Lecture
We come to one of my favorite topics in this study, lecture seventeen, the idea of developing ministry teams. We can surely understand how pastors and teachers dealing with Old Testament passages emphasize the singularity of leadership. Sure, there are multiple passages like Exodus 18, which also emphasize a participatory philosophy. But who can forget the image of Aaron and Hur holding up Moses’ arms during the battle? But people like Abraham and Moses and Samuel and David do tend to dominate the horizon of pre-monarchial and even in monarchial times.
I have repeatedly emphasized throughout all of these studies that when one turns to the New Testament, everything changes. The only earthly kings are the bad guys, like Herod and Caesar. And ministry, biblically defined, almost always takes place in groups. Now that’s an underlying premise of all of these studies, and I hope it is coming across clearly to you. Especially when we focus on the developing of new covenant churches throughout the book of Acts does this become clear.
Van Auken concludes his helpful booklet emphasizing that Christian ministry is teamwork with a difference, teamwork that makes a difference. This is because Christians are different in the goals they pursue and in the way they purse them. God intends for His family members to work together in unified cooperation, the very essence of teamwork. Van Auken goes on to identify specific ways in which Christian ministry teams are different.
Christian ministry is teamwork with a difference because of the pervasive sense of family. Christian ministry is teamwork with a difference because personal sacrifice is elevated above rugged individualism and self-serving competitiveness. Christian ministry is teamwork with a difference because followers are just as important as leaders.
And, above all, Christian ministry is teamwork with a difference because God is in the driver’s seat. He charts the ultimate course.
Now some will immediately suggest that Van Auken’s list represents an ideal situation; you know this can’t really happen, can it? Well, I disagree. I think it can. I think it does. I think not only do ministries like this exist, but they represent precisely the kind of organizations which God blesses in a biblical way. I’m not talking about numerical or financial statistics. I think a church of seventy-five could very well be a wonderful example of God’s blessing and biblical pouring out of His grace as they work together in wonderful love and community to serve God.
It’s interesting. Just before I sat down to tape this series, I talked to one of my colleagues who described a church in Oklahoma. I said to him, “How many people would be there on a given Sunday morning?” because I know he goes up to preach there once in a while. And he said, “Well, on a normal day, somewhere around nine or ten. But sometimes other families come in, and we can get up to as high as twenty.” You know, by modern American standards, that would be absolute failure. I mean close the door and give it up! Not according to Mark, my friend, who said, “Now look,”—and this was not an argument by the way. I was not disagreeing with him. I’m just reporting what he said. And he said, “You know when you measure that little congregation by all the measures that make any difference—whether people care for each other, where they’re trying to reach out to their community, whether they’re growing as parents and as Christians—all of those things are working well.”
Now that’s God’s blessing. I don’t care if it hasn’t grown to 200. I don’t care if it isn’t a church of 2,000. How easy it is for us as Americans to look at “big” and say “That has God’s blessing.” Well, if that’s the case, brother, look at some of the cults and say “God is really blessing that cult. Look how big it is!” How ridiculous!
Well, enough on introductory material. Let’s look at some principles of an effective team. In a very real sense, our entire course has discussed principles of an effective team study after study. But let’s get specific. Let’s try to identify several characteristics of an elder board or a mission committee, the academic affairs committee of a Christian college, or a Christian camp staff. What does a leadership team really look like when it operates according to biblical standards?
First of all, effective teams understand team goals. That “Getzels and Guba model of transactional tension” is important here. That will always exist. Individuals bring their own needs and personal agendas to any ministry position. The key to serving on the team is to sublimate those concerns for the good of the corporate ministry group. At the same time, however, the leader of the ministry team makes every effort to see that personal needs of group members are served, neither ignored or certainly not abused. It simply makes common sense to recognize that when members of a ministry team do not understand their corporate goals, they can’t successfully move toward those goals. Effective teams understand team goals.
Effective teams also utilize group decision making. We already talked about this. It’s been popular for decades to describe leadership as singular activity. Groups discuss, and individuals make decisions. This archaic notion, however, has been repeatedly maligned in recent years by both secular and Christian writers. Griffin’s book Getting Together not only explains the value of group decisions but actually teaches us how to do group decision making. We explored that in study seven, I think.
Scripture tells us “Plans fail for lack of counsel, but with many advisors they succeed,” Proverbs 15:22. But somehow we never transfer the acknowledged truth of that verse to the way we do business in churches and Christian organizations. There are times—usually in emergency situations or perhaps where absolute confidentiality is essential—that the individual leader must make the decision alone. My own experience demonstrates that when the group genuinely shares in eighty percent of the decisions that govern the future of the organization, they are more than happy to let me or to let the leader make the other twenty percent when it’s necessary and will trust him or her to do just that.
