Our Lab on Team Leadership

Yesterday I wrapped up a six week ministrylab (Crossroads training course) on Team Leadership. The idea was to develop both the practical skills of our team leaders, and their 'inner life' as leaders. For one of our sessions, Nathanael Jeanneret--a great ol' mate of mine--came along to give us a bit of a masterclass on running meetings. He's developing an app called, Meetron, which is set for release around Easter 2012.

You can grab the (rather full) notes of the entire lab from our ministrylab page. Check it out, and let me know what you reckon.

I'll be running the lab again in February(ish) 2012.

By the way, John Dickson's Humilitas worked really well as a companion reading to the course. I recommend.

Kids These Days

Recently, I was reading Their God is So Big--a kids' ministry handbook--with Nick Mollison recently. Here are a few things that grabbed my attention (no surprises, just helpful reminders to me):

• Two year-olds
• have short attention spans, you have to change it up regularly
• they like to help
• they thrive on routine and repetition, rather than getting bored with it.
• Three-Four year-olds
• fantasy and reality remains a blur, so work to reinforce the historical truth of the Bible
• Structure your various activities so that they give you their attention at the key time
• use visual aids to lessons
• Five-Seven year-olds
• involve them in helping you
• give them approval
• delegate small tasks to them

Evangelism and Training

Recently, I've been mulling over how to best encourage our church to excellence in welcoming newcomers and helping them become integrated to our church community. Obviously, evangelism is a closely related topic. I just stumbled across this pithy little quote from Phillip Jensen and Tony Payne, in their old Fellow Workers booklet:

"If you wish to promote evangelism as a high congregational priority, we need to include a strong evangelistic element in our public prayers." (45)

But how do you train for evangelism? Even though I run the formal in-house training platform at Crossroads (our ministrylab), I've been quick to point out it's limitations. So it was nice to read this quote, which affirmed me in my reservations ;)

"Training courses are asked to do too much. They are expected to motivate and teach people as well as train them for the task. This is a false expectation. Prayer and good teaching are the only things that will deliver motivation for evangelism. A training course harnesses that motivation and channels it in the right direction, but we must not expect the course to do it all." (46)

(PS. My copy of Fellow Workers is very old, so page numbers are likely different in newer editions).