Team building

Let me ask a somewhat sobering question this morning. Do you ever take a moment to truly look at who you are and what you're doing? Does it matter?

I get this all the time because for reasons I'm unclear of, people think more highly of me and my work that do I. That is not humility. That is, I think, a simple unbiased, biased opinion. I wish I could say I had done this that and the other, but it would not be true.

Still, what I'm learning this late in life is that for my team at my new church to grow and do its job, I must shrink even more.

I read this morning in Paul's writings, "For by grace given me I say to every one of you: Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment, in accordance with the faith God has distributed to each of you."

So, this weekend I gave a great deal of thought to team building. I read what Michael Jordan, perhaps the greatest basketball player ever and winner of six NBA titles and one NCAA championship, said of teams: "There are plenty of teams in every sport that have great players and never win titles. Most of the time, those players aren't willing to sacrifice for the greater good of the team. The funny thing is, in the end, their unwillingness to sacrifice only makes individual goals more difficult to achieve. One thing I believe to the fullest is that if you think and achieve as a team, the individual accolades will take care of themselves. Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence wins championships."

I think the thing we all need to understand is we follow a man who washed feet, who served rather than be served, who gave rather than be given to. If we get that, then we get team.

I don't know what tomorrow holds, but I know who holds the future. That being said, what we want most in our lives must be to give what we've been given, a belief in the love of Jesus Christ for us and for his power to save us.

The question then is what will we give to this work. Authentic worship, we pray. Authentic behavior, we pray. Authentic love, we know.

We do this not so we will gain notoriety, because that left the equation years ago. No we build these teams that will do the work of the church because we love. And we love because He loved us first.

An unknown author wrote this: "The basic building block of good team-building is for a leader to promote the feeling that every human being is unique and adds value." Isn't that a wonderful statement? That's Christian love, it seems to me. Every human being is unique and adds value. That's Christ.

It took only 12 men (with a few women telling them what to do) to change the world. Can't we possibly stem the tide and change the world again with many more. Seems to me it only takes a few thousand teams from a few thousand churches to turn all this shrinking of churches around.

We have work. Let's go.