Southside Presbyterian Church grew from 100 to 300 people over three years, but interestingly, the pastors decided that they didn't need to grow the staff team. Instead, they've focused on ingraining a culture of teams, instead of having a philosophy of church members just being put on a roster.
Ross Wilson and Ben Mansfield (pastors at Southside) share:
- Their team dynamic has changed quite a bit over the years as Ross has sought to make the best of the team that he has.
- “You can have control or growth, but you can't have both.” Leadership can become a blockage for growth.
- It took 3 years to move from rosters to teams, because change takes time.
- The importance of understanding pain of changing needs to be less than the pain of not changing.
- How they started moving to teams with pre-existing teams like youth ministry.
- The importance of clarifying expectations of people on teams.
- Obstacles that needed to be overcome, like people not believing that a teams mentality would work.
- While they have grown from 100 to 300 people in their church they have not felt the need to grow the staff team.
- Giving people responsibility is the key to growth.
- Change happens slowly, one thing at a time.
SHOW NOTES:
Southside Welcoming Role Description
Reach Australia Framework ebook
Reach Australia National Conference 2024
Previous Podcasts:
The Importance Of Getting Job Descriptions Right
CREDITS:
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TRANSCRIPT:
The following is an uncorrected transcript generated by a transcription service. Before quoting in print, please check the corresponding audio for accuracy.
Pete
Welcome to the one thing a podcast designed to give you one solid practical tip for gospel said of ministry every week and the one things brought to you by reach Australia. And we would love to see thousands of healthy evangelistic and multiplying churches all over our country. That’s one thing. But I want to ask how well are we doing this?
And so we are spending a little bit of time talking with some churches around Australia to try to work out whether reach Australia has actually been helpful. Okay, So today we have been and also with us from Southside Presbyterian in Eight Mile Plains in Queensland. Welcome, guys.
Ben/ Ross
Hi.
Pete
Now we’re eight ball players. It’s like how far away is that from the CBD of Brisbane?
Ben/ Ross
Yeah, so we’re in Brisbane on the Southside, eight miles, surprisingly eight miles south of the city. We are in the suburbs.
Pete
It’s all in the name really, isn’t it?
Ben/ Ross
It is a bit of a flying, yeah.
Pete
So what’s, what’s it like to live in. Tell us a little bit about the suburb.
Ben/ Ross
Yeah, so it’s quickly changing suburb. So access to the city means lots of people live here, travel to the city to work. So pretty much where if you go north of us, to the city, it’s expensive. It’s that’s where everybody wants to live. South of us gets close to the Logan a bit more first home buyers or just allow a market.
Yes. That’s quite diverse where we are.
Pete
Excellent. Okay. So we’re going to we’re going to dig into a bit more about Southside Presbyterian, what that looks like. But for now, you have to play on another episode of the one Thing How is Reach Australia Help Southside Presbyterian Church. So, Ross, why don’t you tell us tell us a little bit about the history of the church.
How long was that the church been around for?
Ben/ Ross
AH so it was a church plant in 1984 which sort of kicked on a little bit, but then sort of died. I come along as a theological student, as candidate for ministry in 2003, and there were ten people, ten people. We had their own house on a bit of land. And from that time there was lots of change.
And the support from the elders to go make change or if doesn’t work, then to shut it down anyway. So we kind of had some freedom, like a church plant, you might say. And yeah, it got steadily grew us to move out of the house. We rented a Seventh Day Adventist church for five years, then sold that land and moved into our own place in 2015.
So yeah, it’s been a journey. It’s been it’s felt like three churches for three different churches in 20 years.
Pete
Yeah, I was going to say because you would have seen a lot of different stages to the church along the way. So tell us a little bit about what’s where are you at now? Like until how many congregation So are we running? Is that one, Is that many?
Ben/ Ross
NA So we have one service, which is right, 300 people, so 200 adults, 100 kids, a lot of young families, kids, ministries. Good. But we’ve bought a building that’s going to facilitate. We’ve had this mission for years and years to reach 1% of our community. That’s over 100,000 people live within 10 minutes of the church. So we want to reach a thousand people are committing that to God.
So, yeah, we’ve got this facility, that 450 seat auditorium. We’re going to have to move to three services to do that, and we’re steadily getting there. That’s good.
Pete
That sounds exciting. Ben, you’re also here with us. When did you come on board? Because I’m going to guess it wasn’t around 1984 now.
Ben/ Ross
That’s right. Yeah. So I’ve been at South Side for 14 years, so I did a, oh, 15 years. Sorry, but I started with an MTS 14 years ago. So I did two years of that and then three years at Bible College as a student. And then I’ve been full time. Yeah, for nine years. At the end of this year I’ve been on.
