Dave, thank you for chatting to the ACR. Can you tell us a bit about yourself and where you minister currently? What has been your ministry journey to date?
I’m married to Julie and we have four awesome kids (the youngest is turning 17 soon). I started reading the Bible as a kid after a school Scripture teacher told us about God and it all made lots of sense—well, everything except the cross and forgiveness. I started attending a Westminster Presbyterian Church plant in Emu Plains when I was about 15 years old, and they faithfully taught me the Bible and explained the gospel! Yay!
I worked in a few internet startups in the early 2000s before doing an MTS apprenticeship in Newcastle. After further theological training my family and I went back to Newcastle where I’m serving as the Executive Pastor at Hunter Bible Church and prayerfully trying to maximise the effectiveness of the staff and saints here.
You have just written an excellent book, The Team Leader’s Handbook, which is all about encouraging healthy ministry teams. What prompted you to write the book?
I’m convinced that Christians have this awesome privilege of working together like a family or a body (e.g. 1 Corinthians 12). And I’ve increasingly seen churches enable Christians to serve together in smaller teams, which is great! However, good teams almost always need great leaders.
I was involved in helping train and develop some of the leaders at our church and we recognised this real need for good leaders. It’s hard to be a member of a church while also leading a team of other church members.
So that’s who the book is aimed at—any servant-hearted church member who’s taken on the responsibility of leading a small team of other church members in a ministry area.
What has been your own experience of working in ministry teams to date? What do you see as the biggest challenge(s) for most team leaders?
Like most people, I’ve experienced both the joys of good team leaders and the disappointments of poor ones. (I’ve definitely been both types to others!!)
However, I’m convinced that most of the people who have struggled to be good team leaders haven’t tried to be frustrating! They didn’t mean to be a pain. At the same time, I’m not sure the good team leader really knew what they were doing that made being on the team good!
I think most team leaders just need a bit of help to think Christian-ly about leading a team. It’s about encouraging your team members to do great things for Jesus (without jumping in and doing it for them), and it’s about being other-person-centred as a leader and being the leader your team needs you to be (not the leader you feel most comfortable being).
How did you find the experience of writing the book? Did you come to any new conclusions as you wrote, or did it crystalise any of your existing thoughts?
Writing almost always helps crystalise ideas for me. However, one of the big learning curves was realising how much of a team-ministry culture I was in at our church, and how that led to lots of assumptions about why teams exist and how they work within church life.
For example, how much pastoral care of the team members should a team leader take responsibility for? What does it mean to call people to commit to a team if they haven’t committed to a church first?
This made the introduction to the book a bit longer than I was hoping, but I think it’s been worthwhile. It also led to us writing another book aimed at team members which encourages them to think in a gospel-centred way about what it means to be part of a team at church.
I found your articulation of ‘the four-conversations tool’ incredibly useful as I read the book. Can you tell us a bit about the tool; where did it come from and how have you found it useful?
I was introduced to a version of the four conversations tool through a wise older Christian who had been using it in their secular management role for years. After thinking through it a bit more with a church/volunteer management mindset, we started using it as a staff team about ten years ago.
The basic premise starts with the recognition that every conversation a team leader has with a team member will fall somewhere along two spectrums:
- Who is making the decision here? Me or the team member?
- How much discussion are we going to have about this decision? None or lots?
Answering these two questions leaves four general conversation types:
- I’m making the decision and I’m keeping my team member in the loop.
- I’m discussing a decision with my team member, but I’ll make the final call.
- I’m discussing a decision with my team members, but they will make the final call.
- My team member is making a decision, and they are keeping me in the loop.
This rough framework helps team leaders think about what’s best for the team members at any given moment. It also gives real clarity to team members, so they don’t feel lost and unsure what is going on.
What is your hope for your forthcoming book for team members? Can you share an insight that you hope will come from it?
Whatever title we choose for the next book, it’s aimed at helping team members see how they are serving Jesus and his kingdom as a team member. It’s going to be a much shorter book that I hope will give Christians a framework to serve with sacrificial joy in the context of a team leader (who probably uses the four-conversation model).