Effective teams share leadership responsibility. Larry Osborne talks about building “leadership unity through shepherding meetings,” times when leadership teams like boards meet together to pray and to interact with general devotional or theological materials—not business—and recognize their corporate rather than competitive function. Osborne says:
This teambuilding has had a significant impact on our business meetings. They have lost their confrontational edge. I can’t remember the last time we had an honest-to-goodness argument. Not that we don’t disagree—sometimes strongly—but we’ve found truth in the old saying, “Friends discuss, strangers argue.”
But sharing leadership responsibility is more than just agreeing or even agreeing to disagree. Members of a serious leadership team understand they have corporately managed the progress of the church, so this is what they do. They have collective responsibility for the organization, and so they take collective responsibility for the outcomes. They don’t blame the pastor. They don’t look at somebody else. They don’t blame circumstance. They don’t blame each other. They don’t blame the congregation or the employees. They function as one, anticipating what God will do in honoring their commitment and their work and their prayer. They are a team.
Effective teams maintain good communication. The importance of communication during meetings seems too obvious even to mention. Good team members communicate between meetings as well. If something hasn’t gone right, if something isn’t clear in the minutes, they call each other to make sure they’re moving in the same direction. If one is working on a project and another can provide information or connections that might be helpful; they network to make that possible.
Obviously, length of time together is a factor here. If you’re a football fan, you have enjoyed in recent years the wonderful combination of Steve Young and Jerry Rice or John Taylor. Young can communicate with those two receivers with just a nod of his head or a movement of his shoulders. But a rookie receiver may take years to learn what the quarterback is thinking. Or a rookie quarterback could throw the ball over Rice’s head or throw it where Rice is not almost any time, no matter how good the receiver is or no matter how good the quarterback is. We’re talking about learning to play together, learning to work together. Like everything else on an effective team, communication is something all team members work at all the time.
Effective teams evaluate process as well as product. I can’t belabor this point again here. It’s been so much a part of what we’ve talked about throughout these chapters. The word “product” describes outcome—the final decision, the achievement of the missions conference, the completion of the building project. “Process” describes what went on in the lives of the leadership team as they moved from the beginning to the end, or from any point to any future point in their relationship. In other words, we’re going to put up a building, and we’re going to have a building committee. When we call the building committee together for the first time, that’s the beginning point. When we dedicate the building and move into it and start holding services or teaching classes or whatever we’re going to do there, that’s the ending point. “Process” describes what happened to those people, not what happened to the building. That’s product. “Process” describes what happened in the lives of those people as they moved through those months and maybe years.
Usually positive process begins with flexibility in selecting procedures by which the group will operate. It always includes a good balance between productivity and individual needs. An effective group is cohesive; they hang together. It’s attractive and looks good to people both on the inside and the outside. And it utilizes the abilities of its members. We’ve already done a study on group process, so you’ll recall some of that.
What about the steps in teambuilding? We don’t need to look far for a model of teambuilding. That is precisely what the first four books of the New Testament describe. They detail for us, of course, the birth and life and death and resurrection of the Son of God; but along the way, they let us watch Jesus finding and grinding and binding twelve men into a team. Longenecker talks about the selection:
Servant leaders are not just there waiting to be picked. They require a suitable climate in which to grow and mature, and it is the task of Christian leaders to help create that climate. A church or group that creates a climate in which God’s people can become all that His grace can make them will inevitably grow leaders. Read the Gospels carefully. The story leaps right out at you. The planting of His Church in the world required the training of this little group for leadership in that Church.
Well, the first step in team building is to teach effective leadership. One more time: leaders are not born, they are made. Let’s stay with our biblical illustration. First, most of us would not have selected the group that Jesus handpicked to change the world. They were not well educated, their experience did not particularly prepare them for ministry, they showed little potential for becoming a unified group, they had a frightening propensity toward intramural quarreling, and they seemed relatively unable to function on their own—stumbling through their assigned duties unless Jesus was right there to watch them every minute. By the time we find them in the book of Acts, however, they have become a well-functioning, unified group of leaders—with, of course, the exception of Judas, replaced by Matthias—whose influence and example marked the Early Church. All twelve of them had a distinctive place, even though we don’t read about a lot of them specifically. Acts offers us a real-life enactment of what these men understood the teaching of Jesus to mean. They learned leadership. So step one in teambuilding is to teach leadership.
