[0:00]
Hello, I'm Alan Al and welcome to the Reach Australia podcast. The vision of Reach Australia is to see thousands of healthy, evangelistic, multiplying churches across Australia. This podcast was one of the mobilised electives from our large Reach Australia conference, where James Galea, Katy Annis and Scott Curtis took us through what it meant to mobilise people. My church is smack bang in the middle of that category, and we got a lot out of thinking how ministry is the fruit of connecting and integrating well. I had to make sure we also coach people well as they step into these roles and make sure they're landing in a team that has a healthy team culture.

[0:36]
We got tons out of it and I'm sure you will too. So enjoy. All right. The purpose of this planning session is to get specific of what does mobilizing and equipping God's people, what does it look like in the church size and stage that you're at? So particularly 120 to about 250 in your church, in your congregation. And we're sort of presuming that you're here.

[1:08]
Well, three reasons. One is that's not the size of your church, but you, by God's grace, wanting to get there, and so he's preparing for that season. You might be in that, but we're presuming a lot of people are in that stage where this is your church, or thirdly, you've just wandered into the auditorium. You don't know why you're here, but we're glad to have you here. Just acknowledging a couple of assumptions before we get started. We're assuming that you love the Lord Jesus, that you believe in the power of the Spirit

[1:39]
that has given each member of your church a gift. We're presuming you love the local church, but it does exhaust you, that you believe in the power of the saints, but you probably, if anything like me, feel a bit of guilt. that you're not doing it as much as you should be, but you want to, your heart's in it. Your church, maybe about one, two services, a couple of paid staff, but it is getting to a stage where you're not knowing each other. You don't know each other as much as you used to.

[2:09]
And there's tension, there may be miscommunication brewing. You've put some systems in, but there may be some cracks, there's confusion. You believe in training. You want people to lead and lead teams, but they didn't teach that in college, so try to work it out. And the last assumption is that you believe that you want to learn with others, that we're better together for it. And that's why I love this conference, is because it is that, as we learn from one another in other church contexts, in other states coming together.

[2:43]
So that's kind of an assumption. But also another big assumption is there's probably some challenges, some obstacles that you're facing, and how do we mobilize the saints in our church context for this size? What we're going to do is I'm going to introduce ourselves and talk a bit about our context, and then also a challenge or something we find hard, particularly in this space of mobilizing the saints. And then I'm going to get you to talk to the person next to you. what's the one thing that you find hard in your church?

[3:16]
Does that make sense? So, Scott, we'll start with you. Do you want to introduce yourself and what's the challenge you find? Yeah, so I'm up at Hunter Bible Church in Newy and Lake Mack, which is about an hour north of here. And so my role there is to oversee the serve others kind of area across the whole of church. but then I also have a role overseeing our latest kind of campus plant which is five years old now and we started with 80 people five years ago and by God's grace it's about 190 200 now

[3:52]
so they're the kind of two hats that I wear up at HBC. Challenges for me there's many but in this kind of space of the serve area my my kind of personality I'm very relational organic kind of person and I've had to learn the value of systems and structures that can complement our ministry. They still fatigue me a little bit and I'm going to talk a little bit about leadership development, talk a lot about structure in that but it's not my

[4:25]
fun spot. Yeah. Katie? Hi, I'm Katie. I work at a church in Adelaide called Trinity Church Kernelak Gardens. I have a couple of roles there. One of them is I lead our serve others area and the other thing I do is lead our kids ministry. So it's kind of a combination, there's quite a bit of overlap but yeah, it's a great joy to do both of those. challenges for me in the serve area I think I have a fairly apologetic kind of personality

[4:58]
so I don't naturally find it easy to ask people to do things so I find that when I'm recruiting or trying to build teams I used to and I've gotten better at this but I used to start off with oh you probably can't do this and I'm really sorry to ask but I'd love you to lead a team which is not an ideal way to embrace or go into those conversations. And I think that there's been some great things about the way that we've thought about ministry in the last few years that have helped me kind of grow in that. And I'll talk about that a little bit as I talk about teams in our churches.

[5:32]
Beautiful. Yeah, so James, my name, I'm at the Bridge Church. And the way in which our church is in terms of, potentially, we want our gatherings no more to me than 150. That's intentional about small gatherings. And so that's, so in terms of this space is what we do each week. And so I look after 10 o'clock and 5 o'clock. 10's a bit bigger, 5's a bit smaller, but I love it.

[6:03]
And the thing that, for me, is I get excited and overwhelmed in this space. I get excited because, I don't know, for me, it's nothing better. I don't know about you, but seeing someone join a ministry and just flourish in it, and they love it, and it's an infectious joy in seeing them serve the Lord. I just love that, but I also get overwhelmed by it because Sunday is coming, and you're probably feeling this already. Sunday is getting a bit closer than it was yesterday, and you know there's things you've just got to do, that sermon, putting it together,

[6:36]
and so for me I get overwhelmed because there's the instant demand of a Sunday and trying to be intentional about planning and thinking beyond that so that's sort of a bit of me I don't know if you resonate with that what we're going to do now is I want you to talk to the person next to you and ask them what's something that you find a challenge what is an issue maybe one that's reoccurring that you find that you're experiencing when it comes to equipping the saints works of service in your church. So we're going to give you a couple of minutes, talk to the person next to you, go.

[7:10]
All right, hopefully the juices are flowing and hopefully, God willing, some of those things that you've just raised will be addressed in the next little while. How we're going to work in terms of structure on this thing is I'll kick us off by looking at how do we get people to serve, so into that recruiting space. And then again, hand it over to Katie Kensington, who's looking at building a culture of teams.

[7:41]
So they started serving, what does the culture of teams look like? And then another layer on top of that, which Scott's going to look at, is developing leaders. So getting people on board, sort of recruiting, building a culture of teams, and then developing the leaders. And in between those sections, sandwiched in between, there'll be an opportunity for one or two questions that you might have, sort of to clarify things or flesh things out, and then at the end we'll do a Q&A based on what time we have left. Sounds good? Let's buckle up. Let's go. All right. I'm going to take you back to a moment

[8:19]
in your church life, which I presume you do, and in fact I think it unifies all churches, even if theologically they're opposed, it unites the Catholics, the Orthodox, the Protestants, something we all have in common is this, the working bee. We all have the working bee, right? So I want you to remember the working bee, right? I presume your working bee's happened something like this. You started and there was a group of people there, not as many as you'd like,

[8:50]
but there was a group of people there and what you do is you highlight all the things that need to happen. The windows need to be washed, the lawn needs to be mowed, that cupboard needs to be cleansed and cleaned and sorted, a whole bunch of things. And people put up their hands, yep, I'll do that, yep, you can do that, yeah, you guys can do that, yep, tick, tick, tick. Everyone's aboard and they go. But what inevitably will happen is an hour or so later, some more people will come, right? And chances are they may do one of the following. They'll see everyone busy doing

[9:23]
their things and one person might come and have a look and try and work out how do I fit in, how do I get started and see someone washing a window and so they just pick up a Kleenex and start cleaning. Someone else might come and they think, well, everyone seems busy. All the places are being filled, so I'm probably not needed and just leave. Another one will see that everyone's busy, not do anything, not say anything, but hang around for the three hours until the working

[9:57]
piece is finished, but not actually do anything. And then a fourth person will come and look, because everyone's busy, and on their own initiative, go and do something different. They get out the green paint and paint the room, and everyone's thinking, why are you doing that? They think, because I think it's a need, right? And it creates a headache. That is a metaphor of probably what's happening in our churches, right? A church plant is like the beginning of a working bee. Everyone's on board, we know the needs, we know the issues, everyone's mobilized, done. But inevitably, God willing,

