Growing Edge

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What does a New England Presbyterian pastor have in common with a Four Square pastor from Hawaii? Both are passionate about building teams in church.

George Cladis and Wayne Cordeiro have written two very different books about teamwork. For starters, Pastor Cordeiro pictures an ideal team as a canoe full of Hawaiians paddling in unison over a still, tropical sea. Pastor Cladis finds an ideal team in a painting of the Trinity that is almost 600 years old.

They apparently wrote for different audiences. Wayne Cordeiro wrote Doing Church as a Team (New Hope Publishing, 1998) to convince lay persons to join a team at church. I assume this because he starts with the basics of salvation, “every member a minister,” and the uniqueness of each person, which most pastors already have in the bag. In Leading the Team-Based Church (Jossey-Bass, 1999), George Cladis shoots directly to persuade pastors and church staffs to build leadership teams.

Like most books on leadership, both make much of vision. They also agree that it is even more important in church than in other environments to align the teams around the vision. A vision must be much more than a slogan on letterhead if the pastor is going to build effective teams. A healthy environment, created by living the vision, provides fertile soil for growing teams.

Doing Church as a Team is easy to read and benefits from Cordeiro’s stories and colorful illustrations. The inspiration necessary to build teams in church comes from the direct call and gifting of God upon the life of each person. Pastor Cordeiro outlines his “DESIGN” course, a spiritual gifts inventory (available online at www.newhope-hawaii.org) that they use to place each person in a ministry team. He rightly insists each person must develop a servant spirit: “Being committed to one another’s success is irreducible in doing church as a team.”

Two practical take-aways from Cordiero’s book will help me build teams in my church. First, he suggests “shadowing” as a leadership development tool. By that he means an apprentice simply follows someone else around while they minister. Shadowing, he maintains, is a low-threat, high-return means of equipping team leaders.

The second practical tool is “fractal team building.” A fractal pattern is a shape that is repeated over and over in varying sizes throughout a design. Fractal team building provides a simple structure. He develops it this way: First, divide the job in four parts. Second, find a team member for each part. There, now you have a team and you are the team leader. Each of them can repeat that pattern as their new ministry grows. This structure is elegant in its simplicity and good advice for me. I tend to break my job down into 30 parts and then despair of ever getting any help with it.

Cladis, meanwhile, spans the gulf between theology and business theory to promote team-building as a key agenda item for pastoral leadership. He begins Leading the Team Based-Church with a theological discussion of community within the Trinity. The person of the Triune God truly may be the place to begin talking about teams, but I found his treatment of it distracting. He depends heavily on a word I’d never heard before, “perichoretic.”

It means “circle dance,” and he takes a whole chapter, “The Dance of Leadership,” just to explain it. He also refers repeatedly to Rublev’s icon of the Trinity, a work of art from the fifteenth century that was way off my radar screen.

Nonetheless, his starting point is compelling and provides ballast for what otherwise might be a trendy topic. He seesaws between Trinity and current business research to balance two rationales for building teams. I found myself sharing his fascination with the connection between the two.

Cladis structures the book around seven essential characteristics of successful teams: covenants, vision, culture, collaboration, trust, empowerment, and learning. While these qualities may be important in other leadership areas, together they are the core of what it means to build teams.

Throughout the book he chronicles what team development might look like in fictional Apple Hill Church.

Normally, I find this kind of hypothetical meandering to be contrived, but I actually learned more from Apple Hill Church than from the rest of the book. With this example he effectively communicates the differences between a traditional church and a team-based model, and it illustrates the transition process.

His advice is born from his own leadership struggles in a growing church. Consequently, Cladis advocates that church leaders build their teams with church staff first, then work out to the rest of the congregation. The development of a staff leadership team is the number one priority presented in this book. The leadership must model teamwork for the rest of the church.

He insists that harmony around philosophy of ministry, not theology or personality or gifting, is the most important element in creating a strong staff team.

Cladis sees the present age as providing a unique team-building opportunity for the church. He asserts that “the postmodern world wants to know the heart of leadership,” maintaining that significant spiritual impact will occur when the postmodern world sees the gospel lived out in community in a local church. In other words (Jesus’), “By this will all men know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

So, how will these books affect teams in my church? On one hand, I am freed of the fear of teams. Reading these books concurrently made me realize that just because I have a church that calls ministry groups “committees” doesn’t mean that “team” is a foreign concept. Most of the things we do will require only small adjustments to make them into more effective teams. The basic ingredients are already in place.

Both books confronted a hidden pride in my own heart that causes me to resist building teams. The basic reason I need to work in a team is that I don’t have all the gifts, all the passions, or all the insight necessary to carry out God’s ministry. I’d rather not admit that. Too many, myself included, are content to accomplish a lot less in exchange for maintaining a little more control. Teams are the remedy for my heart problem and my productivity problem.

On the other hand, I’m not immediately going to tell my people, “You’ve got to stop doing things the way you’re doing them and work in teams.”

Cladis offered one sentence I’ve thought more about than any other in either book. It is a good word for those who are open to God’s will regarding teams, but are cautious about jumping on a trendy bandwagon: “The [children of Israel] did not follow Moses because they thought he had a good idea … they followed him because they sensed that God truly sent him.”

If you want to implement team ministry, be certain that God has called you to do it in your church and that your people know it.

—Scott Reavely West Linn Baptist Church P.O. Box 5 West Linn OR 97068

To order books reviewed in LEADERSHIP, call 1-800-266-5766, dept. 1250.

Team Building as a Spiritual Exercise

In their own words.

Just like paddling a canoe, God designed us to stroke together. Each of us has been given a “paddle” by God. A gift. A calling. And like the paddlers of a canoe, each of us has a place or a role to fill … He fits us alongside others who have a similar assignment and calls us a family, a team, the Church. No one person is meant to carry this assignment alone. It wasn’t designed that way. We were created to do church as a team!

—Wayne Cordiero

Moving chairs around and renaming committees “teams” is not enough. Team building has to become a spiritual discipline for the principal leadership team. The individuals on the team have to want it, believe in it, and live it. Furthermore, they have to model it.

—George Cladis

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Reviewed by Tim Ostermiller, contributing editor, CHRISTIANITY ONLINE magazine.

Copyright © 1999 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.