Jesus Geek

The following is a guest post by Elmer Thomas. Elmer blogs primarily at www.ThinkingSerious.com which focuses on programming, design, business and productivity content for tech entrepreneurs living in a 2.0 world. That is, when he is not tickling his entrepreneur itch or consulting.

Is your church ministry or leadership team characterized by any of the following descriptions?

• A few key individuals serve in multiple roles doing most of the planning and work.
• Things decided in team meetings aren’t acted upon.
• People on a team perceive team meetings as a waste of time, even counter-productive to their fulfilling their ministry roles.
• Team members come late to and/or leave early from team meetings.
• The team has a difficulty evaluating honestly the contribution of its members.

In Christian ministry we have seen the explosion of the use of the term “team”: “pastoral team”, “evangelism team”, “worship team”. So now what used to be “The Missions Committee” has become “The Global Missions Mobilization Team”. This is a helpful change, but only if the dynamics of our ministry match the changing terms.

For the purposes of this article, I will define a team as follows:

Team: a group of people who must work together to accomplish a common task.

First of all, a team is not merely a group, defined here as a collection of individuals gathered together to meet the individual needs of the members.

Secondly, a team is not a committee, a group of people elected or appointed to perform a service or function, usually planning, reporting or decision-making.

A team is different. Imagine your team: the professional sports team you root for. How different from a small group or church committee! For any sports team, participation and involvement of all players is essential to the functioning of the team and the accomplishment of the goal: victory. Team members make great personal sacrifices of time and schedule because of their commitment to one another and the common goal. A successful team generates and thrives upon a deep personal loyalty between team members. Without these commitments a team cannot long remain a team. Relationships are therefore crucial to the accomplishment of the objectives. “Team spirit” is all important.

With a focus on teamwork, no simple division can be made between who reaches out to whom, but each partner is involved in reaching several small group members. This strategy requires much more communication and partnership between the leaders. The leaders need to respect the team’s time and use every tool at their disposal to facilitate team coordination. I have found using a tool like a shared calendaring software tool, enables team scheduling, task management and coordination while greatly enhancing cooperation and accountability.

Along with a good software solution, such as a shared calendaring tool, comes new opportunities and unfortunately, some challenges. If you keep the following points in mind, perhaps you can eliminate the typical issues that can sabotage your efforts:

• Adoption – first you must achieve buy-in from both the management and the team, since the system can only work if everyone participates consistently. The links provided will give you the tools to get started.
• Administration – if you are not using a paid and/or hosted software system, you will be responsible for updates and security. So if you do not have someone with that skill on the team, opt for a managed solution.
• Advocate – at least one person should login every day to help moderate and push those who are not participating. It is also important that every participant receives encouragement, especially in the first few weeks, to re-enforce participation.
• Educator – a process document should be created (a wiki is good for this) to explain how the system should be used within your specific team setting. Even though most systems have robust documentation, you will likely only use a sub-set of the total features, so make adoption easy by creating specific and clear instructions. In addition to the written instructions, I suggest you use a free service such as Jing to create how-to videos to provide access to visual and audio help at any time.

What are the advantages of a team strategy? Teams produce more commitment, energy and drive than do “committees” or “groups”, and they produce results. But foundationally, teams reflect the very heart of the gospel, which is taking relationships seriously and working hard at their growth, while advancing the gospel through their effective functioning.

How do you currently manage your teams? How often do you meet? Have gone to “virtual” meetings or are your meeting largely in person? Do you find one or the other more effective? Please share your experiences with us in the comments section.