So that came towards the end of the the first building and then have been on that journey since.
Pete
I want to ask you guys a little bit about how team dynamics work in a moment, But first let me just kind of put in the other piece of the puzzle. How did you come to be involved with Reach Australia and what’s what sort of things have you done with Rich Australia?
Ben/ Ross
Yeah, that’s a big question. How it started was we were about maybe a bit over 100 people hit a bit of a growth barrier. We’re not. We knew that we were a good, comfortable family, church, family size, everybody knew everybody. But something had to change to push through that. At the time it was actually Geneva push ran their annual conference up here in Brisbane.
We went along to that and they were plugging, Hey, we’re going to start this team’s pastoring conference come along. And the theme was breaking our growth barriers. So at that time Ben was with us. It was like, Hey Ben, let’s go and check this out. You know, they might have something good to say, but, you know, let’s wait and see.
That will help. Yeah, that was good.
Pete
Yeah, good. And so did that. That changed the way that you two work together as a team. So. So some of the things that you learned from rich Australia and from that particular conference and since then, how has that affected the way that you guys have worked together?
Ben/ Ross
Yeah, I’ll go first. I’m sure Ben will have something to say about that.
Pete
So I suppose I rescued him from the fence. Yeah.
Ben/ Ross
We. We were a pretty typical senior pastor. Ben’s the youth guy. I preach every now and again. So, like, I had some admin help as well and but going to rage going, Oh man, this is on paper. There’s a few things we need to change. But knowing culturally in church, there’s a lot of things we have to change.
Which means my role is not just the senior pastor that oversees everything and Ben just shadows me. He had to do things that I’m not doing, so to complement each other. So that’s probably putting putting your finger on the biggest shift we’ve had to make in that the way we work together. Because I’m a Gen Xer, I’ve worked hard to get control, I’m level headed and I’ve got this young Gen Y guy that thinks he knows everything.
He’s got all these ideas and just, I can’t get out of the right quick enough. So I settle, settle down and get in line. But then I had to go, you know, I need him beside me working on this, capture his energy, his embrace, his enthusiasm. Yes. I mean, he brings a lot to the table that we had to we had to work together if this was going to work.
Yeah. So we actually I’m still a senior pastor, but we actually share responsibilities across the board. Yeah.
Pete
You know, I’m really trying to stop myself as a fellow Gen Xer to, you know, not say something rude about Gen Y and wanting to take over. And so think about being.
Ben/ Ross
Easy isn’t so easy.
Pete
Keep it, keep it younger. I’m just going to stop. Ben, Have you have you how did you how have you found that that transition in the way that the team operate like particularly between you and Ross?
Ben/ Ross
Yeah, Yeah. I think like difficult to be honest, especially early on, but I was always like when I, like I became a Christian listening to Driscoll, so I was always like pumped up on church planting and, you know, I can save the world and stuff like that. So. So when I finished college, I was, yeah, like, like I was kind of unhappily in a team, but like, luckily and I’m thankful to God for that and say God was shaping me in the middle of that.
And I think, yeah, I struggled with that for a long time because I wanted to do my own thing, as Ross mentioned. But it was good to be in a team and have someone I suppose, that can feel to that. But I think like the benefit of Ross is like Ross could see my strengths and was humble enough to allow me to actually try lots of different things and stuff like that.
So I’m grateful for that. But I think the line that I constantly used over the last nine years particularly was to Ross, you can have control or you can have growth, but you can’t have both. And it was something that I think might have maybe triggered Ross a little bit, but it was kind of like, you know, what do you want here in this church?
Do you want to grow or do you want to have control? Because yeah, if, if we’re actually going to get through where we want to go as a team, we need to we need to use other people in the middle of that.
Pete
Yeah, well Ross, that’s got to be really, that’s got to bite a little bit, doesn’t you can have control. I have growth, you know, I’m there with the little Mexican guy. Why can’t I have both?
Ben/ Ross
But we’re at a stage now. We’re actually I’m fighting it back to him. So I think that’s just right.
Pete
So it’s all coming back. That’s it? Yeah. Yeah. Now, some of the some of the things that you guys have, you’ve you’ve actually implemented some changes along the way for example, you’ve actually kind of developed a lot more in terms of ministry teams. Tell us a little bit more about that.
Ben/ Ross
Yeah. So when I first had the teams on paper shuffling from rosters to teams, not that hard, but realizing that there’s a lot of culture shift that goes along with that. And for us as a church that does rosters, they did rosters. We didn’t do a lot of things well like training up leaders that discipleship in the team, sharing the vision and outcomes, giving people ownership and responsibility of that ministries.
