Dear Jesus, We’ll Get To You When I’m Off The Clock…
When you are on staff at a church you have a responsibility to pastor your church.
One of the many ways that happens is by creating environments that draw people towards God.
I believe this is an essential part of what we do.
But sometimes we/you focus so much on the things we do for our attendees that we forget to grow together as a staff.
I can go for days before I do anything focusing on our spiritual growth as a staff.
This is not ok.
You might say that they are focusing their spiritual growth at home.
Which is great.
I just can’t imagine the early church separating the two.
What do you do to make sure that your team is growing spiritually together as a staff?
Los
RAIN IT DOWN
great post. sadly its the truth.
Something small that we do is to simply set aside an hour every couple weeks to pray, worship, and encourage one another as a staff. We should probably do more, but I know even this small amount of time has been a great way for our team to keep the main thing the main thing so to speak.
This is so true. I have been on the part-time staff at a pretty thriving church outside of atlanta for the past year. I have experienced continual spiritual burnout from not getting poured into because of the same separation. I think authenticity plays a huge part of it. When you feel comfortable to admit what you're going through, when you don't feel like you have to be perfect spiritually, that is at least when the potential for growth exists.
Thanks for asking the question, los.
Man, that's a wake-up call. In the post-Easter slump, this was a well-needed thought.
Thanks mate.
We've just approached this subject dealing with our Lifeguards, name for our volunter youth staff. We're still throwing out ideas but regular group prayer and fellowship time with Bible study has gotta be it. To grow you gotta be in God's Word- how this takes shape is still in the works.
Our monthly "training" is not enough or "good enough".
We've decided to view ourselves and our Lifeguards as missionaries to the "Globals" or the "Digtals". Just changing that term in my brain has changed changes what our staff meeting looks like or should look like.
Accountability, bible study together as a team, fellowship together as a team? Tough when time is precious- but why do we say time is precious when it comes to spiritual growth but can drop everything for a ballgame, especially when it's free tickets to Wrigley field- sorry rabbit trail.
I'm a fan of meeting regularly for a meal, say Monday lunch, and then not eating it, instead fasting and praying during that time.
Well I look forward to checking back into this post and I'll let you know what we come up with.
Great post. My wife usually leads are team through some type of team building exercise every staff meeting, we are over the young adults in our church, so the staff is all volunteers mostly in college, so the business of our lives separate us and this is a must to keep unity among our team.
I'm not sure how effective group exercises are. We do them like everyone else, but I think I see the most growth as a team when we spend a good amount of one-on-one time. I try to have coffee or lunch with at least two of my leaders each week. Having another leader and their family over for dinner is also good, but requires more effort to get the house and meal ready. It's always worth the effort, though, because you can relax and talk at home like nowhere else.
I think this is closer to the early church way. They spent a lot of time together, and not programmed time, just time hanging out being friends. We need to build closer friendships and I think our programs sometimes work against that. The culture around us is not conducive to making, being, and having friends. We need to make that not the case for our culture.
Prayer for and with staff is a great start. Especially if you can get more non-staff to regularly and systematically pray for church staff. They and their families are always in need of prayer. Every church should have a formalized program of regular and systematic prayer for staff. If for no other reason that prayer for a person helps bind that person to your heart.
But every church also needs a system to insure that staff are not working too much at the expense of their spiritual growth or their families. I worked for two years at my last church to get staff to do time sheets so that we could insure that staff were not working too hard and to insure that the board that oversaw staff knew that they were working and both deserved and needed time off. Neither side wanted to work toward this type of accountability. Unfortunately after I moved the board fired the co-pastors in part because they asserted they were not working enough (even though I know they were putting in 40 to 50 hours a week each and were only receiving the equivalent of one salary.)
Bill Hybels says that leadership should spend around 50% of their time in "self-leadership", and while that amount of time is astounding, I think I agree. When teams are at a high level of emotional functionality, and can handle deep spiritual stuff together, team building in this manner can work great.
