find his sanctification. It is as a member of this community, sharing the community"s life and activity, that a man will be able to discover his identity as a Christian" (1965:31). In fact, the study has shown that "Christianity, by its very nature, is concerned with community. Its mission is the development and fulfillment of human beings, and this can only come about through the interaction of persons in the various kinds of inter-personal relationships. Of these relationships, the most fundamental and the most fulfilling is the group or community, giving a collective witness to Christ" (Shorter, 1973:196). Therefore, each and every SCC is called to engage in this act of witnessing as members" capabilities and group"s assets are channeled for the good of the group in such a way that members" satisfaction is achieved and their participation is enhanced.
Rev. Emmanuel B. Olusola is a priest of the Catholic Archdiocese of Ibadan Nigeria.
Presently, he lectures Group Communication at the Centre for the Study of African Culture