So we realized pretty early on when Ben and I saw this and the experience down at the at the Times pastoring conference was then this is going to take some time. So we talked to the elders about that and just go, man, this this is probably a three year project for us to actually implement teams. Ben took a lot of that.
Yeah, I think it was like, yeah, there was a lot of pain. I think, you know, one of the lines from Reach is the pain of not changing greater than the pain of changing. And so we had to help our church see that. And that started with our leadership teams and stuff like that. I remember sitting down with our admin and kids work is after kids work at the time, after one of the rage conferences is kind of speaking about moving to teams and at that stage we were.
Ross So one of the big jobs every quarter was our admin and our kids work. We would sit down and come up with rosters for the whole church and they used to hate it. It would take them about a week to do it. You know, you’re moving all these paces around and I remember sitting them in the meeting room talking to them about this, and both of them looked at me and just said, This is not going to work.
Ben/ Ross
You’re crazy for thinking about this. And I think actually there was a benefit to Ross and I doing that because I was able to have that conversation. But then we will be able to have the resilience, I think, and kind of the arm around the shoulder while we work through that sort of stuff. So we recognized that it would take some time and yet we just we worked with our key leaders first and foremost in that.
Pete
So did you do you actually stop and go, maybe this isn’t going to work, maybe this isn’t going to happen for our church. What kept you going through that?
Ben/ Ross
Yeah, I think we knew that the pain of not changing was great, and I think Ross and I had seen that as we went down to even kind of watch the team posturing and stuff like that. And there was this. Yeah, I think we both knew that the way that Ross is a working in our church, not only was it the time put into it was like lots, but our rosters went really they weren’t functioning the way that, you know, teams could.
And we knew that within our church we had lots of gifted people, but perhaps they weren’t being unleashed because they were, they were in a roster and they were just turning up doing things they weren’t passionate about, they weren’t excited about or they didn’t have ownership over. And so, yeah, so even though we saw that pain, we recognized the pain of not changing was just far greater.
Pete
You know, the things that So sorry. Ross Yeah, yeah.
Ben/ Ross
Just going to throw in there. I think talking to the elders, setting the bar like this could take three years, took the pressure off so if we tried something that didn’t work for us, go. So that’s okay. We’ve we’ve given ourselves time for this. We’re not rushing it. So yeah, I think that was in a sense gave us time to bring other people on board with us.
Pete
Yeah. Why did you choose three years? Like, was there a particular reason for that? We just thought, you know, one year we’re just going to make lots of mistakes. To get three is where we’re sort of pumping is it was a particular thinking behind three years.
Ben/ Ross
Well, I think there was the idea of you could go in Auburn all guns blazing and change all the rosters all at once and just it’s a systems change. But I think we realized pretty early there’s a culture that goes along with this that’s going to take time. So we would just get a bite off little bites one at a time, and that’s going to take three years.
Yeah. Yeah. And we, we didn’t one l church just yeah. To be to tell them to change you wanted to change the culture and just knowing that culture takes time. And so one of the key things that we did in the middle of that was we just, we sort of recognized that as, as Ross and I worked with our leaders and stuff like that.
We wanted to start with the low hanging fruit in our church as well, which in hindsight was really beneficial. So at the time I had come back from rage. I was the I oversaw the youth leadership team and that was it. That was kind of the only team in our church that functioned just because the nature of, you know, you weekly mate and stuff like that.
And so because of that and I had the freedom in youth to try some things and stuff like that, I just came back from the Rage of the teen pastoring conference as it was at the time, and basically implemented the five M’s in a youth setting because I could and I had young adults who were keen to try things and I was keen to try things and I was able to show them basically that I was limiting our growth as a youth leadership team.
And in that space at youth and, and doing that change, we watched our youth go from 12. We were a smaller church at that point, particularly a lot of younger kids. But we had 12 youth and within like nine weeks we had 25 youth at the end of the nine weeks. Wow, that’s amazing. Yeah. Yeah. And so what that did though, for us was it sort of gave us the momentum shift to required to when we were talking to people to actually go look at it actually works.
It’s not just working in other churches, working in our churches and that was that was really key for us then to, to move people along as we were trying to sell the like sell them on teams to actually look at work, see the fruit here and say, yeah, starting with the low hanging fruit was really key in changing that culture.
Pete
Yeah. So that’s the that’s where you started is it is, is with youth. Yep.
Ben/ Ross
Yeah. So we yeah, I mean Ross and I were working on our elders and our like our staff at the time, which was Yeah. As Ross mentioned before and admin and the kids work part time a couple of days a week. But yeah, in terms of on the ground and within the teams, just starting with the teams that we already had kind of the easiest teams that we could work with first.
