USING THIS BOOK TO BUILD
TEAMWORK IN YOUR MINISTRY
The Well-Managed Ministry is a multifaceted and professional resource that can be beneficially used by individuals and by teams. Its materials are carefully designed to stimulate ministry excellence and productivity. The book promotes both the understanding and the practice of effective management within a Christian setting.
Discussion Modules strategically interspersed throughout the chapters present insight into the essential functions, skills, and activities of management. These focused, fast-flowing modules of information provide a basic introduction to the ends and means of Christian management for ministerial staff and lay leaders alike. They can be studied individually by the busy person who wants to get “up-to-speed” in management, or collectively by several people who want to pool their experience.
The Situation Review accompanying each Discussion Module helps team members to describe the ministry’s status quo. Where are we? Where have we been? Where do we as a team want to go? Through the series of interwoven questionnaires and other self-revealing worksheets, team members are able to assess ministry progress and areas of needed improvement in an objective, interactive fashion. The Situation Reviews are engineered to provoke, challenge, clarify, and measure, enabling team members to get a handle on managing the collective ministry effort in a creative way.
Following each Situation Review is a future-focused Action Plan designed to put “wheels” on ministry plans and aspirations—a prescriptive perspective. Team members put their heads together to anticipate the future. How can we overcome the status quo? Where can we improve? When is the right time to initiate change? What is each person’s most productive role on the team? These concrete Action Plans enable the leader and teammates to work on one practical step at a time—to work smarter in addition to harder.
Since the book is designed expressly for interactive hands-on use, members of the ministry team should have a personal copy. This will encourage them to “spread their scent” all over the book by underlining, writing notes in the margins, and so forth. A show and tell atmosphere of comparing personal perspectives will undoubtedly stimulate spontaneous conversation about ministry management needs. The book in and of itself won’t provide answers to these issues, but it will definitely prove to be a catalyst for the team to generate its own tailor-made solutions.
An excellent way to start using the book is to have team members individually overview its basic contents, highlighting the discussion material and worksheet activities they find most relevant. These can then be given the highest priority for subsequent group discussions and meetings.
Once team members have crystallized how they can put the book to best use, periodic discussion/brainstorming sessions should be scheduled. Such advance planning will help insure not only that the resource materials are actually used, but that each team member is well prepared for the fluid, free-floating discussion sessions that will ensue. Who exactly should be included in these meetings? A simple rule of thumb is to include everyone in the organization who is directly influenced by the ministry—at least for those team meetings of greatest personal relevance.
The team leader should coordinate the periodic team get-togethers, making certain that the purpose and process of each session are clearly spelled out to facilitate individual homework. Team members should know in advance which pages of the book are to be read and filled out. If an extended retreat format is to be used, the coordinator would be wise to prepare a time-phased meeting agenda to keep things from bogging down.
During brainstorming sessions, team members can use the book’s questions to generate additional probing queries. The team leader, however, must patiently strive to bring about discussion closure, helping members forge a productive consensus. Differences of opinions provide an opportunity for team members to get to know one another better. Where consensus cannot be reached, goals should be set for working toward this eventuality in future team sessions.
As teammates work their way through the book’s various scored questionnaires, they should bear in mind that these too are designed only to stimulate thinking and brainstorming. They’re not validated scientific instruments yielding right and wrong answers on the issues. The questionnaires are but another resource to stimulate insightful analysis.
Different people and teams will use the book in different ways. That’s the way it’s designed—to be a general purpose resource book serving both individuals and groups in a variety of ways. The more people use the book’s resources together, the more gold they can mine from it! “Without consultation, plans are frustrated, but with many counselors they succeed”. (Proverbs 15:22)
Team leaders are provided with a practical resource for tackling complex managerial problems that require a team solution.
Each of the ten chapters explores a key component of effective management. The reader is provided with both descriptive and prescriptive insights into chapter topics through three format features: Discussion Modules, Situation Reviews, and Action Plans. These provide a meaningful structure for organizational insight, problem diagnosis, identification and evaluation of action alternatives, goal-setting, and implementation.
The series of practical Discussion Modules provide sharp, focused insight into the true nature of managing in a Christian setting. This content material is up-to-date, easy to absorb, and combines both descriptive and prescriptive perspectives. The Situation Reviews, which focus on the past and present, help ministry team members better understand their personal management styles and what makes their ministries “tick.” The future-focused Action Plans facilitate practical planning for the future, highlighting ways in which ministry effectiveness can be further enhanced. A biblical perspective on management is presented throughout the workbook.
The ministry leader/manager faces three central challenges in using this resource book. First, a team approach must be maintained, calling for an open mind, patience, and the willingness to do things other people’s way. The second challenge is to avoid emulating the world’s management model, with its all-too-familiar emphasis on economic goals, pressure to perform, rugged individualism, and self-serving competitiveness. The third, and most difficult challenge, is to accept human imperfection—to live with one another’s mistakes, shortcomings, and foibles. In the final analysis, love is the sole foundation of management in Christian organizations. “By this all men will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13:35).