New Year's Party

OK, so we jumped the gun a couple of days. At Canyonville Adventist Church we did our annual New Year's party last night. We didn't stay up 'til midnight, but as always, we had tons of fun with food, active games for the kids, and table games for others. I saw some pretty enthusiastic Rook players and turkeyfoot dominoes enthusiasts having a great time, and the suitcase race for the kids was hilarious. It was a wonderful, positive time of sharing and fellowship for the church family, including all ages from babies to the elderly.

The reason I'm sharing this on the blog is that all of this is organized by our Fellowship Team. They put it together every year without any input from the pastor, the church board, or anyone else. It is part of their ministry, as expressed in their mission statement: "To allow God to create through us, a safe, united community. To nurture genuine relationships with acceptance, respect, love and bonding as a caring family." The Fellowship Team organizes and leads out in several similar events throughout the year. They give us an annual church campout, a community-wide corn feed and country gospel music jamboree, and other special times for fellowship and bonding for the church family. The point is, the team does this. They plan it, organize it, and make it happen.

Teamnet Ministries is about teamwork. Other teams within the system also carry out their purposes, and the entire system works together in a network of cooperation and mutual support. For each team to effectively do its work it must be given the A.R.K. of Empowerment: Authority to make decisions for the team; Resources needed for the task; and Knowledge of both the "what-to" and the "how-to" of thier responsibilities. When all three of those elements are in place, people are empowered for excellence in whatever field they serve. They add their talents. God multiplies the increase.

Leadership Coaching

A book I recently finished reading -- Leadership Coaching: The Disciplines, Skills and Heart of a Christian Coach, by Tony Stoltzful -- has to be one of the best I've read in a long time. Teamnet Ministries lives or dies with leadership -- but not just any kind or style of leadership. Teamnet Ministries is about empowering leadership, in which leaders are focused on guiding their people into success through the A-R-K (Authority, Resources, Knowledge) of empowerment. The new discipline of coaching is tailor-made as a model for leadership and leader development in the Teamnet Ministries system. For more about Tony Stoltzful and Transformational Coaching you can visit http://www.coach22.com/ or http://www.transformationalcoaching.com/. The book is also available at http://www.amazon.com/. Kewords: Leadership Coaching.

I'll be talking more about the coaching model in future posts. I'd welcome your thoughts.

Staying Flexible

It is terribly important to stay flexible if you ever want to get anything done in any organization, especially a church. Sometimes the battle over protocol or policy is just not worth the heartburn. You have to ask, Is this a mountain I am willing to die on? If not, there's nothing wrong with some compromise. Give and take is the name of effective efficiency. If you're too inflexible you become a stick-in-the-mud that stops all progress. How much more important to bend a little here or there for the sake of working together for a common goal. No, of course I'm not talking about great moral issues here. Methods rarely equate to morality. In other words, who cares how a job gets done just so long as it actually gets done! Team members and networking teams have to bend and flex in order to keep from breaking.

Well, maybe I need to modify that next-to-last sentence above just a bit. It really doesn't matter how a job gets done, just so long as it actually gets done -- and the way it gets done isn't illegal, immoral, or doesn't hurt someone. The real question is: Do we equate methods with morality. Think about it.

Eleven Months!!

Ok, so it's been eleven months since I posted anything here! I've probably long since lost two-thirds of the three readers I had back then (myself plus two family members!) but my guess is that I can pick them back up without too much trouble. Dare I fantasize that someone else might actually still have the Teamnet Ministries blog on an RSS feed? If that's you, and you are reading this, blessings on you! May your tribe increase!

Now, there are some things I really want to share with you that I've experienced during these intervening months, some to do with Teamnet Ministries directly, and some things about organization health, leadership, coaching, and the like. I do want to do that in a separate post, however. So, watch for some more feeds from Teamnet Ministries blog coming soon. And, as always, your comments are coveted.

Loren

Prayer Power

There is great value in using an organization model that is in harmony with the economic realities of our times. Networking is the model that grew out of the emerging information age of the late 20th century. Anything that gets done today in any field is accomplished through some kind of network. As times change, any organization wanting to stay in touch with the times seriously needs to adapt and change the way it conducts its business. A church is no exception.

There is a major difference, however, between churches and other organizations such as businesses. Churches, by definition, include a spiritual dimension. Other organzations or corporations may be able to get along just fine without prayer or Holy Spirit direction. Not so, the church. Prayer is an absolute essential for successful church life. If the Holy Spirit is not resident in the church, the church has no hope of being what it should be.

Specifically, as relates to the subject of this blog, Teamnet Ministries can only work as the entire process of church life is bathed in prayer at every step. This is vital to the success of the mission. As prayer is the life of the believer, so it is also the very life of the church. Without prayer -- serious, constant, and searching prayer, neither this nor any other system of church governance has any hope of success.