[10:30]
people will join your church more people will come and so a church that is more than a year old which between most of your churches people are trying to come and work out one thing what's my part in this church family how do i get involved how do i begin to serve how do i know where i fit in and there will be people who come to your church and they will just naturally say, well, these people are welcoming,

[11:02]
these people are cooking and slot right in, right? But there'll be some who will look at your church family, they'll experience for a couple of weeks and think, I'm actually probably not needed. I'm not needed and they'll leave. Others will come and they think, well, things are happening, but to be honest, they're not really going to take the initiative. No one's going to talk to them and ask them, and so they just sit in the pew each week for years and not do anything. And others will create new ministries on their own accord that create a whole bunch of admin

[11:37]
and headaches and drama, and it frustrates you, right? What may have worked when your church was smaller, you're finding now it's not working because of one thing. People don't know each other as in the well they did. It's sort of getting bigger to the size that, you know, we don't all know who Jennifer is, who Roger is. It's getting bigger. And so what you're sort of potentially finding is you need a clearer system, a clearer process, a communication pathway so that people

[12:09]
who are joining your church know, how do I get involved? How do I be part of this church family? how am I, I know that I'm part of the body of Christ, but what's my part in this body of Christ? So, one objection, which you'll find maybe in yourself or people in your church, as you sort of pivot to becoming less, sorry, more organized, more having a process or a pathway of recruiting

[12:40]
and onboarding people, people will naturally say, hang on, I want this to be an authentic place, I want us to be a family and so sort of jar at the idea of having a process or a plan, right? But I want to suggest that if in the desire for an authentic relationship, sort of a real church, so to speak, you unintentionally communicate to people who come to your church, we don't actually need you. We don't actually want you. Now, that's not your intention,

[13:11]
but because you don't have a process that's clear and open and accessible, though you may say it, we want you, by your behavior, by your person, you're actually communicating something different. So I'm a big believer in a clear process that's open, accessible, is actually not only saying it but showing to people who are joining your church, who are sitting there, we need you. We want you. We want you to be part of this church family. You have been gifted in a way. God has made you in a way that's different to other people, and we are richer in having you part of our church family.

[13:44]
So, a good, clear process. I experienced this in a different context a couple of weeks ago where we were trying to get my daughter into a basketball team. There's been a couple of years of COVID, which hasn't been part of a team. We wanted her to join a basketball team. And so my wife, who really went on this journey, Googled local basketball teams for eight-year-old girls and found a website, called them up and said, oh, you need to talk to Kate. Details are on the website. Okay, went to the website.

[14:14]
Her details weren't there. And so then had to ask again, okay, just wondering how do I get my daughter into a team? Oh, reach out to this person. Then we reached out to this person and said, oh, well, our team is full. Okay, we went back. Okay, is there another team? Okay, this team is full. Maybe try this team over here. We tried it out. They said, well, you can wait for a week. And we were just trying to see if we can go to some other girls in. And then maybe if they don't accept it, then you can come in. And so then we wait for the week. And then they said, all right, come for an audition. And by the end of this journey, right, it was exhausting. It was tiring. It was frustration. But we met the basketball community. They're lovely people.

[14:49]
But going on this stressful, unclear journey, I have a very apprehensive view about the basketball community, right? I know they're lovely people, but they were communicating to me in a complex system that was just talk to this person, that kind of thing. They were communicating to me that they didn't want my daughter to be part of a basketball team. Now, that's not their intention, but because they were unclear, because it was convoluted, because it was confusing, they were communicating to me a bigger message than their website of, we'd love to have kids play basketball, right?

[15:22]
So that's sort of just that. Did you tell her to make it? She made it. Great. She did. Sorry. You go home wondering, did she make it? She did. So what I want you to do is this. I'm going to have a reflection task for five minutes, right? I want you to imagine I'm coming to your church. I'm keen to join your church, right? But I want you to map out, if I was to join your steps, what steps would I take, need to go on, to start serving in your church, right?

[15:56]
That's just part of the team. I want you to, and you might, if you're with your other people from your church, you might want to do this in the group, but I want you to do five minutes. I think I have a, I've got to use this clicker. Ah, there it is. If someone joined your church, how would they begin to serve? What steps would they take? So I want you to do step one, step two, step three, right? Map them out. You're going to get five or so minutes to do this, and then we can come back. Does that make sense? So if I was to join your church, what steps would I need to do?

[16:28]
What would I need to fill in? What would I need to talk to? How would it go about actually starting to serve at your church? Right? Does that make sense? Five minutes, go. Hopefully you've taken those steps with step one, step two, step three. What kind of steps are they taking, if at all? Can I just suggest, if you've sort of written down or talked or said something along the lines of, well, they should talk to Joe, they should talk to Bill, and then that'll get it started,

[16:59]
or maybe contact the pastor, or after they've been for a couple of months, we'd reach out to them. May I humbly suggest, you're still thinking smaller 75 church. You're still thinking that organic kind of family. You do need to pivot more to making it more open and accessible because people don't know who is Bill. You will forget people more and more as your church grows. So if you're still in that space, trying to help you. What's the next step that you can take so that you're not relying on

[17:32]
talk to this person when they've been for a certain amount, we'll reach out, okay? We're trying to move in. So what I want to just suggest is a pathway that we do at the Bridge Church. We've been doing it for a number of years of recruiting people, and it is focusing on those who are new into this space. It has borne a lot of fruit. I'm not going to talk, there's presumably people in your church who are serving, right? There are new people who are coming. There's also a group of people who've been in your church who aren't serving. I'm not really going to talk about

[18:04]
them, but I'll suggest something at the end which may help that. But I'm going to show you a process that has borne a lot of fruit and helping you, if you don't already have it, form those steps that people can take so that as people come in, you're communicating, we want you, you're mobilizing them to be part of the local church. So here are the steps that… There are four steps. The first one's pretty easy. They're welcomed at a church, right? So they come to church, and they're welcomed.

[18:37]
And if you came to the bridge church, you would hopefully be welcomed. And good to have you. And then you would have to either that Sunday be contacted, or you would hear about our next step, which is a newcomer course. We call it belonging. And so step one's pretty easy. Step two is really the funnel in which, if you want to be part of our church, Bridge Church, this is the first step to take. Now, this is, I know, a bit more membership kind of land, but I want to just talk about, particularly through the lens of serving, why I think this is an important step.

[19:17]
We've been running Belonging, which we've got a booklet here. and then I put this document, so you can see what we do on the app. I put that there for you to have a look at. But it does a whole bunch of things. One of them is basically puts everything on the table of what we are and about, where we've been, what we believe, and to make an informed decision, do you want to make this church your church? That's what we're saying to the person who's new. Do you want to make this church your church? And we're putting everything on the table over three weeks.