And so yeah, it was youth.
Pete
That you mentioned that your admin children, she was sorry, I’m sure it was a she that.
Ben/ Ross
Changed from.
Pete
Oh did I Got your kids worker for example was a little skeptical it sounds like at the start. What what did it take for them to to be turned around and go. Actually yeah teams that Oh sorry I’m assuming they have turned around but what did it take for them to kind of go actually yeah. This kind of does work.
Ben/ Ross
Yeah. I think it was the like there was pain with our kids church so in the sense of we had lots and lots of kids but not many workers and rosters just went it was Rosses were really hard to manage that because you just had a few people that could actually do the work. Lots of kids, and it was just really intensive to get to that point.
So I think there was a there was an end in sight in terms of rosters like there’s going to come a breaking point within kids church anyway because of the amount of kids we had to work as. And so when we had all that other stuff going on with youth and then were able to work one team at a time in the rest of the church, we were able to sort of get a little bit of momentum in other places to go.
Look, this this could work here, but at the time our kids work actually stopped working at South Side and went to work somewhere else. She was she was amazing at kids but was also doing some stuff with end of Life stuff as well. And so just the nature of working with kids and people in palliative care I think was a bit difficult to manage.
So yeah, she left, which we were really sad about because she was amazing at what she did and the new But when the new kids work, it started. There was an ability there I suppose, to start fresh. And because she was only working one day a week with such a large amount of kids, it was kind of like the only way this is going to work is if we work through giving people real ownership and delegating to two teams.
Pete
Now, how important was, I guess, clarifying people’s responsibility and all of that had we went to that kind of fit? And how did you how did you do that?
Ben/ Ross
Yeah, making lots of mistakes along the way was a good lesson.
Pete
I said, Let’s talk about what was because we don’t talk about mistakes enough. Like people, we make mistakes in ministry all the time and you have to share, I guess, one of the big mistakes you went on that really taught us what not to do recently.
Ben/ Ross
A lot of I think like when it comes with clarity, I think in teams, one of the things we realized is just if you’re going to give ownership to people, I do need to have clarity around what they’re doing. And I think when it comes to, yeah, role descriptions, like we just started somewhere and where we started we thought was okay, but like and good at the time.
But I suppose you don’t realize what your mistakes are until, until someone runs with that and does what they’re asked for. And so we’ve probably had like five versions of our role descriptions where we’re constantly being editing it and trying to grow in the middle of that. But I think too, the the natural tendency is to put like four kids ministry, your best kids person as your team leader, your best years as in years later.
That was our first go to, but then realized, oh, actually overseeing a team is way different. It’s discipleship, it’s vision, it’s follow up. It’s so when we talk about who’s a team leader, it’s actually not the most competent in that ministry, but the most competent in dealing with people. So that was a big that there was probably some hurt in that just somebody puts a hand on a team leader now and then you actually go, You’re not that good at it.
We’re going to have to have somebody else do that.
Pete
Yeah, you’re really good with kids, but you’re not great at leading a team. And yeah, because they’re very, very different skills. I remember actually taking a guy with to cycling through this. He worked in a big accounting house and he went, Well, this explains what’s wrong with our whole company because we keep taking good accountants and making them team leaders and.
Ben/ Ross
Yeah.
Pete
They’re great accountants. They’re just terrible at managing people.
Ben/ Ross
Yeah.
Pete
You can insert you talk about accountants at this point of time. I’m just going to move on. So yeah. Sorry.
Ben/ Ross
Also to add to that, I think that’s one of the things with those role descriptions that we realized we did have to add as we went on to, you know, the level of leadership to actually put what does that actually mean for you as a team leader? And so it means leading people rather than doing the ministry. But even still within church, like we talk about the idea of the language within that of like sometimes we have captains and sometimes we have coaches.
So sometimes the captain is the person who’s on the field doing the task and they’re leading everyone with them. But at other times you have the coach, he’s not on the field but is helping the players on the field, I suppose, to that task. Well, but this is a constant struggle for us and a constant wrestle because, yes, sometimes the most willing person isn’t the best leader, but you don’t know that until you put them in the position.
And yeah, and I think there’s just a level of grace and patience that, you know, that even as leaders, we need as we work with people in the middle of that.
Pete
Hmm. I suppose having those role descriptions actually helps that conversation to go, Hey, this is what we wanted here is where you’re not quite, you know, helping out, you know, getting where we need you to be that that that can bring some clarity to that conversation. Yeah. Yeah. Okay guys let’s let’s talk about you started with youth team.
