Transforming Church

In your life have you and God become a committee with God as the Chairman, or have you and God become a team? Faith, often identified as our side of the relationship with God, is not active in a committee or a meeting; faith becomes active (alive) only when we act on something, step out in trust. It’s "me and God together," our relationship as a team.

In this article, Part Two, we will be looking at building trust corporately within a team of two or more persons. Trust alone cannot make a team effective, but no team can be effective without trust. In fact, the biggest obstacle out there today to team ministry is trust, that is the lack of it. Anyone who still believes a team is simply a committee with a new name has not begun to appreciate the significance of trust. No one has worked effectively as a team without trust.

Those same people might be likely to describe faith in God as so many accepted beliefs. Truth is, while faith can express itself in beliefs, faith is in no way synonymous with beliefs. As something much more active, faith has to do with relationship and approaches in makeup being 80-90% an ingredient called trust.

There are ways that trust can be developed and encouraged, and all of those are key to the success of a team. Each way must become part of the DNA of a team if that team is ever to reach its potential of effectiveness. In our first Building Trust… article, we looked at two of those building blocks, consistency and competency. If you have not read that article, we recommended that you begin with it first.

Effective teams are self-generating, self-governing, self-destructing and autonomous. None of those can become reality without trust. Trust empowers them to pursue what is clear within the mission, vision, core values and beliefs of the congregation. At the same time those statements govern and hold the team accountable. Effective teams are open, informal and can be either short or long term. Through their affinity and common values, conflict has been reduced so that it can easily be resolved through discussion and prayer. And finally, effective teams exhibit an outreach mentality instead of fortress mentality within the life of the congregation.

But teams cannot be effective without trust. What we will be looking at here are two additional building blocks to trust: familiarity and comfort with change.

You will discover that familiarity as a building block to trust has more than one face. Teams, unlike committees, are not a group of people pressed together by another committee without awareness of common affinity with the mission of the team. Each team needs to be made up of people who either share the common mission or, at minimum, like one another. Teams ought to be chosen by the one for whom passion for the mission/vision of the team’s ministry is greatest. That person generally emerges as the key leader of the team without appointment, election or entitlement. In choosing their team, it’s natural that key leaders will look for members who share their passion to some degree. This does not mean that all members of a team will be totally like-minded. Contrasting ideas are actually invited and welcome, since they are perceived as potentially leading to enrichment and improvement of the vision of the team. Such openness builds trust rather than sabotages it. What’s more, if there was a misjudgment with the affinity of one or more members of the team, more often it simply means that early on one or more members of the team will change.

Familiarity as a building block for trust also addresses familiarity with team style ministry. Important to the environment for trust is having all members of a team understand how teams work, and even more precisely their own role within the team. Helpful here would be to read two other articles available on our website entitled, The Anatomy of a Committee and a Team and Building Effective Teams. An asset to any congregation would be to have one or more persons with coaching skills to work with leadership. For trust to build, all leadership of a team needs to be clear about each of their roles.

A third face of familiarity occurs as a team works together as a small group. The longer and more often a team works together, almost apart from the mission/vision of the team, trust levels between persons begin to emerge and build. This happens more quickly if teams are not larger than six members and is characteristic of pretty much any small group.

Our fourth building block to trust, also existing within a team, is an openness or comfort level on the part of all leaders to change. No one actually "likes" change, but those open to it do not give in to resisting it or fighting it. Instead they see change as an opportunity. Those who fear or resist change do not understand it. Change is impossible to avoid; even to rebel or deny it will lead you to change. The best way to engage change, rather than either resisting or blindly accepting it, is to take the initiative and choose how you will change. Trust will be pretty much impossible for those who simply cannot handle the chaos and conflict that always accompany transition and change.

It was only a little over a decade ago that most of us felt our mission was to bring order to chaos, that if we were only a little more loving, if we tried just a bit harder, we could fix the mess out there and restore the order of Eden. Today we understand that this world cannot be fixed. All we can do is slow down the slide into chaos and we, each of us, need to work within the chaordic fringe if we are going to be effective for Christ. It is also there that the Holy Spirit has already always done His best work. Without trust in this process, however, we will never be effective as teams, and, as testimony at the same time, is the reason why committees no longer are.

Teams are equipped to handle change, and their openness to it becomes one of the building blocks to trust. When all leaders of a team are comfortable with change, only then can they proceed to foster ways and develop systems of trust and community.