[19:47]
Sometimes we put it in intensive. But what I love about it, it's an intentional moment. Them not just sitting in church, but them making an intentional decision. Hey, I'm going to sign up to this course. And it's the beginning of them saying, this is my church. Because I hate the idea that you're sort of a member through osmosis. You know, you're sort of being around here for a bit. I feel like I'm part of this church. I don't know, but I've… No, no, no. sort of a helpful moment where they're sort of saying,

[20:17]
this church is my church, so you know them as a pastor, they know each other, and they themselves are saying, yep, this is my church. So this is, a newcomer course does that. And in that, it's a teaching moment of a couple of things. At the third week, we talk about serving, and what does it mean to be part of this church family? I highlight things like, why is it that we serve? Talk to the person next to you. Why do we serve a church? I do subtly suggest at the end, if you're thinking that we serve to, you know, make God happy to get in heaven,

[20:50]
you probably don't understand Christianity, and I encourage you following this to go do our explore course, right? So you're just clarifying there. It's a teaching moment where we bring out Ephesians 4, that Christ gave the apostles, prophets, to equip His people for works of service. So it's a teaching moment to say, if we as pastors do it all, we have failed in our job. Our job is to equip and empower you to serve others in our church, to almost, as it were, empower you and then get out of your way

[21:21]
as you glorify God in serving God in our local church. It's also an opportunity to tackle, I guess, the feeder beliefs when it comes to serving. One of them is they come to the church and they're thinking, I don't think there's really, I don't think I'm needed. And I say, that's a lie. We need you, right? We need you. God has gifted you with a particular gift, and we want you to find your part, right? So we're just highlighting that. We also highlight, and Paul Dallas, senior pastor, has been helpful with this,

[21:51]
is saying to particularly Christians who are coming from our churches, they're maybe just burnt out, right? They're spent. Saying to them, it's okay to come, and you don't have to serve but be served. Sit in the gospel of grace. Come, and that's okay. That's you. That is okay. So it's sort of doing a whole bunch of things in that newcomer course. as one lady said Nina she said it took me 10 years to find out why my church did the things they did but in three weeks I understand a whole lot more why the big church does the things they do so it's

[22:22]
sort of an intense moment to get people on board particularly in the serve moment then we give them this tool, which is a Serve 2020 booklet. Again, that's on the app. And this is basically every opportunity to serve at our church in a booklet. So it's sort of like a little brief blurb, bit of time commitments. And it demystifies what are the opportunities that they could take.

[22:53]
It's in a book that they can read, go away and have a look. Again, you can download that. But it's one of those things where you do it once, it takes a bit of effort, but once you've created this thing, you're tweaking it every year or so, but it's a resource that you have that is immensely beneficial because it's putting on paper, bringing clarity of what are the opportunities in your church, in the gathering, outside the gathering, that people can have a look at. And so it gives them a tool to read, and so we give that to them.

[23:26]
That's step two. Step three is a serve chat. We call it in the British Church a post-belonging catch-up or a conversation. In other parts, they might call it a serve chat. Basically, the goal of this is helping people take the next steps. They're a course, right? But because we're not just about course or context, we're about people, a conversation is saying we want to get to know you.

[23:57]
Where you are at? What's your story? How can we help you take those next steps in finding your place in our church family? And again, I put in the app and sort of the questions that we go through in this conversation. But a big believer has talked about this yesterday in that conversation. Because it is looking them in the eye and getting them to take the next steps and valuing them as an individual, as a person. in this chat we're doing a whole bunch of things and again these questions are on the app but it's

[24:30]
basically their story where they come from uh what being a part of a previous church does their pastor know they've left the other church uh and sort of that kind of handover moment uh it's i try to work out do they get the gospel uh what does it mean to be a christian uh what do you love about jesus what does he mean to you so sort of diagnosing do i need to then orientate them to an explore course after this, or are they? Yep, they get the gospel, so we can continue. And then it's helping them join a Bible study, asking them about giving in terms of do you have any reservation,

[25:02]
the questions about money at church, and the fifth and great thing, serving. So presumably, they would have read this booklet, and then it's in that conversation saying, hey, is anything that you've served in the past that you might be keen to do, maybe something you want start new, anything in the book that you think, that really stands out to me. And so it's then got conversation, because I mean, look, you could do a spiritual gifts questionnaire, a questionnaire, right, online, I don't find them all that helpful, right? Mainly because they're sort of American, and I don't really understand

[25:33]
the American language in some ways, but it's the jargon. But I feel like a conversation is so much better in terms of helping someone begin that process of working out, where, what are my gifts, how can I start and so from there oh sorry and can i just say one more thing on that i find 80 of the time when i'm doing this and by the way this conversation in our context is done by a partial team so ministers student ministers interns uh in in other contexts they get emotionally intelligent high capacity

[26:10]
mature saints people in the church to do this in our context we get partial staff to do it and And inevitably, 80% of the time, they will always say, when talking about serving, but what are the needs at church? You know, where are the gaps? And there's something natural there where you think, oh, great, well, here it is. You can do this, this, this, this. But resist that and reorientate the conversation. Actually, I want to start with a place of what do you think you're gifted in? What do you think you're passionate in? What excites you?

[26:41]
I mean, this happened the other day. I was talking to Raymond, having one of these post-blogging catch-ups. and he would say the same thing. He said, I presume you probably need help in welcoming. And I said, no, Rem, what are you interested in? He said, well, I'm really excited about AV, but I presume you don't have needs there. And I was like, well, for a start, we do. But that is where, if you feel like that, then do that because they will last longer in that ministry than just filling gaps. Then fourth step is passing on that information. So they say,

[27:11]
actually I'm interested in kids ministry, actually I'm interested in welcoming ministry, actually I'm interested in doing explore ministry, then it's passing on to that ministry leader. And this is trust, right, where I'm passing this person on to you and that they will begin the process of reaching out to them and onboarding them, working with children's checks if that needs to happen. That's sort of our journey, right? It's four steps. It has borne a lot of fruit. and to be honest, I don't mind what journey you go on, but I do think a journey that is clear and

[27:42]
open and that they can trust that when they're stepping, taking a step forward of, I wanted this church to be my church, they will go on a journey that they know that people follow them up and that it's clear and they can trust the system in terms of like, I will find my place in this church family. I think I might leave it there, but just a final observation is, as I said, But conversations, I think, are key because it's our theology in action. And so when it comes to recruiting members of your church who are not serving,

[28:15]
I do think probably the best way is actually just those conversations. I've noticed you're not serving. Oh, sorry, even this happened the other day on Sunday. There's a guy who had been at church for a while. I was hesitant to ask him because I knew he was busy. But in the conversation, say, hey, just want to give you opportunities anyway you want to serve. And he just said, look, I can't do much, but I'm interested in just doing a logistical role on a Sunday. And that was through a conversation. He would never have responded to a call out. He would never have responded to an email,

[28:46]
but to a conversation he does. So I do think conversations are the key. All right. Well, just give me a second to open up. I think James has given us some really helpful things to think about how we get people, right, recruit people and get them involved in serving. What do they want to do? and I'm just going to spend a little bit of time now talking about once they're recruited, once they've expressed an interest in serving somewhere, then what do we do? How do we actually get them engaged and involved in that? So at Kennel Eye Gardens where I work, we do that

[29:19]
with a teams-based approach to ministry. I think Graham talked a little bit about teams-based ministry yesterday but as a bit of a summary, a teams-based approach to ministry I think builds on the often more traditional roster-based system of serving by focusing on getting people to work together, to love and care about their ministry and to take ownership of their ministry as a team. And teams-based ministry has a framework for leadership. It involves different roles within teams

[29:51]
where team leaders or leaders of leaders are tasked with encouraging and leading their team. Sorry, I've got some slides as well. All right, Teams Face Ministry, sorry. All right, so you might think, why Teams? One of the things I've loved this week is being reminded that the outcome of the serve area is not simply to get jobs done at our churches, but it's about seeing every member of our church growing to become fully formed disciples of Christ.

