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How often do we hear the old adage, "If you want something done
right, you must do it yourself!" But this is poor advice – especially when
it comes to church leadership, as Pastor Ralph Bowles (Australia)
discovered.
"As the senior pastor of a church that has gone through
significant conflict, I have struggled with how to develop a culture of
excellence in the lay leadership. Negative experiences have created
mistrust, and direct methods of control (for example reports) tended to
make matters worse.
In the Parish Council we spent a lot of time in a workshop
thinking about how to redesign our church management structure to make it
more effective. One member proposed we design our management around
interdependent, overlapping teams. Each ministry team would relate with
another team through a shared member. For example, the coordinator of the
Sunday School children's program team would also be a member of the
worship team that serves the family congregation [Interdependence].
The other question we considered was how to ensure the teams
operated productively. Instead of having a hierarchical structure running
we put together a set of guidelines for "Effective Ministry Teams". And we
asked each of the various interlocking teams to draft a simple written
Ministry Team Agreement. The Ministry Team guidelines made the team
members themselves responsible for interdependence, evaluation, and
fruitfulness. They were empowered to do the work well. The church leaders
did not design the evaluation procedures or other details but left them to
the teams [Functionality].
Because the whole process was thought up within each team, rather
than being a directive from the top, it did not meet the same resistance [Energy Transformation].
I can see how powerful this process will be when it stimulates
the teams to think and act interdependently with other teams and leaders.
It's a relief for me as the minister because my previous attempts to
direct ministry operations had failed – my efforts simply didn't empower
people.
The first Ministry Team agreements are being commissioned at
present. I think of these guidelines biotically as the DNA for our
church's teamwork, to be reproduced in the various 'cells' of the church
body."
Here is a pastor who realized his old way of doing things just
wasn't working. The more he tried to lead from the top, the more
resistance he encountered. Then it occurred to him that there was an
alternative to the "top down" approach. By creating interconnected
ministry teams and empowering them to devise and assess their own
procedures, he found a renewed enthusiasm for ministry within his
congregation. He was less stressed – and the work was done as well as (or
better than) before!
Julie Belding is
editor of DayStar, New Zealand's Monthly Evangelical Newsmagazine |