I tend to spend alot of one on one time with the people I lead, in order to better facilitate conversation. My boss and I also try to provide as many resources as possible to encourage good growth among our team. I have found the best thing is to know when people need to get sent home for some "chill" time, as hard as it can be on everyone else.
what do you mean by drawing people towards God? I am reading The Divine commodity and it has some interesting points…what are your thoughts on this?
yeah we do a great job of developing busy Christians
Not much. Sad truth.
This is something I've been struggling with quite a bit lately. We feed and guide the congregation but each other. Bible studies, reading books together as a staff, times of prayer/worship are things we've done from time to time, but not with any regularity.
The most obvious and probably most effective answer is a scheduled time when you worship and pray together. Maybe it even looks like having someone else who is in ministry but maybe not necessarily on the "team" come in and pray over everyone and lead you all in worship so that you have the opportunity, for snippet of time, to take off your roles as crowns and lay them before God. As a church attendee and small group member it would be more important to me that you had your time to build together as a team and strengthen/encourage each other consistently than to create a mind-blowing experience. The Holy Spirit is the one who draws the hearts of people towards God regardless of set list, stage design, etc. Providing an environment is important, but having the continuity between team members and leading out of a place of relationship I would say is more important.
Discipleship!!! That's the key. We weren't told by Jesus to go out and make Christians, but to make disciples. To me, that's WAY harder!! It takes time and effort to disciple someone.
Our focus at my church is shifting to a more discipleship model. In the Worship Arts and Media department, my wife and I are strategically holding key meetings with our leaders to focus on building relationships and bring unity.
Thanks for the post. It really confirmed some things that we have been feeling for a while.
That's a great post!! I am going to put something together today for our Team! Thanks for the reminder and bringing to light what we all know is a struggle
The other struggle is to not assume that the office/workplace is separate from the spiritual side of things. At my last church position, we would all get notes based on what "went wrong" from the pastor from a production standpoint — typos, missed lighting cues, etc. We had contsant staff discussions on the need for this or that because the "Pastor" wanted it without the focus of ministry. Discipline was rigid and shepherding was at a minimal in the workplace. Sunday morning worship times were forsaken to fix "problems" that arose, and trying to find times of spiritual growth and renewal outside of our church was subject to discipline.
Because of all of that, we the staff times of prayer and communion were extremely superficial. The support staff did not trust the pastoral staff to lead them spiritually, but more or less "played along" because it was their job to do so. Either that, or the choice was to stand up to it and be fired. Which is what ended up coming to pass.
daily devos… and lot's of group prayer… occasionally i'll ask them what there reading in the word.. and what god is speaking into their lives..
Sometimes we have staff bible studies, and for those on our staff concerned about hours… we don't dock pay for that time we set aside.
We have staff devotions for about an hour and a half the 2nd and 4th Wednesday of the month. I know a few of the departments meet on the Wednesdays that we don't have devos and others meet on different days. I also know our prayer ministry prays for the staff at their early morning prayer meetings. Trust me, we see those prayers put into action.
As horrible as this sounds, I realized how easy it is to coast when you're on staff or in ministry. I mean, we work at church, we go to church, it consumes the majority of our time while we're awake, which can be an excuse as to why we don't take time on our own for individual time with God. I'm not saying this is true of all people on all staffs, but it is such an easy trap we can fall into. That is where accountability, and as people mentioned above discipleship, comes in.
I agree, discipleship and team building activities are great ways to grow. I also think it would be extremely helpful if the team leader had 1 on 1 meetings with each member of the team. This could occur bi-weekly or even once per month.
Nothing. How bad is that? We have the 'excuse' that all of us have our other 'day jobs,' so we don't have time to get together on a daily/weekly basis. The reality is that we're just not making it a priority. It needs to be a priority.
Thanks for the light bulb over my head this afternoon.
We actually set aside an hour each wednesday to gather a refocus on God's word and some aspect of growoing as leaders. Our Pastor, Marty Holman, does an amazing job. Another thing we do is on Sunday we have "Volunteer Central." We spend some time in worship, and then some time in God's word with all our volunteers that are scheduled that Sunday. Right now we're going through Bill Hybel's Axiom.
That is such a good point. Though i am not a pastor i have people that serve under me and i am responsible for their growth as much as our Pastor is. You have gotten the gears in my head turning…thinking about that. Thank you.