[30:24]
and a part of this being formed and a part of this growing is their ability to serve God with their whole lives and to serve each other. So a few years ago we at Kernel Light Gardens we moved to this teams-based approach to serving and we did it after attending a conference on the topic of teams. We were quite captured by the outcome of the serve area and I think we came away feeling pretty convinced that there was more that we could be doing in this area. There was

[30:55]
more that we could do to love people and more that we could do to disciple them through the serve others purpose. So just for a little bit of context, up until we decided to make this change, we had a pretty highly centralised way of serving. You could summarise it by saying that we had a pretty good process for getting stuff done and getting roles filled. Each week our church manager would send out a request to our church members and when they got it they would either click yes

[31:26]
which meant they could serve on Sunday or they would click no which meant that our church manager would then send a request to someone else. And we used this system for about five years but by 2018 we'd grown as a church and the puzzle of putting together the 70 odd people that we needed each Sunday had become both challenging and I think more importantly it became really limiting for people and for our ministries and so after this conference and hearing how some other

[31:59]
churches had set out to do teams ministry we decided to implement implement it ourselves and we hoped that this shift, that this would help us shift the focus in ministry in our church from a list of jobs to be done on a Sunday to encouraging and equipping God's people to love and own their ministry and to grow together as they did that. So the way that we did it, I'll give you a brief summary of this because we will talk about it a bit more in a workshop this afternoon called Ross with the Teams. So if I skip over any details,

[32:34]
you're welcome to either ask questions or come along to that. It's worth saying at this point that this was not a small change for us. We had built a particular culture of serving in our church and it wasn't exactly an unhealthy culture. We had lots and lots of really faithful people who loved God and who wanted to serve and did it graciously and cheerfully. But we did all the thinking for them.

[33:04]
We told them when to be there, we told them what to do, we told them how often to come. And so changing that culture that we had created was a very big shift in our church family. And we did pour a significant amount of time and resources into it. And to be honest, very honest actually, it's still a work in progress three years later. I think it's well worth it, but it is a time investment. one of the first things that we did was we started to work out a fairly significant change

[33:37]
management process and the first thing on our list was to think about communication how are we going to communicate this change to our church family and I think we opted for the you know the change management principle of over communication rather than under communicating so we we invited every single person in our church to what we called a vision dinner we got really good food we tried to make it really nice we did lighting and tablecloths in the hall and we said to people we'd really love you to even think about you know getting babysitters

[34:10]
and coming along to this like this is going to be a big change in our church we tried really hard to get everyone there and I think actually a lot of people came to that thinking oh wow they're going to tell us that we're planting soon or we're doing something you know like a new church and we talked about rosters to teams as we called it. We called it Where To Next but we told them about teams which I think was okay. It wasn't a bad surprise for them but not what they were expecting.

[34:40]
In addition to these dinners we also organised individual catch-ups with our most sort of on-board key people in our church. We wanted to sit down with each of them and talk to them about what teams would look like, ask them if they had any questions or any ideas to offer, and also ask them to consider what it might look like and whether they were willing to lead one of our teams. We also talked about it as a whole church in emails. We sent out emails. And we also put together what we called a vision document,

[35:11]
which we sent out early in the year, which I think from memory was about five or six pages long. We packed quite a lot into it. But we addressed that to every household and we sent it off or put it in people's hands to make sure that everyone got this communication. And in this communication, the thing that we tried really hard to do was to tell people the reason why we were making this change. We wanted them to know that it wasn't simply a structural change to the way that we served, but that this was a gospel-driven change.

[35:44]
It was how we as a church hoped to help disciple people better in love and service and to build community in a more fuller way and to reach out to our community with the good news of the gospel. As I said, I'll leave those details there. Our senior pastor, Matt, will talk about them a bit in the workshop and he tells it much better than I do. So, I'll leave some things for him. As well as communicating with our church family about this,

[36:15]
we also spent a lot of time thinking about how we could support every person who joined one of these new teams to think about what it meant to be a valuable part of that ministry. How could they play a meaningful role in their team? Because this change in the way people approach serving was one of the deep changes that we wanted to make. To see people relating to each other as a team, a team with a common purpose, and a team who work together. And so to do that,

[36:48]
we focused on five key areas of what it looked like to be a ministry team member. Now, those five areas, I'm going to try and use this thing again. there we go thank you those five areas that we focused on were we said to people you can serve your team by loving them communicating with them growing with them resourcing them and

[37:19]
understanding your role so I'll talk a little bit about each of those things um because this was the culture that we wanted our teams to embrace. This is what they wanted to do, we wanted them to do. So loving your team means get to know your team, connect with them relationally, talk about what's been going on in your lives, what are you struggling with, what are you rejoicing in. We thought this was a really great way for people who are new to our church to be able to be welcomed and be in community much quicker than they might have been if they weren't a part of a team.

[37:53]
the communicating with your team we said to people we'd love you to be talking with your team talk to them about your availability to serve share ideas with your team about ways that you can help your ministry grow and talk to each other to work out those problems that arise there were times when things went wrong or didn't go right in ministries and it was always staff who were the first point of call for that people would come straight to us with you know oh this didn't work or this isn't going to go right and we said to people we would love you, you guys are the

[38:28]
people who are passionate about this ministry, you know it better than we do, we would love you to be talking about those things, have those conversations with each other. We also said to people we'd love you to be growing, growing in your ability to serve, so getting better at doing your role, working out what does it look like, where would you like to be trained, what could you do better, how could you help someone else do it better. And we said we'd love you to resource your team. So the best way

[38:59]
to resource your team is to be there. That's the first thing. So when your team is on, it'd be great if you could be there. But if you can't, then part of your resourcing your team could be that you arrange a swap with someone else from a different team. Ask your team whether they think that will be helpful. And we said to people, staff and leaders, we are here to help you, but we would love you to have a go at doing this first. And then the last one there is understanding. So

[39:30]
understanding the purpose of your team. Know what it is that your ministry is trying to do. And ask yourself and your team, are we currently doing that? Are we achieving that outcome? If you're thinking about changes to your ministry, do they add to the purpose of your team or do they take away from the purpose of your team? So work out what it is you're trying to do as a ministry area and grow in that understanding. So this is how we wanted people to start thinking.

[40:02]
So we created a summary document of these points. it doesn't look quite like that but we gave it to everyone with a bit of an explanation about what those five things were I have put a copy of the document that we made in the app so if you want to have a look at it you're welcome to see how we talked about it how we explained it and you can adapt it to suit yourself but we said to everyone please read this read it take it home talk about it put it on the fridge we'd love it to be in the front of your mind so these key areas were a big part of us establishing a culture of healthy teams

[40:37]
and where we've seen teams doing things doing these things and relating in this way we are seeing people who are joyfully serving and we're seeing ministries growing and changing for the better but this little document wasn't a one-off thing that we did and then we just thought oh well, that's it, people will get it. We thought, that's not going to work. So once we'd given everyone these key points and we'd put people into teams, and most of our teams were up and running,

[41:08]
we gathered all our team members from every team. Didn't matter if you were coffee or you were welcoming or you were set up. We invited them to come along to a team member training day. And at this training event, we talked to everyone about this new team culture that we were working towards so that everyone heard it from us and that everyone could be on the same page about it. And once we'd given them a bit of a spiel about what that looked like, we then got them to break into their teams.

[41:39]
And the first thing we said to them in their team was, introduce yourself. It sounds like that's fairly obvious, but we would have had people in ministries who had been serving in that ministry for, you know, a couple of years, but didn't actually know everyone else who served in that ministry because the roster had never made them cross over. So we said to them, get to know each other, introduce yourself, make sure you know who you are. And then once they'd introduced themselves and met each other, we asked them to talk about their specific team.