The second is to build team unity. Nothing is more crucial for churches and Christian organizations. How foolish for a congregation to enter an elaborate and maybe even expensive community evangelism project, when at the core of everything they do is a squabbling, back-biting deacon board. As Osborne discovered in his shepherding groups, “it would be nice if unity in Christ guaranteed unity on the board.” But human nature being what it is, most groups also need to spend significant time together in order to gel.
And you make use of team abilities. Of course, you can’t do this until you first discover what those abilities might be: spiritual gifts, natural talents, experience, skill. All these come in the package of a leadership team. And, until we discover how God has gifted and led team members, bringing them to precisely this point in His kingdom purposes, the blend of abilities is hampered by our ignorance; not our stupidity, our ignorance. We just don’t know. You’ve read it before, but it fits here as well, because it is easily in the top ten leadership axioms: Lead to your strengths, staff to your weakness. And that staffing means building a leadership team with people whose gifts, interests, and abilities complement your own so you can make use of team abilities.
Practice mutual submission. Ephesians 5:21 may lead into a passage on husband/wife relations, but the principle of mutual submission applies to all believers. And this lies at the core of servant leadership biblically practiced. I certainly cannot say it better than Paul Cedar put it in his wonderful book Strength in Servant Leadership:
In my opinion, every Christian minister, Christian parent, Christian coach – indeed every Christian – involved in any vocation or responsibility of leadership has one common need: to be a servant leader. A leader who serves as Jesus served, a leader who leads as Jesus led; and I believe that God is calling all of us to become servant leaders.
And you want to teach people to follow creatively, not just to follow, but to follow creatively. Once again, the disciples provide an excellent model of how one learns followership before he or she learns leadership. It would probably not be an overstatement to say that one who has not learned followership can never accurately or completely learn leadership. Picture a Christian college in which the newly appointed academic dean has been brought from another institution after one or two years of service as an instructor. This appointment was probably made through board influence or perhaps sheer nepotism. And now senior faculty of twenty and thirty years’ experience are expected to follow a neophyte who, though he may be intellectually brilliant, has no idea how to function as an administrative leader.
There’s a book which deserves more spotlight than it has received, although it’s gotten a lot of press in this course. Thomas Gilmore’s Making a Leadership Change has a section in which he talks about managing the boss. How do you like that? Managing the boss! He offers six explicit points, and the last of which fits precisely here in our present chapter. But since I have them all here, I’ll dump them all right here.
1) Negotiate shared expectations of the strategic challenges with your boss.
2) Think explicitly about the style differences between your old boss and the new one.
3) Build up a picture of the boss’s world and assess the relative stakes that are located in your area of responsibility.
4) Assess the boss’s strengths and weaknesses and how they fit with your own.
5) Periodically ask your boss for feedback on how you can better support him or her.
6) Work explicitly on followership.
“Work explicitly on followership.” Now as he expands that point, Gilmore suggests,
New leaders sometimes tend to over-concentrate on the challenge of leading and under-attend to that of following, especially if they have been upwardly oriented, watching their prior bosses to learn how to lead, reading about leadership, fantasizing about what they would do if they actually took charge. In that frame of mind, it can be difficult to confront honestly those aspects of one’s role in which the challenge is to be a good follower – aspects that may not have been visible in role models.
Examples of team leadership. Here we go to the text of Scripture. You may want to have your Bible handy and look at some of these, although I’m not going to read the text in each case since you have access to it, of course. Now we could have begun the chapter with this section, but I always like to let principles precede examples so that you can find the principles illustrated in the examples. I referred earlier to the consistency of team leadership in the book of Acts. I want to look now at four specific segments which give us a life-size, historical, accurate, color picture of how Christians work together in ministry teams.
The first is the selection of servants in Acts 6:1-7. It would be a good idea to stop the tape right here, read the passage, and then listen to the section and to do that each time. How easy the apostles would have found it to call all the shots in this situation. A dispute had arisen in the Early Church regarding cultural discrimination. Greek-speaking widows were being neglected in the congregational care program. Instead, they turned the entire project immediately back into the hands of those who faced the problems on the front line, namely Greek-speaking or Hellenistic Christians elected by the Greek-speaking portion of the congregation. These people formed the ministry team—what else could you call it—to solve the problem. Now some believe this was the first deacon board, although the use of the term diakonia here I don’t think sets any kind of historic precedent for the office later defined in the Pauline epistles. I’m not opposed to the office; I’m just not sure I can find it in Acts 6.
Now notice the careful wording of the text in verse three. “We will turn this responsibility over to them.” The apostles themselves were a ministry team, and now a second ministry team had been created to take care of other functions. This passage seems to say, with great emphasis, that the ministry of the Word was not more important than the ministry of taking care of widows. It was just different.
