Team Building
Can you imagine launching a ministry with no one by your side? Of course you can because you’re a church planter. Jesus can certainly relate as well. When he kicked off his ministry, he had zero followers, no team members and an equally impressive number of leaders serving alongside him. Before he catalyzed a movement flipped the world right side up, he had to find, recruit, and develop Kingdom influencers and prepare them to carry on his mission long after he returned to his father.
Aren’t you glad Jesus wasn’t sent out by a mega synagogue with fifty rock start launch team members? Just like you he had to pray, teach, preach, and reach out to the “least of these” to build his band of disciples. After three years of ministry, he had 120 committed team members. He preached to thousands at a time and yet, only a fraction of those people were on his team when he ascend to his throne.
If you’re discouraged and find yourself thinking, How are we going to find and develop the team members we need to accomplish the vision God’s given us?, remember Jesus! Re-acquaint yourself with the gospel and Jesus’ ministry. Investigate how he turned everyday, ordinary people into world changers. If you could use some help doing this, consider applying to be a part of our church planter distance residency program which will help you grow as a leader and team builder.
No matter how prepared or gifted you are, building a robust launch team will always be challenging. That’s why we’ve filled this newsletter with tools and tips designed to help you find, recruit and develop ministry partners for your church plant and the sake of the Kingdom. Enjoy!
-Patrick Bradley, Director of Operations
July 2022 – Contents
- Team Time
- Leadership Matrix
- Leadership Development
- Building a Launch Team
Team Time
One skill church planters must master is stewarding the time they have with their team. Your time is valuable. Your team’s time is valuable. That’s why you need a plan for how you’ll make the most of your time together. One meeting format we’ve seen church planters use for disciple making and team development is the Three Thirds Process. Ying and Grace Kai used this meeting format while catalyzing disciple-making and church-planting movements in China that resulted in millions of people coming to faith in Christ.
One recent graduate of our distance residency program is using this format for their team meetings. The format is helping him build a launch team while training them to be disciples who make disciples. This meeting format has proven effective in a variety of contexts whether being used for small group Bible studies, one-on-one discipleship, leadership development, or launch team recruitment and development. To learn how you can use Three Thirds to help you steward your time with you team and develop disciples of Jesus watch 3/3s (Three Thirds) Pattern of Discipleship by NoPlaceLeft.
Leadership Matrix
While “organized” may not be the first word that comes to mind when you think about a church planter, typically their effectiveness as a leader hinges on their ability to organize teams. Knowing that church planters could use some assistance developing leaders and organizing teams for them to lead, we’ve created a Leadership Matrix Template.
Utilizing this template will help church leaders structure ministry teams and stay up-to-date with where people are serving. It also helps team members see where they fit into the larger organization and where other service opportunities exist to recruit teammates.
Developing Leaders
If God’s going to provide you with team members, don’t you think he’ll expect you to be help them grow as Kingdom influencers? How are you doing at that? If someone were to ask you what your church’s leadership development strategy was, would you be able to answer confidently?
Too many churches can’t. Even churches that have a clearly spelled out strategy for developing leaders struggle with implementing it. That’s why we are grateful for the ministry of Mac Lake. He’s passionate about leadership development and wants to help you grow as a leader of leaders by offering you free leadership development tools, tips, and techniques via his YouTube channel.
If you haven’t viewed any of his videos, you’re missing out. Don’t just keep this resource to yourself. Think about some leaders or future leaders in your church that can benefit from what Mac shares on his channel, and then share it with them. Then start developing your church’s leadership development strategy with the help of our free Leadership Multiplication Strategy Template.
Building A Launch Team
Before you start inviting people to join your launch team, you need to have a clear picture of what you’re inviting them to. Whether they verbalize it or not, everyone you’re trying to recruit to your team will eventually ask, “What do you want me to do?” and “What will be expected of me if I join the team?” Make sure you can answer those types of questions with clarity and confidence.
To help you with this, we’ve developed a Launch Team Development Strategy Template which will walk you through key questions you’ll need to answer to build a dynamic launch team. You can hope to develop a growing launch team, or you can plan for it. You decide.
If you need inspiration or clarification to help you develop your strategy, please download our Sample Launch Team Development Strategy. Pray, plan, pray some more and then execute.