[42:10]
We asked them to talk about what was the purpose of their team. Could they articulate it together? We asked them to talk about how they as a team could be living out those five things, the loving, communicating, et cetera. and we asked them what changes they would like to see in their ministry area to make it better and not just what changes they wanted but how they could start to make those changes happen and this training day I think was a super encouraging moment in our in the life of our

[42:42]
church as people grabbed on to the purpose of their ministry and began to work out how their team could work on that ministry and what they could do to make it better and care for each other. Some of the conversations that came from that day was such a joy to be a part of. I remember talking to our CREACH team probably a few weeks after that meeting and they'd met in their team and they'd obviously talked a bit more as time went on and they came to me and said, Katie, we've got all these ideas about CREACH, there's all these things that just aren't working.

[43:15]
it's not accessible for prams it's not this we haven't got that in the cupboard this doesn't work and I was like okay great that's fantastic and then they said but we've also got some ideas of how to fix it we're going to get this done and we're going to buy one of these and we're going to do that is that okay and I said yeah of course it's okay like all those things are really wonderful so it was great and then they just went ahead and they did some of those things and they built a ramp to go up to our creche area and they bought some new things for the cupboard and And, yeah, so it was a really great moment of just seeing a team that was owning their purpose

[43:48]
and actually willing to do something about it. As an ongoing thing, and it's definitely a bit of a work in progress as I talk about this, we are hoping to continue training around this culture. We're slowly putting together some short videos for our people that we're rolling out to them, giving out to them to watch and reflect on. We've been quite blessed to use some of the material from Reach Australia to make those. But we are hoping that over time, all of our teams will continue to watch, continue to think,

[44:22]
and reflect on what it looks like to make a valuable contribution to their team. So that's a bit about what we did. I'm just going to talk quickly for the last few minutes about how that looks for us today. Where do we kind of get to and where are we at? so at the moment all of our ministry areas serve as part of a team I don't think we have any ministry areas that aren't part of a team so that's our kids ministry all serve as a team our coffee our setup our what we call our mag teams but that's basically our Sunday

[44:56]
platform type team so band prayers service leader they all serve as part of one team it did take us a little while to roll out our teams we didn't do them all at the same time we did them over about nine months i think it took us to kind of do a few at a time talk about it learn from it do the next ones learn from them um in theory all of our teams have a team leader so there's that structure of having a leader and then team members um that's a bit of a work in

[45:27]
progress for us. We, you know, there's a natural attrition sometimes to the teams and people leave or move churches or things like that. So there's always, there's always room for that to grow but in theory every, every area, every team has a team leader and then a series of team members. And within each of our ministry areas we have four teams, one for each week of the month. So, for example, our setup teams, they're part of the setup team ministry,

[45:57]
but each sub-team then is either week one, week two, week three, or week four of the month. And so teams know exactly when they're rostered on from the beginning of the year. Like, they know that if they're team two, they're always on the second week of the month. So they can plan around that and they can organise themselves around that. It's good to say, too, we do actually place people into those teams. so at the beginning of each year we do spend a bit of time looking at putting teams into a team schedule I think it's um yeah we don't just recruit 10 or 12 people to a team and say okay here you go

[46:34]
you're the coffee team you guys go and work out when you're going to serve in the year and you know that'll be great um I can see that would end badly so we do still use a schedule or a roster system and we still do put people into those teams but once they're in them then they know that I've got a repetition of when they serve and they serve with the same people each week then. Our teams are responsible for communicating with each other. We provide a platform for this. We use Slack, but there's lots of other things that you can use as well.

[47:07]
And we encourage our teams to find a way to communicate with each other. So that might be Slack that we kind of give them or they might want to use something different and that's perfectly fine. but we just say to them we would love you to find a way that works for all of you to communicate to share ideas you know to communicate to encourage each other and where there are various roles involved in that ministry teams work out within themselves who can do that so they work so our coffee team for example there's a setup person a pack up person

[47:39]
and we say you're the coffee team for this week you guys work out how to love each other Work out what it looks like. Do you want to do set up because you're a morning person? Do you want to do pack up because you're not so much of a morning person? You guys work that out. And then there's room in there for variation as well so they can actually get to know what works for each other's families and they can work it out. And we have tried, as we've set up teams, with varying success at times, to make time and encourage teams to actually get together for meetings.

[48:11]
Meetings and catch-ups, I think, are a really key part of people working together and owning their ministry. Whether it's a meeting because there's actually things to be decided or changes to make, or whether it's just to hang out and get to know each other, just spend some time together and pray. We've had some great stories. There was a moment, I think a little while ago now, where we were changing in our church. We were changing where our kids' groups were meeting. so we've got five different kids groups and we decided that our little minis who are our little

[48:45]
preschool ones they had to leave the room they were in because our year five sixes needed it and we walked around the site thinking okay here's some ideas of where they could go we'll put them here or we could put them here and I had a meeting with our minis team and I gave them all these ideas I said look I'm really sorry that you have to move but you know you might want to go here or here's an idea or here's another one and they talked about it for a while and then they looked at me and said, well Katie, how about we just do this? Which was completely different to what I had, anything I had suggested. And I was like, oh that is so much better. I'm not sure how I never thought

[49:17]
of that. And so that's the decision that they made. They went with that and they're kind of tweaking that as they go. But they just looked at it and thought, well this is how we think this will work for us, so we're going to give it a go. Another thing that we try to do as a church is to communicate and let people know where the gaps are that we've got in serving. And we do that as part of the membership slash ministry interview that James talked about. That's our key way of letting people know where our needs are.

[49:49]
But we also do try and do it throughout the year as well, just a couple of times here and there, just to encourage people to consider the season of serving they're in and if they would like to make any changes. I think one of the key things to keep communicating in teams is purpose so helping teams to see and understand their purpose will be the thing that I think gets them to really work together when they have a purpose that they want to achieve then they'll make it work themselves now I'm

[50:21]
very aware that there is more that I could tell you about that and I've probably skipped over some very big details. There are stories I could tell about more encouraging moments. There are also lots and lots of things that we've learnt and lots of things that we would do differently. If I've somehow given you the impression that we've got it all sorted, well don't believe me because there's lots that we're still doing but we think it's a journey that's really worth being on. So hopefully that gives you a bit of a big picture. I'm going to get you now just to spend

[50:52]
some time talking to each other and there's a question there. I'd love for you just to spend a bit of time thinking about a particular ministry area in your church, an area that has people serving and then think about how that area might grow or benefit if all of those team members felt ownership over it or if all of those team members were doing the five things that we talked about in terms of caring and loving, communicating with their team, how might that make a difference

[51:23]
to that ministry? We'll give you about five minutes and then I'm going to hand to Scott. We're going to shift thinking now into developing leaders but I hope what you're starting to see as we go through that serve other area in a church 125 to 250, you're seeing the value of what you can think about when you give someone a little bit of time thinking into these things, thinking on the ministry and how we can actually really do a good job of loving people well

[51:56]
by intentionally thinking about some of our structures and our strategies and our systems under God. It's also the kind of what we've broken this up deliberately into recruiting teams and then developing leaders because we're trying to break down the serve others area. So we've talked about breaking down church to a degree into significant purposes that we think individual disciples want to be on about but also the corporate church ought to be on about

