4 – A Team for Everyone, Everyone on a Team

We have seen that everyone needs to love and be loved, have an opportunity to serve, and grow in the Lord. Our strategy for helping people do these things is to include them in a team. Our goal on Mercy Night is to offer a team for everyone and have everyone on a team. We particularly want to make it uncomplicated for the person who is not accustomed to church, isn’t familiar with Christian jargon, and isn’t sure what to expect.
To meet this goal, we will need a variety of teams with creative ideas and a leader for each team.
If someone wants to be a spectator on Mercy Night, they are welcome and we won’t chase them away, but we are not looking for spectators. We hope that spectators will see that they really need to get in the game and that there are doors wide open for them.
Mercy Night is also open to people coming by who belong to other churches. We’ll have people speak or sing who aren’t going to become part of one of our teams because they already have their place to love, serve, and grow in their own church.
Because individual needs and interests are different, we need to be creative to develop a variety of teams each with a little different focus. Chapter 6 offers a few ideas of how a team can serve, but we hope that teams and team leaders will be much more creative in developing ideas that ignite the passion that the Lord has put in people’s hearts. Our different teams will each have a different focus, but we want to see them all become “three dimensional”, that is they exist to help everyone in the team love, serve, and grow.
Study Focused – A team may make Bible study their primary focus. They meet weekly and spend the majority of their time studying the Word together. They will probably choose a topic that is of importance to the members of that group. To call this a team, however, we want to see them also find an opportunity to serve together. And, we want them to spend some time praying for each other, caring for each other in times of need, and following up on team members that have quit meeting with the team.
Prayer Focused – A team may make prayer their primary focus. However, to call it a team, we’d ask that they also include some Bible study (almost all prayer groups do this anyway), care for each other, and find a way to serve as a team.
Task Focused – A team may have serving as their primary focus. A music team, a team that cleans the church, and a youth ministry team are examples of teams whose focus is serving. To complete the picture, though, we’d ask that these teams meet for study and prayer, even if only monthly, and make sure they are caring for each other. It’s easy for a church to get ingrown when all the service in the church is focused on the needs of the church members. We’d like to have at least as many task focused groups serving people outside the church as we do serving people inside the church. There are some ideas in Chapter 6, but we believe that we haven’t thought of the most creative ideas yet.
Fellowship Focused – Some teams may meet primarily for fellowship, getting to know each other, praying for each other, and caring for each other. We’d ask a fellowship focused team to also study some Scripture together and serve together in some way.
Can a person be on more than one team? We aren’t out to limit anyone, so if someone wants to participate in more than one team, they can. However, we want to encourage whole hearted team participation. So we would rather have someone fully engaged in one team than partially engaged in more than one.
What if a team gets bigger than 12? – When a team gets bigger than about 12, it begins to lose its ability to keep all the “one another” commands we read about. It’s time for them to think about how to launch a new team. This can sometimes be difficult and painful, because people have grown close to the members of their team. A team doesn’t need to abruptly split, but can gradually expand into a second team.
All teams should be preparing for expansion, developing potential future leaders as the team grows.