A second glimpse is the Antioch church in Acts 11:19-30. This portion of Acts 11 is one of my favorite passages of Scripture. A church founded by laymen on the run and led by a lay leader named Barnabas clearly becomes its own cooperative congregational group when the people decide themselves to send an offering for famine relief in Judea. There’s no special program here. There are no signs. There are no posters, placards, logos, thermometer charts on the wall. They had been studying the Bible for over a year. Now they understood that believers take care of other believers who have need. So the entire congregation had become a ministry team after watching Barnabas and Saul work together as their leader. You talk about modeling! All this seems to come alive after only a year or so of spiritual growth. It can be done.
Then the picture of the first missionaries in Acts 13:1-4. If you missed the plural pronoun throughout the early verses of this chapter, you miss the function of the Antioch congregation as one large ministry team. They, them, they did this, they did that—one thing after another. It’s a beautiful passage. Look through it again just looking for those plural pronouns. In this case, “they” gives birth to a smaller ministry team. The larger ministry team of the congregation gives birth to the smaller ministry team heading out on this first journey, as we call it. They pick the candidates, they discuss the attributes, they trust God for the selection, and they send them on their way. This is a clear indication that the missionaries will report back to the sending congregation, which, of course, they do—not once but twice. We’re not talking now about sending back notes and letters. Probably a lot of things went on that are not recorded in Scripture, but we do know about going back to Antioch to report at the end of all the journeys.
Dennis Williams and I conclude our joint effort, which you have read, Volunteers for Today’s Church, with this paragraph just as a reminder:
When people in any congregation exercise ministry for which God has gifted them through the power of the Holy Spirit, they can, under a caring, nurturing leadership, make exciting things happen. So put words like “duty” and “drudgery” behind you. Stop focusing on maintenance and accept the exciting challenges of the future. Help people find the places God wants them to serve, and turn them loose to function effectively in those volunteer ministries.
And then the council at Jerusalem, for our last glimpse from Acts. Actually, all of Acts 15 is important here. The drama builds toward the end, but the whole chapter is essential for us to take a look at what is happening here in the development of the ministry team and how the ministry team operates and how this whole cooperative principle operates. A cursory reading of the passage might yield some credence to the idea of a singular or even autocratic leadership. James obviously chaired the session. But as you read the chapter more carefully, you’ll notice how cautious he was to allow every voice to be heard, to make sure the traditional as well the nontraditional viewpoints—or to make sure that the nontraditional as well as the traditional viewpoints—were given proper airing and respect, and then to formulate the policy for Gentile churches. Now most New Testament scholars believe that James merely verbalized what the entire group had decided. He’s not originating these regulations for the Gentile churches. I think that’s a fairly common interpretation and hermeneutic on the part of New Testament scholars. James is not the autocrat of the church, not the Bishop of Jerusalem saying Okay, this is what we’re going to do. What we have here is group decision making, and there’s a clarity of team goals, especially the Paul-Barnabas mission to the Gentiles. That was really the focal point here. This is a one-item agenda business meeting. You don’t often see those, but that’s what this was. The one item on the agenda was: What do Gentiles have to do to be saved? On the one hand, they wanted to protect the convictions of the traditionalists, the Jerusalemite Christians who would like to have the whole ball of wax carried over. You know, Let them keep the feasts, and let them do circumcision, and let them do all this stuff. After all, if it’s good enough for us, it’s good enough for them. And they wanted that viewpoint to be aired and heard, but they also wanted the grace viewpoint, if you will, to be heard. And what happens is not a condescension to one side or the other, but to recognize that there’s a balance here, a genuine balance that is sent back as the message.
Group decision making is really crucial and really demonstrated wonderfully in this passage.
Now all of this is neither fiction nor foolishness if we really believe the Bible. If we believe the Bible to be the accurate and absolute Word of the living God, then Christian leaders can’t ignore the overwhelming evidence on participatory leadership style and the development of ministry teams. We find it on page after page of the New Testament. I’ve quoted Van Auken two or three times in this study. Let’s close with something from his book. Have I mentioned the book? Well, you have it in the bibliography, of course. The Well-Managed Ministry is the title. Philip Van Auken says: “The spirituality principle—teams engaged in Christian ministry are supernaturally empowered, generating a rare kind of fruitfulness nurtured by team member unity, vision, and sacrifice. God lovingly shepherds His teams, helping them succeed despite human fallibility and frailty.”
I like that close. That’s a good way to close this study. Let me read that last sentence again: “God lovingly shepherds His teams, helping them succeed despite human fallibility and frailty.” That’s yours and mine, as their leaders.