[52:27]
according to God's Word. Although you don't have to structure church around that way, there's loads of other ways you can do that. The Pentagon of Power, it's not the only way. but it's a it's a helpful tool to think through things and then as you dig into the serve others area where you're seeing how then having someone overseeing that can think about breaking that down further into to pieces to deliberately think about and so that's what we're trying to show you anyway but as I said before we planted out of Hunter Bible Church as a campus plant which meant that

[53:00]
We had, when we started five years ago, HBC Lake Mac, it meant that we inherited a whole bunch of conviction and culture and constructs as we came into this campus plant already. And so a helpful framework to think through leadership development that is from a book called Design to Lead. I'm going to quote some books and I'm only ever going to remember like one of the author's names so Kevin Peck and maybe Eric Geiger are the two guys who wrote that it's through Lifeway don't

[53:35]
agree with everything theological theologically in the book but a helpful book to reflect on leadership within the church and this framework comes out of that and we found this really helpful to think through our ecosystem of leader leadership development you really need to have these three pieces going in regards to conviction, like what are our theological convictions about building leaders? Then out of that, what's the culture? What's the actual behaviour, the shared kind of attitudes that we see in the life of church? And then what are the constructs or the plans

[54:08]
or the strategies that actually feed backwards to help facilitate culture? But what the picture does also show, we're going to speak mostly about some constructs in a second, where people want about the Word of God and the sovereignty of God and those convictions are central and then the culture flows out of that and then constructs are helpful but not primary and so hear me communicate that really clearly. As someone who's not a huge fan personally of constructs and those sexy words

[54:43]
of systems and structures, I've learned to see their value in submission to God's Word and thinking about, or another, that helpful analogy, trellis and the vine. Okay, the vine, the people work, the Word of God work, that's really important but trellises have a place, trellises are helpful to think about in regards to loving the flock and loving God's people. And so as we planted HBC Lake Max, we were really, I think we had this really strong conviction for leadership development. We're really fortunate to have a uni-church congregation as part

[55:18]
of our wider church, which means we've got a lot of people in their 20s that get keen about serving Jesus, which means we've got a lot of enthusiastic people and a culture around that congregation where we're really seeking to raise up leaders. But that actually flows through the rest of church, having that culture coming through. And so we had these theological convictions that while God doesn't need any one of us, you know, little old us, schmucks like me, doesn't need any one of us, he still chooses to use his people for the sake of his kingdom and for the sake of

[55:52]
his glory. And part of his means within the local church is to have shepherds over the flock and to have leaders. And so we've got those commands like 2 Timothy 2 to entrust the gospel on for generations to come until Jesus returns. And so that strong convictions, I think, was throughout our church and that's a foundation that's really important to have when we're thinking about leadership development within a church. A couple other convictions that is worthwhile saying as we

[56:22]
go into some constructs, character is way more important than competency, just thought I'd say that. But the other helpful thing that Graeme mentioned yesterday is we're not just thinking about the convictions in leadership when we want to develop leaders, we want to think about the whole Pentagon of Power, the whole ecosystem and how things like being on mission will actually generate zeal to want to take on more responsibility for the sake of the kingdom and actually raise up leaders by working on all those parts within a church. So we had this convictions translated over

[56:58]
which also meant that we had pretty strong culture of leadership development particularly personally with key leaders in church there was this real personal value on developing leaders and one-to-one mentoring and coaching and all those kind of things. MTS has been a really strong culture of that partly because of Unichurch but that's actually impacted we've wanted to see that grow our other congregations as well and so by the time we planted Hunter Bible Church Lake Mac I think we

[57:30]
trained 50 MTSs over 20 years by that stage which was great and we have a few cultural sayings that we try and push around our our team so things like character over competency or character as king can you bring someone with you to do that so just a little reminder here and there maybe it's a little cuttings sometimes but can you bring someone with you to do that come on keep keep thinking about leadership development uh can you think about working yourself out of a job um so can you raise people up because there's loads more things we can find for you to take

[58:05]
responsibility of if you can work yourself out of a job next generation now so constantly thinking not just for our youth and kids as part of that next generation but then leadership development and we also talk about wanting to be a church that sends. So if you think about the Reach Australia vision that we're all here kind of thinking about this week to see another 200 churches planted, where are those leaders going to come from? And so we don't want to just think about leadership development for the sake of our little patches wherever we are.

[58:36]
We want to be thinking about leadership development for the sake of the harvest, which is all nations, not just Australia, but it's okay that we think about Australia. but so we so we had this strong conviction strong culture but in terms of constructs when we planted there wasn't a lot going on there which actually leads to a bit of frustration because you get you know you get people keen and then what do you do with them and like it gets a bit murky if someone's like if someone wanted to give up a day of day a week to serve at church what do

[59:09]
what do we actually get them to do how do we think about that what do we train them with and so mts was clear and strong that was kind of a strategy or a construct that we had in place but things were pretty messy within our church and so what i'm going to get you to do is a quick exercise now this is there's actually a page for this in your um in the app if you want to look at it or you can just draw this out but i'll talk you through there's three steps step one's just to list out some of the ministries across your church now you're probably only going to get time

[59:42]
to do this for one or two ministries, so don't worry about listing them all out. But it's helpful to do for your whole church. So list out all your ministries and then brainstorm within that first box or that second row, what are the different roles within that ministry? So try and name them, what are all the different roles within that particular ministry? And if you get time in that five minutes, are there layers within those roles? Like, do certain people kind of sit over other

[1:00:13]
people or that kind of thing? Do you have some clear layers within that role? So just have a crack at brainstorming that for five minutes, just to get the juices flowing for what we're going to talk about next, and then I'll bring us back in five. All right, bring it back in, everyone. I know that's not enough time to do a good job of that, but hopefully that gives you a bit of a tool that you could go away with to think some more about the ministries within your church at the moment.

[1:00:43]
Let me tell you what happened when we did this at our church. I did it, then presented it to our team. We had 113, this is a larger church, 20 years, 113 different labels for roles. going on across our church. And it was a mess. And the language we were using just didn't signify anything. It was really complex in terms of depending on what ministry team

[1:01:16]
you were looking at. So we had trainees who were learning how to welcome in kind of in community team. But then in the kids ministry team, we had trainees who were actually leading kids but were still, for some reason, trainees at that point. We had coordinators. So you could have had a coordinator, someone coordinating baking for morning tea or something like that. And then we had the language of coordinator for someone leading a whole ministry. They're pretty significantly different roles, but still both, they are coordinating.

[1:01:49]
And then we had helpers for some roles. We had pastors. We had a welcome pastors for a little bit. Leaders in training. I loved our welcome team also had SWOT team members. I can't remember. It was an acronym for something. Has anyone heard that? Does anyone know the acronym? It's louder, louder. I couldn't hear you. No, you made it up. All right, good on you. Captains was another one.

[1:02:20]
one. So anyway, it was a mess though and what it showed us though is that as we'd grown as a church, we drifted into complexity and our different ministries had actually, not in theology but in practice, we'd actually divided a little bit or siloed is the kind of of nerd word in organisational thinking. So we planted Lake Mac. Notice that we had a problem.

[1:02:50]
When we planted Lake Mac, we kind of had some key people for the Pentagon of Power that we threw. We refer to the M's, so we had them overseeing the M's. But then underneath them, it was pretty murky. And then we came across the idea of a leadership pipeline. There's a book on the leadership pipeline. It's a pretty dry read, but if you're a bit of a nerd, you might like it. Ram Sharan, Stephen Drodder, and a third guy I can't remember.

