We recently asked Dave Gibbons (author of the awesome book, The Monkey and the Fish) a question:
Dave, it seems like in our church culture that we ask a small percent of the members of the body to do all the work, while most of us give nothing more than money to the work of the Kingdom--so much gifting, skills, ideas, and possibly Billions of man-hours are sitting unused. What can US Churches do to empower the pew-warmers to use their gifts to contribute to the Church Universal and advance the Kingdom?
Dave's answer:
I think this is one of the fundamental challenges of the church today, namely, to stir a volunteer revolution where every one is truly a priest.
Here's a couple of best practices that would move the church forward:
1. Reassess our current Assessments! They're inadequate. Today we have a model of assessments that focus on the strengths, personalities and passions of our membership. What we need are assessments that look at the meta-narratives of pain, weaknesses and turbulence as well. Pain is often a better teacher and guide for most of humanity.
2. Develop Intuitive, listener/coaches who intersect the voice of our membership and the voice of God to come up with customized discipleship/growth journeys for our membership. These people are in our congregation today. This is a sacred journey not just an objective assessment.
3. Create an ethos where Pastors are seen as the "support team" and the congregation members as the "field team." Real application of this will shift everything you do.
4. Focus your resources (budget which includes time, money, focus) more on people development than weekend programs, facilities and professional staff. This changed my life as I always said Leadership development is my number one priority. But the reality of it was it wasn't reflected in my work week time schedule.
5. Let your congregation members be a part of the real strategy sessions not simply the focus groups.
6. Provide on-line and off-line resources to not just the people in our individual churches but to the body of Christ locally and globally. In today's world on-line and off-line is seen as one world. While many have a difficult time fathoming a world where you can also be developed on-line, the reality is that the next generation doesn't. While it's not the only way, it's growing more seamless with the off-line physically present processes we now have in place. Moreover, if we always have to visibly, physically be present for spiritual maturation we're cutting out the role of one who we don't often physically see. . .the Holy Spirit. We need both to fuel our people to be radical followers of Jesus.
7. Intentionally collaborate with other churches. Move beyond the "network" and "association." What would happen if we really did intentionally unlock the doors to our small groups, training materials, experiences, mentors, and experts to each of our churches. . . And actually planned our curriculum offerings together starting at least on a regional basis and eventually national and global? We're working on this with our new alliance but we need networks to start embracing this. We're still reinventing the wheel and wasting our resources.
Dave Gibbons, Lead Pastor of Newsong Global Alliance, Culture Consultant and Social Entrepreneur, Author of The Monkey and The Fish: Liquid Leadership for a Third Culture Church.
I love Dave’s response (#3) about pastors being “support team” and the congregation being “field team”. But I wonder how this shift can be effectively done. I can think of many pastors that would just make an announcement that they are now the “support team” and everyone else is now the “field team” without making any ‘real’ transition to something like this. What thoughts do you have on making this shift effectively?
Comment by Dan King - Mar 05, 2009 @ 03:30 PM
well, that’s a good point, Dan. I think that’s a major problem that we have to face! What do we call this problem? Whatever it is, I think it shows-up ALL OVER THE CHURCH.
This idea that pastors have: “it’s not my job, it’s your job, go and do it.” but also “work hard during the week, give me your money, and support this Sunday morning event thing we do. If you do something else, GREAT! but you can’t put it in the bulletin and you can’t pass out fliers and maybe, if it has a cool logo—and you are young and attractive—we’ll interview you about it on stage.”
We’re simply not setup to do church like this. We can’t even comprehend it. Our model is simple: come, attend, give money, we’ll have a slick motivational presentation for you. There’s no serious mission component, other than “waste thousands of dollars to go on an exotic trip and pass-out tracts a few times in your life” or “once a year help us build a house for some needy people.”
The fact is, we don’t take our mission seriously, or we’re too lazy to. If we did, we would gather, ORGANIZE, train, and direct ALLLLLL the members of the body, DETERMINING their various gifts (kinda like the army does I guess? MOS?), and deploying them into the field to accomplish the mission.
Perhaps we do do this already, but the extent of it is: 80% of you come and give money to support the church, 10% of you do that plus park cars, teach kids, or pass-out baskets (or help with sound), 2% of you use the gifts God has given you to put on a creative and entertaining show that will attract outsiders, and 1% - you get to spend all week doing what you love, sitting in coffee shops, dreaming up sermon series, running the show, and using your gifts of communication to preach.
Hmmm, at least that’s how it appears.
.... how to make this shift? I don’t know, I have some suggestions ....
Comment by Jesse Phillips - Mar 05, 2009 @ 03:59 PM
Your question is difficult, and I don’t pretend to know the implications of what will work and what won’t work effectively. Honestly, it’s not clear to me what it looks like to do church or be the body in such a way that most of the parts are freed/deployed to use their gifts.
My intuition is that it’s really hard for a large group of hundreds of believers to do this effectively together. I feel like it requires smaller teams of believers working together, and those teams working together.
Honestly, I think to answer this question, the end must be clear, then we can figure-out the steps. Not sure exactly what the end is.
...
ugh! does that make me a hypocrite or stupid or something?
Comment by Jesse Phillips - Mar 05, 2009 @ 04:30 PM