T.E.A.M.s

T.E.A.M.s

I was invited to join up with a group of fellow pastors. Mostly guys in church plants, or other "progressive" (for lack of a better word) churches. Connections is definitely the baby in the group.
It's nice to be invited to the group as it appears that these guys see something they like in Connections.

Anyways, the point is to share some of the valuable learning I gleened from our time together yesterday. The most fruitful portion was a discussion on the real need to foster a volunteer culture through ministry or service teams. Essentially, we all agreed that you need to create numerous "sticking points" in your church for people to be involved. We actually challenged our churches to create a ratio where 50% of your attenders can always find a ministry team to be a part of.

Two points of clarity- this doesn't mean you volunteer every day or week. But it should mean you voluteer at least once a month. This means some people need to stop doing so man things, and it means others need to take on a role so they really feel like a contributor to the church.

Second, this doesn't mean the ministry teams become more complex. We don't need to create all sorts of new roles. It means the more people we have, the more greeters, ushers, children's ministry volunteers we need. Growth for Connections will not mean becoming a more complex organism.

But finally, in our discussion, we talked about the things that are essential to leading a successful team. We boiled it down to four things, and I put them into the TEAM acrostic, just to help me remember this stuff. SO these are 4 essentials qualities to leading a team...

T. Task- know, understand, and complete your ministry task, whatever it may be.
E. Empower your team to understand their role on the team, to own it, and to do it.
A. Adore what you do, Adore who you do it with. It's really about caring for each other.
M. Multiply- always add to your group! Recruit like mad!

So there you go- my new BIG thing for our ministry TEAMs. It's kind of messy, some words are nouns, others are verbs, but hey, serving in ministry is kinda messy too!