[1:03:22]
But they're the main guys. It's helpful to think about. It's in a business world, so it doesn't translate fully into the life of church. We've got to submit it under the Word of God if we're going to bring that thinking back in. but it brought really helpful thinking to how we can be a bit more structured and on the same page with leadership development. So I'm going to speak a little bit about that now. As Christians, so we rightly hold that for leadership character as king and we want to test people's godliness,

[1:03:53]
that's kind of fundamental to moving someone into leadership. But when it comes to competencies or skills or gifts of leaders, we can tend to think of leadership development more like a pathway, like a flat kind of thing than a pipeline. So we tend to think about moving people to the right in discipleship and godliness and that is good and important and significant and primary. But say we've got a welcoming team at church and for whatever reason we had someone leading the welcoming team but now they've moved

[1:04:25]
on or they've moved away or something's happened, what do we tend to do in that moment? Well, We look at our team members and then we see Sarah. Oh, how good Sarah, right? She's a godly woman. She's by far our best welcomer. She's friendly, organised, creative. And so we go, here's our new team leader. It's definitely got to be Sarah, right? She's ticking all the boxes, or is she? And so then we have a conversation and we tend to throw poor Sarah into the deep end and say,

[1:04:57]
good luck to you, you know, go for it. that's what we tend to do. Now if that's all we've done, we're going to set poor old Sarah up for failure, aren't we? We haven't trained her, we haven't gradually handed over responsibility but one of the biggest things we've done is assumed that what made Sarah a good team member is going to make her a good team leader and that's the assumption that the leadership pipeline pushes against and helps us think into a bit more. What it does is clarify that it's not

[1:05:30]
only character and ministry specific skills that we want to be thinking about but we also want to be thinking about leadership skills because the leadership pipeline helps us to see that it's a little bit more nuanced and the particular skills that would make you a good welcomer won't necessarily translate to making you a good team leader over welcomers. And so let me, three kind of insights that the leadership pipeline brings. What it actually, it clarifies leadership layers

[1:06:01]
that you can have within any organisation, but I think can be helpful to think about in leadership within the church. So leading self or team members. One thing to say as we look at this as you move up a leadership pipeline you're not growing in godliness automatically all right we're not communicating that there are people in all of our churches who aren't serving formally in a ministry team who are some of the most godly people we know so let's not assume that as as we

[1:06:32]
do that but leading leading self team members leading others or leading teams team leaders leading leaders we've used the language around reach australia here of area leaders leading ministries ministry leaders and then leading the church senior leaders and you can see there how leading yourself a team member even to go then to be a team leader the the chinks in the pathway trying to communicate there's a new set of skills we've got to think about here and there's a whole

[1:07:03]
shift that I'll talk about in a moment. Now as you see this, the goal is not to get as many layers within your church. When we started implementing it, I actually think we thought that and so all of our ministries, you know with 10 people in them, were starting to think well how do we create these layers? That's not the purpose of this. It's kind of like a Constantine to thinking about as we grow or teams grow we might implement further layers but you actually want to keep layers as minimal as possible because the more layers you put in the more communication the more

[1:07:38]
kind of complexity comes in and so for as long as possible you want to keep it as flat as possible but this is where it doesn't translate fully into the life of a church because in an organization people are working full-time and so they can think about how to employ people and train people full time we're trying to do that with people who are already working full-time for the majority of them and then are giving us or giving Jesus time on top of their full-time job to spend.

[1:08:09]
And that means that within a church, often to break up tasks and roles, which could take 80 hours or something like that, we're going to need more people to do that than in an organisation, which kind of means that our layers will tend to go deeper more quickly than in an organisation where people can work full-time. But don't see this and go, I've got to get five layers in my ministry team. Don't think that way. Keep it as flat as you can.

[1:08:41]
Now, the second helpful concept is that as people, rather than being that pathway kind of thinking and moving people to the right, when we take on more responsibility, we're taking on more scope and complexity. and there's three key shifts that go on for a leader that they have to navigate if they're going to grow into that role. Assuming godliness, assuming those things that we've tested already.

[1:09:11]
The first one is time, okay? So you no longer spend time to move from a team member to a team leader. You no longer spend time doing the ministry. rather now you want to be spending time organising, training and equipping others, the team members to do the ministry. Now you might be, say you're a team leader over a band, you might still be a team member in the band playing guitar, so you have one hat, but then you might then come out of that and put your team leader hat on.

[1:09:43]
As a team member, you're spending time playing guitar and getting good at guitar and rocking up on time. but as a team leader you've got to be thinking longer term about your team and how you're developing them equipping them and discipling them in the context of a team culture the second shift is skills so there's a whole new set of skills that you've got to navigate and grow in at each layer so bringing for a team leader bringing new people onto a team fostering relationships becomes

[1:10:20]
a whole new set of skills that you may not have had strongly before. Envisioning people now and encouraging them how their service is in the cause of the gospel and making disciples and bringing glory to Jesus, giving clarity to their roles and helping them understand that, empowering others, envisioning others, making decisions about middies and where we're going to go and things like that and taking responsibility and thinking creatively. They're kind of navigating that for a team. So There's a whole new set of skills there.

[1:10:52]
The third shift is value. And this is kind of the most crucial one. It's the heart change. And this is the one I think we wrestle with personally as leaders in ministry. I love evangelism. I really, if you could, I just, I love sitting down and sharing the gospel with people who don't know Jesus. On Thursday after the conference, I'm taking a mate to the Life Series. and I think God's softening his heart and I'm so stoked he's come to the Life Series

[1:11:22]
and he's my friend because I have to go and help do the evangelism and that kind of thing. I love that kind of stuff. But as leaders who are seeking to equip people for works of service, you've got to go through that heart change to be more effective for the sake of the kingdom. Can I multiply other people in that as well? Can I equip them for that? Can I work through others? and when you're passionate it doesn't mean you're giving up I don't think God calls any one of us to give up on evangelism by the way I think we have to model the way on that but it does mean

[1:11:57]
we can't necessarily spend all our time doing that if we're shepherds of God's flock or team leaders seeking to equip others it's that heart change of I can't just be on the coalface doing it all because sometimes that's pride and selfishness driving that as well I've got to move through and humbly think about can I equip others for this as well and that's a real gear change for people to grasp because if I keep coming in and doing the ministry that I've recruited you to do then I'm actually not equipping you and I'm saying you're not needed or you're not part

[1:12:29]
of the body of Christ so that's value so Sarah Wright she's still gonna want to in the welcome team she still wants to value welcoming and the goal of seeing people loved as they come into church but she's now wanting others to step into that as a team leader and so her time moves from welcoming to organizing and leading the team for them to welcome well she might still jump in at points but this helps us think about intentionally identifying and building leaders and particularly

[1:13:02]
some of the skills that are required for that and some of the the heart movements that people have to go through to take on more responsibility it helps us to refine what we're equipping them in and how to equip them through that shifts. And it not only helps, like we found it was helping our staff lift out of things or our keep, but it also our ministry leaders that we'd kind of placed over the ems. It was starting to help them work on the ministry more and not just in it. So that's the second key thing. The third key thing is the idea that then as you start to,

[1:13:37]
you probably started to think about this a little bit as I was talking, but a team leader in welcoming is going to have some crossover of skills with a team leader in music or a team leader in kids. Now what we tend to do in church is we have, like we might have all right discipleship training but then what we were finding is a lot of our time was spent on the ministry specific training. So the kids team would get together and think about how they love kids and do them really good. Then the small groups would get together and think about how they do small

