I read this article three years ago and it has never left my memory. As a student of leadership, I've often wondered if team leadership is really possible. Studying leadership and churches while in college gave me great hope that--perhaps--team leadership could be the future of the church. I considered this a great connection between the modern church and the first church.Objections to team leadership abound, often stated in memorable witticisms:
"God called Moses to lead Israel into the Promised Land; He didn't call a committee"
"When God sent his son, he didn't send twins"
But is team leadership--team leadership from the top--possible? This article says so. Interestingly enough, I have one of those "3 degrees from Kevin Bacon" connections with this ministry. In 2002, while a student at Nyack College, I had an internship at a church in New Jersey with the Lead Pastor. Prior to coming to NJ he was the lead pastor at Applewood Baptist, the same church mentioned in this article.
A few weeks ago, at a district conference, I was speaking with another pastor serving in Dayton (who graduated a year after me at Nyack) when I was surprised to find that he and another pastor were using the team leadership model in a restart project. Both he and Blake serve as lead pastors; neither one has a trump card over the other. And it is working well! Their church is growing and reaching out to the community. People are growing in their faith and new people are coming to faith.
Here's what I find: it takes the right people to do this. Team leadership is not impossible, but it is difficult. It may not be for everyone.
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ReplyDeleteThis is an interesting leadership model, and one that may not be the best for everyone. We’ve all also heard phrases like “two heads are better than one,” but when co-leading with others, we might say otherwise. Woodrow Wilson once said that we must have “not a balance of power, but a community of power…” Perhaps this is the ideal, but there are many ways in which it makes things more complex. I have some friends whose church is run by a team of 7 elders (with no pastor) who share responsibilities and this actually seems to work well.
ReplyDeleteThough not in a ministry context, I had some experience with team leadership while serving on a governing board made up of five members. We all had equal power, and were to work cooperatively on the tasks with which we were charged. This worked well in that it gave us a variety of perspectives when making decisions and helped us see things we may not on our own, but it also made it difficult to get things accomplished at times, especially when significant change was involved and not everyone was on board with a particular course of action. Because the majority ruled, we (unfortunately) sometimes only ALMOST made progress.