Back to Current Article

The Power of Teams

Resources

Ginghamsburg United Methodist Church outside Dayton, Ohio, has "stumbled accidentally" into a new way of doing church, one that unleashes the power of teams.

When Ginghamsburg began its "high-tech, multisensory" worship in 1995, the staff soon discovered that putting it together each week -- drama, video presentations, music, message -- was too much to handle.

"We realized none of us could do that by ourselves," recalls Pastor Mike Slaughter. "It took a team approach."

Slaughter now works with a team of six people -- staff and volunteer -- who focus exclusively on planning the worship services. "I live with the worship design team from Wednesday to Sunday," he says. "We discovered … that the creativity of worship began to grow in an exponential way."

The team concept is so ingrained, Slaughter says, that when he became ill once during a service, another member of the team stepped in and finished his sermon. "We live and die together."

So successful was the team approach that Ginghamsburg Church, which averages 3,000 people in its weekend worship services, now uses teams in all its ministries -- small groups, lay mobilization, even building programs. More than 2,200 people participate in various ministry roles that coincide with their spiritual gifts, says Tammy Kelley, the church’s executive director.

Kelley says the team approach "levels the playing field" between staff and laity, which is consistent with the priesthood of all believers. She says the best compliment she hears is when a newcomer complains, "I can’t tell who the paid staff is!"

The role of staff members is no longer to do ministry but to work with the teams to facilitate the ministry of others, she says. "The staff are to be equippers for ministry, and they work elbow to elbow with those who are doing ministry," says Kelley, whose first role in the church was passing out bulletins.

Likewise, Slaughter says, he no longer functions as the church’s CEO. He and Kelley serve as co-leaders of the church, which has an annual budget of $5 million. His focus is on worship and visioning; she coordinates teams and almost everything else.

"I’m no longer meeting with all the staff trying to keep all these different parts together," Slaughter says.

The church now has only one committee, which handles budget and business. The team leaders meet regularly, but each team is empowered to make its own decisions. "As far as bringing all the staff together, we’ve found that’s not very productive," Kelley says.

"We discovered that when people are involved in meetings," Slaughter says, "it takes them away from God’s destiny for them."

Ginghamsburg’s experience is part of an emerging trend in churches away from staff-led, committee-run hierarchies to team-based ministry, where decision-making is dispersed to lay-led ministry teams.

The movement, though small, is in sync with trends in the business world, where teams are increasingly common and organizational structures are "flattening." But, advocates say, teams also are biblical.

Most point to the fourth chapter of Ephesians, which says God has placed pastors and other staffers within congregations "to prepare God’s people for works of service." Those church members, in turn, have been given "spiritual gifts" that equip them for certain ministry roles.

"The paid staff become ‘consultants’ to the teams," explains George Cladis, pastor of Noroton Presbyterian Church in Darien, Conn., and author of Leading the Team-Based Church.

Church consultant Bill Easum, another advocate, says teams are right for the times.

"The complexity and speed of life in the 21st century will make it much more difficult for a pastor to have all the skills and knowledge needed to intuitively address the issues swiftly," Easum says. "Young adults also relate better in a team atmosphere than they do in a top-down authoritative environment. This could prove to be the undoing of many of the megachurches built around individual, charismatic leadership."

So far, advocates admit, team leadership has hardly made a dent in traditional church structures. But leadership consultants who work with churches say the most effective congregations are already there.

"Whereas I have not seen any study to prove that team leadership is a trend in churches, it is clear that the interest in it is growing rapidly," says Easum. "I see it all the time in healthy churches. Most churches, however, are having as hard a time making the transition as is the business sector."

Advocates expect the team approach to catch on as more churches confront two particular issues -- growth and ineffectiveness.

George Cladis felt the frustration of many pastors when his former congregation -- Covenant Presbyterian Church in Austin, Texas -- started growing. "The growth of the church just meant more work for me," he recalls. "I was feeling burned out."

His denomination, which promoted a traditional hierarchical leadership style, wasn’t much help, he said. So he looked outside the church to organizational and management thinkers like Peter Drucker.

Cladis adopted a team-based philosophy of leadership and found team principles to be biblical, reflected even in the trinitarian nature of God. The team emphasis on collaboration "mirrors the relationship of Father, Son and Holy Spirit," he says.

Team advocates say traditional church-leadership styles were themselves adopted from culture hundreds of years ago -- primarily the medieval idea of empire-building and American corporate hierarchy. As the culture moves away from those models, team advocates say, they will prove less effective in churches.

"Effective ministry teams in the church in the postmodern era are empowering teams," Cladis writes. "They have put aside the older, hierarchical models and spread out authority and responsibility of doing ministry. Leadership no longer means taking control, dictating or giving orders."

"The most effective churches today are the ones that are developing team-based leadership," Cladis writes. "This pattern will likely continue into the 21^st century, both because Scripture emphasizes Spirit-led, Spirit-gifted, collaborative team fellowship and because today’s culture is receptive to such leadership."

The team trend promises to return ministry to the people, providing a corrective for staffers who want to hoard power and church members who expect to hire staffers to "do the work."

Cladis says when he moved to Connecticut he encountered similar resistance from parishioners. "They’re looking at me and saying, ‘You’re supposed to do that.’ And I’m saying, ‘No, we’re supposed to do that.’"

The church’s failure to share power with the laity is "the thing that is keeping us from being great," Ken Blanchard, author of the best-selling One-Minute Manager, told a recent team-ministry conference sponsored by the Leadership Training.