You’ve started with some some smaller kind of things. How many, how many teams have you got running now.
Ben/ Ross
Yeah. So we’ve got about 28 teams going now. And to put that in perspective is when we started with church and get over 100. Now our church of about 328 teams, that means 28 leaders. But also we’ve actually got a very similar staff team as we did when we were over 100 to 300. So we actually need lots of volunteers, need teams functioning well for the church, continue to grow.
So everybody’s jumped on board, everybody’s on board with the vision. And that’s that’s been an amazing journey to see.
Pete
See, that’s the incredible thing. I just love hearing that story of the body of Christ working together and you don’t need more staff to do it. You just need to, you know, give responsibility to the people who are already there. Do you reckon percentage wise, do you reckon that that’s moved from, say, 20% of people who were doing 80% of the work?
How many people do you reckon, percentage wise, how many people do you reckon are on teams in your, your church now?
Ben/ Ross
I think it’s hard because with when we were doing rosters, yeah, you’d come into church and we’d put you on a roster like so yeah, your membership depended on whether you’re on the morning roster or not. It’s usually, Yeah.
Pete
That’s a problem with rosters. You’re always just, you got to fill them, you got to fill in, you got to find somebody else and Yeah, yeah. Whereas teams, people are wanting to be there. Yeah, yeah.
Ben/ Ross
Yeah. But it’s definitely, I think there are people in our church, you know, there are a number of people in our church that give lots of their time and energy. So we yeah, I think we have around 30 people. We did a survey recently in church, around 30 people who are kind of giving about 4 hours a week in church life.
So there is a significant amount of people. Yes. Simply because when they when people seem to own their ministership, their ministry, they’re excited about it and they throw themselves into it. So, yeah, we do see that there is a a larger amount of people giving more of themselves. But yeah, with rosters everyone was just doing stuff anyway. So yeah.
Pete
Guys, let me, let me start with the one thing, because this is the one thing. What’s the one thing that you have learned about that that change process of moving people from site roster settings, but just the general cultural shift that does happen there? What’s been the one thing that you guys I’m going to let both of you get one thing each.
So because there’s two of you.
Ben/ Ross
My mind might be two is having that clear vision and allowing other people to use their gifts and power to to work under it. So as a senior pastor, actually letting them have some freedom and control, but having the clear vision means we’re all on the same page. So that’s clarity is, yeah.
Pete
You can control, you can have growth, you can’t have both. But that’s what you hear in the last year. Yeah, that’s it called bench.
Ben/ Ross
Yeah. I think, I think sometimes. Oh so the one thing for me is to recognize that change happens slowly and through one kind of victory or one team at a time and so I think like when I think about this, you know, every reach conference that I’ve been on, whether it’s team posturing or the ones after that, you always come away from these conferences kind of overwhelmed.
There’s so much that you’re not doing. There’s so much that you could do. You come back and yeah, there’s just a way, I think sometimes to all this stuff that you could be doing and how you’re not doing it and yeah, and then you get back into ministry, you know, the ministry happens and you got to write a sermon or you’ve got people to look after or whatever.
And I think, yeah, just kind of just recognizing one thing at a time over a long period of time creates a massive difference. And that’s yeah, so that’s the one thing for me. So just starting one team at a time, if you got, if you got a team to work with, then you can begin to change your culture in a church.
But you just got to start with them.
Pete
I’m so encouraged to hear Gen Y talk about take it slow. So sorry, baby. We have just we we even have it in this episode. Sorry, we should be. My time.
Ben/ Ross
Gives. In fact.
Pete
It’s all right in the toolbox. This week we’ll actually have some of the documentation that the guys are going to be make available, including some of those descriptions, those role descriptions, so that you can see an example of what that might look like. Don’t copy and paste, make it your own, but that’ll give you an idea of what you can do.
We’ll also have a link to the A Framework e-book, so make sure that you’ve got some of those things clear. The Reach Australian National Conference is coming up. These guys actually did a great under the hood at the last you at well this year’s conference not the 23 conference I know under the hood sometimes these early in the morning but I managed to get along to this and it was fantastic.
So make sure you get along to that. But to do that, you’ve got to register for the conference. Make sure you do that. The tickets are going, so get on to it soon. And if there’s anything else that you want us to cover, I should actually also mention I’m going to add a couple of more episodes, previous episodes just on rosters and teams in there as well as anything else that you want us to cover or you want to get in contact with us, make sure you email us.
Resources at Reach Australia. Akam, Delilah, Ben and Ross. But it’s been so encouraging hearing from you. Thank you so much for being here today.
Ben/ Ross
Yeah, thanks for having us.
Pete
On to use chat to.
