Building Teams
30 June, 2010 -
“Our bodies have many parts, but the many parts make up only one body when they are all put together. So it is with the ‘body’ of Christ."
- 1 Corinthians 12:12, TLB
Doing church as a team is a whole new mind-set for many churches today. But if we are going to be a church of the twenty-first century, there’s just no other way! Often in the Bible, God refers to us as the body of Christ. The better we understand this metaphor, the more we will be able to cooperate with God’s design for His church.
The church is not an organisation. It is more like an organism with living parts that must move and work together as a whole. An individual part cannot function on its own. If I cut off my arm and plant it in dirt, that arm will not grow into a new body; it will die. So it is with the Body of Christ. Each of us has an individual assignment and role, but apart from the rest of the Body, we are useless. God created us that way. That is His design, not ours.
Have you ever noticed how each part of your physical body works in groups? For example, the hand works with five fingers, a palm, a wrist and forearm, with muscles, bones, and tendons connecting them all. The integration of all these elements, working together, gives your composite hand and forearm agility and coordination. Every part of your body works best as a team, with all of its parts serving in harmony and cooperating toward a common goal.
Have you ever watched a concert pianist move his fingers in perfect synchronization, running arpeggios up and down the keys of a piano? Each sinew, each ligament, every finger, muscle and joint work together in beautiful harmony. No one finger, by itself, could accomplish what the score calls for. The wrist can’t do it alone, and neither can the arm. But by working together, each part fulfilling its role, they can fill a concert hall with magnificent music that enthralls an audience and sets hearts soaring.
This is the church - connected to “the Head, that is, Christ” (Eph. 4:15, NIV) and working together for the “common good” (1 Cor. 12:7). Each of us is to be a living, functioning, serving member of the Body of Christ. God has gifted each of us with talents and abilities. He has divinely endowed us with all we need to serve His purposes - and we do this best in teams.
Building teams does not begin with a certain kind of technique; it begins with a certain kind of heart, desiring only God’s best. Such a heart constantly asks, ‘How can I include others?’ It anticipates the joy of sharing experiences, struggles and victories, realizing that, like the body, we work best in teams - the way God designed us to function.
I owe much of the understanding of this metaphor to a longtime friend, Loren Cunningham, founder and former president of Youth With A Mission. I met Loren for the first time in Hilo decades ago. Loren is a big man, standing over six feet tall. I remember the first time I shook his hand. Mine disappeared in his, and I felt secretly glad to get it back. Well, his heart is as big as he is.
A few summers ago, Loren visited Hawaii. We were having lunch together in Waikiki on a balmy Sunday afternoon. During the meal, I asked Loren if he would share some ideas he had garnered along the way on equipping God’s people to reach the lost. That one question ignited three hours of brisk interchange and conversation.
That day Loren shared with me a seed thought about fractal patterns, which he had heard Winkey Pratney discuss in a seminar. We sat and talked until it looked like our waiter was about to charge us double for loitering.
This process for building teams is by no means the only way. Dozens of time-tested ways to build teams exist, and no one way is necessarily the best. Find one that works for you and do it! The bottom line is this: You can’t do it alone. You weren’t designed to. According to Webster’s Dictionary, the word “fractal” means “any of various extremely irregular curves or shapes for which any suitably chosen part is similar in shape to a given larger or smaller part when magnified or reduced to the same size.”
If you’re anything like me, you’re just as much in the dark after reading this definition as you were before. Let me see if I can explain it as it pertains to doing church as a team.
Living organisms are, in many aspects, quite similar to organisations, while in other ways they are very different. Both require structure, direction, measurable objectives, and leadership. On the other hand, an organism is a living entity with emotions, changes, natural growth and a susceptibility to disease, accidents, predators and sickness.
The church, or the Body of Christ, is a living organism. It may have organisational needs, but organisation alone would make it unhealthy. Like a silk plant, the church could look fine on the outside but remain lifeless on the inside. Silk plants often impress from a distance, but up close, you can tell they have no life and no fragrance.
Sometimes it seems easier to treat the church as an organisation because, like silk plants, once they get arranged, they seem to require little maintenance. They might look good - but don’t get too close! Recall once more the fig tree described in the book of Mark: “And seeing at a distance a fig tree in leaf, He went to see if perhaps He would find anything on it; and when He came to it, He found nothing but leaves” (Mark 11:13). Jesus actually cursed the fig tree, causing it to wither overnight. The tree looked good from a distance, but up close it lacked any evidence of fruit.
If you are looking for a low-maintenance structure, fractals and teams will not suit you. Anything living requires maintenance. Silk plants look pretty, but they cannot bear fruit. Living things require your attention. A church is just like a marriage; unmaintained, it dies. (My wife often reminds me of this sentence.) If we want this team to live and bear much fruit, we can’t avoid the high maintenance it requires.
Excerpt taken from Wayne Cordeiro’s book ‘Doing Church As A Team’.
