by Joshua Pease
One of the best gifts God has given me is not giving me a lot of gifts. No, seriously.
Things I’m good at: speaking (I think), helping others’ find the bigger life God has for them, vision-casting where our church community should head.
Things I’m not good at: emails, details, planning, singing, remembering[1], empathy, event-planning, service projects, manual labor, cleaning, enjoying animals, hand-eye coordination, everything else.
And I legitimately believe this is a good thing. I realized at an early age[2] that I was going to need to specialize to find my place in life, and this has carried over into ministry as well. I am so painfully bad at so many things that I have no choice but to delegate most of the ministries I lead to someone else.
The problem I see in some of my pastor-friends though (and I mean this sincerely) is that they’re too good at too many things. They have this “I’m the only one that can do it this good” mentality. The problem with this is…
1) they always seem to be teetering on the edge of burnout and
2) their ministry depends entirely on them. Which means no one else really leads, shapes vision, or contributes in a meaningful way.
But this isn’t disciple-making. It’s not empowering. It’s basically not anything at all like how Jesus led his crew of church-builders. So if you’re one of those unfortunately super-talented people, here’s a few ideas from someone significantly less talented[3] that might help in spreading the leadership around:
1). Recruit a team – I have a volunteer team of about 8 people. A lot of them were people I recruited when CRAVE:Rancho first started. They are all spiritually solid, passionate about what we’re doing, and understand why we do what we do. Which brings me to the next point:
2). Meet regularly – my team comes to my wife’s and I apartment about once a month. We feed them dinner, hang out and talk, and then spend at least an hour doing some sort of leadership training. This could mean brainstorming an upcoming series, talking about where CRAVE is heading next, praying together, or helping them discover what they’re great at.[4]
3). Force yourself to let go … and them to pick up. Every week I’m with my team I’m blown away at how talented, godly, and smart they are. When they are owning significant chunks of ministry – leading a volunteer greeting team, making our facebook page/podcast run, leading a small group, speaking in to my message preparation – our ministry wins. But for that to happen I have to continually give up things I want to hold onto.
So if you’re one of those well-rounded, good-at-everything, micromanaging types, how can you release some of that control? If you could create a volunteer dream team, who would be on it? What are things you’re currently doing that other people could do instead?
When you figure this out, you win, your ministry wins, and God wins.[5]
[1] Ex: Faces, people, conversations, announcements that I decided need to be said 5 minutes before, everything I meant to put in this list.
[2] One has lots of time to ruminate when stuffed and locked in a locker (actually that happened to a friend, but the threat of it was ever-present)
[3] I swear, this isn’t sarcastic! (even that sentence felt a little snide. I promise it’s not.)
[4] The book “strengthsfinder 2.0” is my favorite resource for this. It’s a book with a 30-minute online test that identifies your core strengths. We talked about our results as a team and it was probably my favorite team meeting yet.
[5] And “love wins” © Rob Bell (too soon?)
thanks for the good word dude. Easy to get caught up in seeing things fall through the cracks and instantly go to “I need to handle it” rather than looking around and saying I need to recruit and train and try to empower those around me to partner in the work—as you say let go and, “let them pick up.”
A challenge might be when you don’t have the dream team that is “spiritually solid, passionate about what we’re doing, and understand why we do what we do”…… do you sacrifice quality in order to give opportunities to those on your jr high middle school 2nd string roster or do you model for them what quality looks like and attempt to find them where they are at and walk with them until they can start at the varsity level (still a few levels shy of dream team- but seems like we all have room to grow)….or secret option 3 that you will tell me about.
thanks for bringing challenging ideas and an evident love for college ministry- stoked to continue to see God move in this generation.
Love the thoughts David.
Here’s what I would say in response: there’s the people we empower from within our ministry, and then there’s the people we bring from outside of it.
When you recruit from within (and everyone should) I think you plan to take a dip in quality (this increases the younger the age group you’re working with).
What I am talking about in this article is a team of people “outside” the ministry. When we started our college ministry, I recruited super-talented friends I knew. Some of them were in college, but most are in their mid-to-late 20s. I looked for people that 1) I had instant chemistry with (liked being around them) 2) who were passionate about the church, and 3) weren’t using the full extent of their gifts and abilities.
I know that there STILL aren’t people like this in every setting, but I would encourage someone in college ministry to look around at their friends, at solid families within the church, etc. Who are the people who are wise, talented and underused? Those are the people waiting to be invited to take on large portions of your ministry.
good words dude- and before this year in Kosovo I would have completely agreed- and its not that I completely disagree, but a pastor here in Kosovo that I work with has challenged me with the American “mercenary” mentality as he calls it. He tells me in his broken english that scripture doesn’t point to this model of recruitment and sees this as a fault of the american church. He may be saying this because he doesn’t have the luxury of calling up his super talented buddies b/c there are less than 2000 christians in the country- most 1st gen. but if the model you point to is valid I would like to know where you find this model in scripture to pull talented people away from their local church or other ministries to your own? Again dude, please hear me say- I had done it in previous ministry positions and bought it completely—I wanted the ministry I was in to be rocking and it made sense to go find the best people but now I am personally rethinking it and being challenged to work with the broken people around me even if they are 2nd string jr high.
look forward to hear your thoughts josh. Thanks for the dialogue!