Collecting a team of people who share your same passion is one of the most important things you can do.  Hopefully you know of at least one other person who will be on your team.  You need to make sure you have people who are willing to work, not just people who are willing to share their opinion.  We tend to think that “ministry leadership team” are the people that get together and come up with all the big ideas, but really, the leadership team should share the responsibility of vision, planning and execution.  And these leadership team meetings should encompass vision, planning, and execution. While it is the healthiest and most efficient to have one, maybe 2, people primarily responsible for the vision, that doesn’t mean that person doesn’t get into the weeds with everyone else.  Likewise, the doers on your team need an opportunity to share their ideas and insights.  Long story short – you need a team of people willing to work.  Those are your people.  If someone shows an unwillingness to own some work, they may not be the right person for your team.  This leads to the next important part of your team, your structure.  Some of you may be familiar with the concept of an org chart, others may not.  It’s basically just a simple way to understand what everyone does, kind of like a seating chart.  If you have more than just a handful of people, you’ll want to develop some kind of leadership structure.  I like to use SmartArt in Word to build mine, and I have some example templates under the “Church Ministry” tab.

Once we know where everyone is sitting, we need to know what they do.  That’s where roles, responsibilities, and expectations come in.  A clearly defined RRE helps everyone understand who is doing what.

As your team grows, especially if you’re a multisite church, communication can become more difficult, especially meeting in person.  Our team has found success using a few different tools to help with this.  We use Voxer, which is a voice messaging system, to communicate things that need more discussion.  If we need to have a meeting but can’t get together, we use Zoom for video conference calls.  Zoom has a free option that will let you have meetings up to 40 minutes.  You may also ask your church if they have a Zoom subscription that you could use.  To organize all of our teams, events, and to dos, we use a program called Asana, which is a project management tool.  Asana also has a free version that will likely get you all the material you need.  We just started using it recently and it’s been very helpful.