Shared power is a key trait of the successful organizations he has studied, Blanchard said. The popular church model of pastor as CEO is a "brain-dead" philosophy that will only hurt the church in the long run, he said.

Kentucky pastor Leroy Armstrong, one of the organizers of the conference, said the megachurch movement of the last 20 years has been led by "superstar" pastors who are now "dying out or burned out" without having mobilized lay people for ministry. As a result, the church, which should be an army, "still looks like an audience."

If staff members will take seriously their duty to equip the people for ministry, "they will be far more creative than we ever would be," said Armstrong, pastor of Greater Good Hope Baptist Church in Louisville. "That creates the possibility that we could enter the 21^st century having rediscovered the dynamic of the first-century church."

Leadership Training Network is trying to speed the transition to team-based ministry. The San Antonio conference, perhaps the largest of its kind, attracted more than 1,100 people from mostly mainline churches to learn the nuts and bolts of mobilizing lay people for ministry.

Leadership Training Network operates as a resource center for lay mobilization in churches. Of the 2,500 churches that interact with Leadership Training Network and its partner organization, Leadership Network, 500 churches have a person assigned to lay mobilization -- up from almost none five years ago.

Western Heights Baptist Church in LaGrange, Ga., though much smaller than Ginghamsburg, likewise has shifted from a committee structure to a team-based ministry.

"We had a nominating committee and a small control group that screened everybody who came through the door," recalls Greg Brown, pastor of the 700-member church. "We used people as fodder … to fill up our organizational slots. We repented of that."

"It was a painful transition," Brown concedes. Many long-time members objected to the new structure. Forty members left in the first year, he said, but 140 have joined since.

The challenge for Western Heights, Brown said, was to design its ministry around the people God placed in the church rather than around an arbitrary church structure.

"God is the interior decorator of the church. He has arranged every part of the body just like he wants it to be."

"Our goal is to have more of our members working outside the church on building the kingdom of God than to capture them just to run this institution."

Team leadership may be the wave of the future, but it's a wave that many churches will have a hard time riding.

That's the reading from three consultants who help existing churches face transitional issues. Team-based ministry will require traditional churches to consider abandoning committees, democratic rule and other proven mechanisms from the past. Often that will bring conflict.

"The shift from committee work, where controlled delegation is the key, to team-based ministry, where uncontrolled empowerment is the key, requires leaders who are flexible, secure and clear about where the overall organization is headed," says Bill Easum, senior managing partner of Easum, Bandy and Associates. "Most churches are not clear enough about their mission in life to trust people to work in autonomous teams."

George Bullard, director of New Reformation Solutions, says adopting team leadership requires "a significant cultural shift" for churches.

"Many pastors, staff members and long-term lay leaders will never have functioned in a team-based church," says Bullard of Columbia, S.C. "They will have trouble even conceiving how it will work."

"Some laypersons, particularly persons who have been members of the church for more than 20 years, may resist a move to team-based ministry," he adds. "They will feel a loss of accountability, a loss of their position of hierarchical authority in the church, and a loss of commitment to the denominational way of structuring a church."

Still, he notes, with careful coaching, it can happen. "This is an opportunity to help them learn about ministry in a postmodern context. It is also an opportunity to help them see the New Testament in a new light."

Some critics of team leadership worry it will threaten democratic governance in churches. Indeed, Easum concedes, "Democracy is the No. 1 enemy of team-based ministries." But then, he says, democracy is "not the biblical way for a church to function."

Unlike committees that are elected by the church, teams should be appointed, says Easum of Port Aransas, Texas. Although they must be responsible, he adds, they also should be free to act within bounds. "These traits are so foreign to the democratic, top-down, check-and-balance system of this country that the transition will be difficult until the generations born before 1960 fade from the scene."

"The heirarchical style will always be around in some form, it seems," adds Easum, author of Leadership on the Other Side. "Not everyone will be able to function in a team environment, just as not everyone was able to be a great singular leader."

"However, when people come together in complimentary teams, where they can express their individuality around a common theme, one's ability to contribute to the whole rises exponentially."

Generational differences will make it hard for many churches to transition to team leadership, says Terry Hamrick, church resources coordinator for the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship in Atlanta.

Baby boomers, who now lead many churches, are typically individualistic, he says. They are less likely to function in teams than the younger generations, "who are all about team."

"We have a low trust threshold," Hamrick says of his fellow boomers, "and the whole basis of team is trust. ... As institutional guardians of what we have built, can we trust these young people to take care of our church?"

The shift to team-based ministry, though not yet widespread, may be aided by a growing frustration, Hamrick says, as traditional leadership styles become less effective in a changing culture. "There is a growing sense that it's not working. Church leaders have to work harder and harder to get less results."

While churches are not clamoring to shift to teams, Hamrick says, they are willing to question traditional ways of doing worship, education and ministry. "Our absolutes of what it means to be church are getting fewer and fewer. We're being pushed to more basic, fundamental issues. The gospel is all we have that is unique."

With so much else up in the air, and many churches desperate to get a handle on the future, they may eventually give teams a try. "We'll back into it," Hamrick predicts.

- Greg Warner

back to top ^

The transition to team-based leadership challenges church staffers to become equipping leaders rather than "doers."

 Selected ideas from George Cladis, author of Leading the Team-Based Church.

back to top ^

react!

interact

home

trial issue

back issues

subscribe

P.O. Box 23769
Jacksonville, FL  32241
888-715-9403
editorfw@aol.com