[1:14:09]
groups really well but there was actually this common piece across all of our ministries of leadership skills and training now there's another book um and i dave orrick is the only guy i can oh and sweetman maybe um leadership code is the book that's where they propose a figure for this which you may have heard before that 70 of leadership skills is common across whatever organization you're a part of, again this is a secular book, 70% is common and then 30% is specific to whatever

[1:14:43]
your organisation is. Now I think it's a little bit more nuanced than that in regards to the fact that if you're a team leader in a band, I think it's probably less than 70-30. Yes you're starting to grow in leadership skills but you still need a significant amount of ministry skills being that close contact to a team ministry specific skills being that close contact but as you start to if you do have more layers within your team as you start to move up those layers the ministry specific

[1:15:19]
skills become less important and the leadership skills become more important alongside the most important thing, godliness, that we're continuing to grow in that. And so the Pin Up Boy example that we have in our church of this is Sam Hilton, who was our mission pastor. And we started playing with this and we're like, you know what, let's have a crack. Let's see if this is true. And so we made him, he was on holidays at the time and I put his name forward to take over magnification

[1:15:54]
music and he sucks at singing and he can't play an instrument he's hopeless and so am I so that's all right um but they the man when he joined the mag team they actually got him up the front and tried to get him to play a cajon and he was like just no rhythm whatsoever um but he's he's a fantastic uh godly guy who does a great job of building teams and so when he moved across to the mag team he actually has done a fantastic job of growing that team with no magnification skills

[1:16:28]
now he's got people within the team with those skills who can complement him and this is the body of christ working together and how we think about leadership development the ecosystem now those common competencies reached some churches from reach australia got together to think about there's books as well like the leadership challenge the leadership code talks about some of these common competencies. But we kind of said, okay, there's discipleship. That's just a core thing for all leaders to have.

[1:16:58]
That's growing in godliness. That's thinking about shepherding, teaching God's word. And then this is simple. It's oversimplified in some ways. It's always more nuanced than this. But generally, leaders need to grow in vision, strategy, teamwork, people development, and stewardship. and we can talk more about that. So they're the common competencies. So for us then at Hunter Bible Church, Lake Mack and across HPC, we saw this clarity start to come in

[1:17:30]
as we clearly implemented leadership layers across church and I had to become like the word Nazi kind of police. We've picked common layers across church. You weren't allowed to use coordinator for here and here and here. Get rid of coordinator, throw it in the bin. please stop using coordinator no you're not allowed to use coordinator anymore here's the it's literally been like that but that's been all right it's grown my patience and perseverance so praise god for that um and so initially what we also found is with around 80 members we kind of

[1:18:04]
at that start we'd for most of our ministries now not all some ministries will have more layers than others depends on the size of the ministry so but you're wanting clarity about the layers across the ministry. Some of our ministries moved to having three layers in them when we planted around the start of Lake Mack, senior leaders, team leaders, team members. And then as we grew around 125, apparently the growth barrier thing didn't go on this morning, but that's a common

[1:18:34]
growth barrier. There was a few sociological reasons that that was a growth barrier for us, but part of it was that we needed to move some of our teams to four layers. And some, like the Serve Others team, actually stayed at two layers throughout all this and still three layers now. But we moved some of our teams to four layers. So we went senior leader, ministry department leader, team leaders and team members. Now that's how we did things. Our churches will do things differently here.

[1:19:04]
The point is clarity about what you're doing, not comparison. clarity within your church not necessarily comparison um and that helped confirm some people um you know as we started to implement this oh okay maybe they're not they're godly but maybe they're not actually suited for this role they're actually better to keep at the coalface or they just they're just that evangelist who can't work through not wanting to be on the coalface you know what that's okay let's free them up to go nuts in evangelism it brings that clarity to

[1:19:36]
then how we're seeking to pass the flock. Now, I just want to finish very briefly talking about that leadership development ecosystem and then we want to spend some good time in Q&A. Let me give you six key things in terms of leadership development ecosystem very quickly that helps us kind of systems, that helps us keep leadership development on the agenda. So the first one is we want to keep planning for growth as a church. Now why? Because theologically we believe we are now in the day of salvation,

[1:20:12]
this is the age of the resurrection and God is growing his kingdom. He may choose to bless us, he may choose not to, but we're going to plan for growth to think so that if God does bless people coming into the kingdom, people seeing people saved, we're ready to love them. and so I've put in your apps another tool that we use which is just this kind of so this is how we think about it we sat down and did this in May so with the key leaders Hunter Bible Church Lake Mac we're currently 192

[1:20:45]
it's an arbitrary figure but if God grows us by 10% we'll be 212 by the end of 22 and by the end of 23 another 10% would be 233 Now, God may not answer what, like, he may not do that. And we'd love for more growth than that, to see more people become Christians. But that's a rough figure that we're just using in pencil to work with. And so then we go, okay, for our ministries then, depending on the layers we have,

[1:21:16]
what do we have now? What are our needs going to be? And so what plans do we need to make in light of that growth coming? and so for example in small groups we've currently got 16 small group leaders at Lake Mack we probably need two more this year for growth this year if that happens and to think about growth for 23 we probably need to start the year with 20 next year so that's four that we've got to find and then what we find is because we're monitoring this about you know 75 percent stay within the team and 25

[1:21:54]
percent will leave the team at the end of the year and so we need that's 12 of our current leaders will continue with a need for 20 next year so that means we know to be planned for that growth we need to train up at least eight small group leaders this year and get them ready for next year but we'll do 10 just in case so that's kind of the thinking that we do small groups is the easiest

[1:22:26]
one to do do it with because it tends to be linear but it's not the same for a music team because you tend to not need as much growth they're more based around how many services a church might have and we can talk more about that. So that's number one, the system for identifying leaders that we have and we often talk about calendarising leadership development personally, so I need to make time in the calendar to do that kind of one-to-one stuff. We also think about calendarising leadership development as a corporate kind of church and so we have an annual church rhythm,

[1:23:03]
I've put a serve calendar in your notes to have a look at for how you can actually think about the rhythm of a simple one for serve across the year but in terms of leadership identification we do a key leaders gathering in March where we gather people that's a cultural thing and a conviction thing of trying to encourage them spur them on let them into the life of church some big things that we've got going on to help them lead change in our church in May with our key leaders we do growth planning so some of the stuff we talked about and then we get them to personally

[1:23:36]
and so there's a tension of the sausage factory that we're talking about a little bit in terms of the constructs but then what we're wanting to do alongside that is to get them to personally identify some key people that they're going to invest in and do that one-to-one kind of training and development and coaching as well and so then out of that in July or August we sit down and think about the following year, about the needs we're going to have in leadership and we have a discussion about who's been encouraging us and who we think could actually take on more

[1:24:09]
responsibility, who we've seen have the godliness and the competencies. We have a Serve Sunday in September and then we do intentional recommitments with everyone in our all our ministry teams including leadership placements for the year ahead. Now that's probably more a larger church rhythm than just for Lake Max so that's something we do as a wider HPC but the point of this all is to say you will have different contexts where you can put

[1:24:40]
leadership identification in your calendar or leadership training in your calendar and you want to be intentional about that and think about the rhythms of your year in your context for how you can actually put that on them on the agenda. I hope that sparked a lot of thinking and ideas. My team certainly had a lot to think about. Now, if you want help in how to move your church forward in mobilising people for the mission, we would love to have you in the Reach Australia Development Programme.

[1:25:11]
You can find out more at reachaustralia.com.au.