Pastoral Team Health

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

Benjamin Kreps:
Hey everyone. And welcome to the Mark Prater podcast where our aim is to connect our global family of churches with our Executive Director. Mark, by now, most of the pastors in Sovereign Grace have read about, or maybe even have gone through the the team health evaluation tool that Jon Payne and Mickey Connolly and Jared Mellinger developed to serve our teams. Why this tool for our teams? Can you explain what the thinking is behind it?

Mark Prater:
Yeah. I'm so grateful for Jon and Mickey and Jared's work. We asked them as a Leadership Team to work collaboratively on this tool. It's a tool by the way that anyone can find on our church development website: sgcleaders.com. If you go to the October 19, 2021 blog post that Jon wrote you'll find the Team Health Evaluation tool there.

We asked these guys to put this tool together because really for this reason: what our experience has taught us is that typically where you find a healthy eldership team, you find a healthy church. And where you find a church struggling a bit, many times, actually most times, there are struggles on the pastoral team. So we've gotta be intentional as pastors and as pastoral teams to pay attention to our team health. And quite honestly, I think it's easy to set that aside given the demands and busyness of ministry, given the real legitimate needs that people have in your church. It's easy for that to fall down on the list, but we need to pay attention to team health and Jon and Mickey and Jared have really served us by giving us a tool to evaluate team health.

And the purpose of it is not just growing as a team. The purpose is to strengthen the church and have a healthy church and ultimately to bring glory to Jesus Christ, the great shepherd who is over our church. So that's why we have the Team Health Evaluation tool.

Benjamin Kreps:
Yeah, seems to me, it arrived at a providential time after the last couple of years and the conflicts and struggles we all experienced in our churches. This is a good time to get into how our teams are doing together. What kind of categories are we talking about in this this tool?

Mark Prater:
Yeah, just to remind guys, the categories, which I think are really good, the categories contained in this tool, first of all there’s a structures category. What structures do you have in place? Meaning; what meetings do you regularly have, whether it's elders meetings to lead the church and what structures do you have in place for care? Like small group meetings that pastors and wives participate in. So that's one category and there's a number of questions under that category.

The second category is decisions; how are decisions made? And a lot of good questions about how decisions are made. What do you do when you disagree? Does everyone feel that they can share their perspective, honestly? How do you handle the person that has a minority voice on a decision? These are questions under the decisions category.

And then relational harmony; it's looking at relationships on the team, working relationships together. What kind of culture does your team sort of embody? And then lastly; conflicts, are there any current conflicts and how do you work through conflicts and what if you can't resolve a conflict? So those are some of the categories that are contained in the health evaluation too. And I found very helpful questions in each of those categories.

Benjamin Kreps:
Yeah. Well actually we're going through this tool with our team. Jon Payne is coming in this weekend. So looking forward to that, and you're working through that tool locally at Covenant Fellowship. What are your thoughts if any as you've worked through these categories and given thought to them, any reflection on what you've seen so far?

Mark Prater:
Yeah, I'm working through it right now, just about finished completing it because we've asked Mickey Connolly to come in about a month and just sit down with us as a team and help us assess our health. So we're trying to get those evaluations to him by this Saturday. So he's got about a month to look at them. What I've found in working through it, and it takes some time to work through the questions, I found the questions to be really helpful. First of all, there are questions that you would think of but I don't take time to think about. And I just need to do that more as one member of the Covenant Fellowship team. I think secondly, it's revealed where I think we're doing okay in some areas, but there's been a few questions where I thought, that may just be a weakness for us. And that may be something that we need to talk with Mickey about and see how we can grow and be strengthened as a team. So I've found the team evaluation tool, not just an exercise or a formality, but actually something very helpful to help me think about what my role is as a member of the Covenant Fellowship team and our team overall.

Benjamin Kreps:
Excellent. Well, thank you to the Leadership Team, to Jon and others who have helped develop this tool for our teams. I mean, we receive this as an expression of care for our churches in Sovereign Grace. So thank you. Thank you, Mark, for your thoughts, and thank you everyone for watching. I'm looking forward to reporting back after we work through the tool and commend it to the other guys in Sovereign Grace. So we'll see you here next week, Lord willing. Bye for now.