Toward the end of my tenure in Gulf Breeze, we launched another new faith community in Pensacola Beach, Worship at the Water. As it turned out, launch Sunday at WOW was my final Sunday in that pastoral appointment. Nonetheless, Worship at the Water has thrived across the years and today runs 400 in worship attendance without any paid staff other than the pastor. It is a testimony to the power of a volunteer team!
In 2007, I moved to Washington DC, again to plant a new faith community. In this case, for several reasons, the team did not materialize in the way I had hoped. The project limped along. After four months, I had scrounged up four people. I was the same leader who had preached to 590 people at the opening worship service of the previous project in 1999. Now I started with no team, and had only four. (Four good ones I might add - all laity - and two and a half years later three of the four are now staff members at the largest UM churches in Virginia, Tennessee and Georgia respectively.) But our planting in project in DC struggled. Not enough team.
After another year and a half, we were serving about 80 people a week in three locations, but it was just not clicking. So I backed up and regrouped, and formed a partnership with Foundry Church near the White House. This time, we assembled an extraordinary staff team of five part-time persons, a team that spans 35 years in age, at a net cost considerably less than my single salary two years before!
And as we quietly launched our first worship services this winter (www.foundrypm.org), one of our major goals each week was to grow the team of persons volunteering to share the joy and responsibility of planting and growing our new community. After five weeks, we now have around 100 people in our orbit, with new ones streaming in weekly. (To say that it is clicking would be an understatement.) Half of these are signed up on one of our teams, helping with a group, with set up, with groceries, with hospitality, with Facebook. You name it. And this time, it is working like it did a decade ago in Florida. We are now showing up to what God is doing and having a good time!
Wayne Cordeiro in his very simple and helpful book, Doing Church as a Team, shares that at New Hope Community Church on Oahu, they work in teams of five. And the five are taught to reach to the margins of their faith community to find five more who will help them in whatever task the team exists to do. The five then become ten. Five marginal people become core people. The church grows. And soon you have two teams. One of their major strategies in assimilating new people is to put them to work within a week or two from the time they first show up in the church’s life. In Washington DC this year, we are borrowing from that play book, and it is growing us a new faith community - right before our eyes!
In my work with The United Methodist Church nationally via the Path 1 team, we are developing a new church planting model that is built upon a team of laity (with adjunct clergy in the wings, but not at the center). These teams cost us a fraction of the upfront price-tag typically associated with a new church start. These teams are mirroring the way churches are multiplying all over the planet, and the way that our Methodist forebears planted tens of thousands of congregations in North America. They are not typically built around a single charismatic leader, but around the shared gifts and corporate charisma and synergy of a Spirit-led group of ordinary folks, who together with God are able to do something quite extraordinary. We are training such teams via a movement called the Lay Missionary Planting Network. It is all about God and team!
I believe that the era of the hero pastor planter is passing in America. It is a dysfunctional and, in many ways, unbiblical model. Many have tried to lead in this way and have failed, often having burned through a lot of denominational money before they threw up the white flag. They tried to find the John Maxwell within, and failed to dig up much. A few each year do manage to succeed in this way. And some of the books about church planting tell the stories of the relatively few big successes, contributing further to the myth of the lone hero planter. And yet behind the scenes, many of these few who succeed in planting as hero leaders also admit that the pressure and imbalance in their marriage and personal lives caused by such over-functioning is catastrophic! In other cases, when you look closely behind the scenes and the mythology, there is a phenomenal team helping to make the magic!
Whatever it is that you are up to this year, be it planting a church, building a youth ministry, establishing a new social ministry or simply revitalizing an aging congregation - be careful not to attempt such work alone. Take time to build your team. Jesus took time to build his. You are not more talented than Jesus - I promise you that. The team you build will make all the difference in the end.
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