Andy Stanley the Pastor of North Point lead off the conference with a message on leadership and teams entitled “The Multiple Choice Team”. He started out his message with a very powerful point, “Your local church should be the best organization in town.” And he stressed that this should go on beyond the weekends, that when someone walks into our church that they are amazed by how professional we interact and operate. It should almost be to the point where they want to bring their people to us to get advice on how to run an organization.
This idea of being efficient and impacting lead to a discussion on how to maintain the relational integrity necessary to operate as a team. In order to do so everyone on board must choose to trust and be trustworthy. There are some many times church teams become dysfunctional due to gaps in the relationships, gaps that are caused by the lack of trust. We should be able to trust one another to not only to commit to one thing or another but to follow through with our commitment. And if we aren’t going to meet expectations we should warn one another so that no one is ever caught off guard or embarrassed by lack of information.
Two feelings or emotions we should be aware of are suspicion and mistrust because they can easily poison our church culture. Andy points out that “as leaders, we must learn to fear the consequences of concealment more than the transparency of a culture built around trust.” In the end we were asked to reflect on whether or not we want the relationships of our staff to export to the congregation.
Overall I feel that our staff has a great relationship with one another. But our relationship is very informal, like a bunch of friends and family. We can laugh, we can joke around with one another but the professionalism is somewhat lacking. I think if someone were to come in right now and ask how we do what we do it would be something difficult to explain. This conference will hopefully help us organize our thoughts and help us figure out how to organize our team. It feels as if God is on the verge of giving us great responsibility at Nativity, but I think He is waiting for us to prepare. I’m excited and I pray that God continues to give us what we need to spread His Good News. Amen.