What does it look like to share the pulpit and teach the scriptures as a team? Are you considering it for your church, but don’t know how to begin? In the episode, Pastors Brady Boyd, Andrew Arndt, Glenn Packiam, and Daniel Grothe talk about how and why New Life Church embraced the Team Teaching model.
EPISODE 004 – Cultivating a Team-Teaching Model Pt 1 – Show Notes
I think the local church is always meant to be led by a symphony of voices…
For me, as a senior pastor, I realized that from a physical standpoint I couldn’t keep doing at 50 what I did when I was 30… that was the pragmatic reason… but theologically, I wanted a symphony of voices at our church…
You can naturally reach people ten years older and younger than you… if we’re going to lead a multi-generational congregation, then we need to have voices that naturally reach certain elements of our congregation…
One of the things that’s been interesting is that we’ve heard from a lot of pastors around the country who are dying to do this… it gives us a chance admit that we need help… it gives our congregation a chance to admit that they need help in their own lives…
Doing it this way cuts down on all our study time… but we have to follow some rules if we’re going to make this work… we have to be able to defend it with each other… we don’t have to use any of each other’s stuff… but if we DO use each other’s stuff, we can’t grasp for credit…
We’re creating a situation with this where you have to lay ego aside… it’s created a collaborative ethos… the congregation can feel that we love each other and love working with each other…
The goal here is not for us to sound the same… the goal is not to be homogeneous but to be in unity… which means that we give each other permission to be different, to be ourselves…
Relationship leads to trust… you can’t hire this… it’s something that has to be invested in… but even with these things, there is inherent risk… are you willing to risk it?
Once you do this, the weight of preaching that is draining the life out of some of you, it will make pastoral ministry really joyful and really fun…
Some of my favorite times of the week are when we sit together on Tuesday mornings and talk through the upcoming sermon… we’re all circling the same big idea but we’re seeing it from a different viewpoint…
The biggest thing for getting started is to get people in the room with you to help you study… bringing a diverse set of voices will help you study better…
Questions for you and your team
1) To what extent does your church reflect a “symphony of voices”?
2) What would change at your church if you adopted this model?
3) What would change in your own work for the church if you adopted this model?
4) What can you do to begin moving in this direction?