Vineyard Church North Phoenix | Recruiting a Church Planting Team

Core Concerns: How to Recruit a Church Planting Team

By Steve Nicholson, National Director of Church Planting, Vineyard USA

So God's called you to plant a church. Who's going with you? What kinds of things do you look for in a potential team member? How do you go about asking them? These and other eminently practical matters are the subject of what follows written by a veteran himself, Steve Nicholson, who has overseen dozens of church plants over the last twenty years. Here, in an abridged version of a chapter out of Vineyard's church planting Coaches Manual, are a few insider tips.

A foundational assumption of any church planter should include the view that it is up to God to do some of the work in putting the team together. (It's an assumption that comes out of a genuine expectation that the Lord will build the church.) The first thing to do, then, is not make a list of names, but rather start praying about who God wants on the team, asking God to supernaturally work to put the team together. When planters pray like this, many times they end up with people on their teams that they would never have even met, let alone thought of.

In the midst of that, however, there are some important things to keep in mind.

Key Considerations

Here is what I always tell people to look for in potential team members:

1. Character. Don't make the mistake of valuing abilities over character. Always, always, always go for character first.

2. Vision. When a diverse group of people come together on one team, there's great potential for disagreements and splits. The secret is to bring them together under the same vision. You will need to spell out your vision to them, and they need to be on board with what you want to do.

3. Function. After praying that God would build the team, it is then time to start asking the pragmatic questions. The most important one is, what functional places need to be filled to make this church plant happen, bearing in mind the vision, strategy, and two year plan that has been decided on? List descriptions of these functions without any names (e.g worship leader, children's pastor, administrator, etc.) Then begin praying that God will fill the slots even as you begin thinking through potential people. This gives the planter both a spiritual and pragmatic basis for building the team.
   
   A major issue church planters can face is what role their friends should play. So let it be said here: Beware of bringing your friends along! The tendency is to want to bring those closest to you if for no other reason than the relational support and the fear that goes along with moving to a new 12345678901place, away from all that is safe and familiar. Two things should be remembered, however:
   
   First, it was not that way for Abraham he had to leave most of those things behind. It's a principle that often (though certainly not always) holds true when God calls us to something new, as well. Second, if friends are not coming for clearly functional reasons, the following often occurs: the friends come, but they're not able to function in the church the way you need them to function (helping in a church plant is very different from ministering in a large, established church). They get frustrated, you get frustrated and you end up not being friends. Good friends are worth keeping and they are often worth more as friends than as co-workers, anyway. So be careful not to bring people with you for the sole reason of personal friendship. Make decisions on the basis of function. Then, if they happen to be friends or if they become friends that's a bonus. But functionality must be the fundamental and primary criterion when putting together a team.

4. Design. Besides their ministry role preference, they should also know their spiritual gifts, passions, temperament, leadership role and style, and natural gifts and talents.

5. Temperament. Of course, an important issue which affects good functioning is: You've got to like the people you take. The planter needs to be discouraged from thinking, "Anybody and everybody
   that wants to come should come." Avoid the warm body principle. There are some people who want to be part of the initial team that, if you let them, within six months you will be consumed with trying to find a way to get them to leave.

The best way to determine the team combination is to consider the ministry strategy of the church plant. That will determine what you need. The two functions you most need to take with you are evangelists (gathering types) and a worship leader. You can raise up home group leaders and pastors along the way. But if you don't have a good worship leader it's hard to get one. You don't necessarily need a whole band just one person who can do the music well enough so that other musicians will want to be part of the process. If the music is sub-standard from the beginning, no accomplished musician will be able to stand being part of the church. If the worship is good from the beginning, however, it will attract other good players, out of which a good worship pastor can begin developing additional musicians, bands, and worship leaders.

Recruiting From an Existing Church

If you are going to talk to people, present the vision, and recruit from an existing church, you should first be talking to whoever the pastoral leaders of those people are. There are some important reasons why the senior pastor (and their housegroup pastors) from their church should know before you talk to the person, not after:

1. It makes it a lot easier for the sending church to feel as though they are giving the people to you, rather than having them just being taken away. It makes it possible for them to be generous, to have their own sense of ownership in the process. It is a way of respecting them.

2. They might know things about people that you don't things which might affect whether you really want them to be on your team or not. If you've already recruited people (before talking to their pastor), and then find out some less than ideal information about them, it's a little late. You've already handed them a ticket that is difficult to take back.

Pitfalls in Recruiting a Team

People have a lot of different motivations for wanting to be part of a church plant not all of which are the kind of motivations you want in the initial stages of your plant. Here are some issues of which to be wary:

1. People who believe that, if they can be part of something new or small, they will have a higher degree of control, power, or influence over things than they do in their present church.

2. Some people are looking for adventure. Church planting looks exciting, a way to be a hero. Unfortunately, church planting is heroic only from a distance. There's a significant amount of pain and drudgery in the process that feels anything but heroic.

3. Some people are merely trying to escape situations relationships, perhaps, or other problems.

Avoid recruiting people for a team with specific or implicit promises of a guaranteed role in leadership long-term or an expectation that they will be on staff at a certain point, or that they will have a close relationship with you for years to come. When the time comes, you may not want to pay that ticket. You may find there is somebody else who you want to hire. You may find there is somebody else to whom you are closer or with whom you want to spend more time. You may decide that they are not as much the leader as you thought they were. There are so many unknowns if they have gotten on board with those kind of promises, and they go unfulfilled, it will adversely affect your relationship down the line, as well as inhibit their ability to function wholeheartedly in the church.

Avoid taking a team primarily composed of pastoral, small-group leader types all they tend to do is go and take care of each other. Focus primarily on having gathering and evangelist types on your team.

Avoid recruiting someone to be part of your team who cannot see you as their pastor. You can tell those who see you as their pastor they are the ones willing to take advice from you, who let you pray over them about significant issues in their life, who let you speak into their lives and have influence. There is a sense of respect. If that isn't there, be careful even if they agree with the vision. You will have a battle somewhere down the line, and the more leadership gifting they have, the more troublesome and dangerous that battle will be.

Pragmatically speaking, it will be difficult for someone significantly older than you to let you be their pastor, especially if they are two or three life stages beyond you in their experience. Once you yourself are 40 or 45, that matters less but until that point, it's rare than an older person can follow a young person at a significantly earlier stage of life and still relate to them as their pastor. Consequently, if you are young, you are probably going to have a young church at least until it gets bigger (and you get older!)

How to Recruit a Team

1. Share the vision with those you would like to come.

2. Ask them to pray about whether God would have them be a part of planting this church.

3. If you have a specific role in mind for them to play, you should tell them that "You might be a good person to fill thus-and-so function."

4. Don't neglect to say, "This is going to be a one-to-two year process, there's no guarantees of any position at the end, it's going to take a lion's share of your time, and a lot of energy and money along the way. Knowing that, will you consider whether God wants you to be part of this?"

5. As the team starts forming, there comes a point where you get them together and start meeting with them. The first things you do with the team are:
   • Clarify the vision, the values, the strategy, and go over the two-year plan.

   • Work over the list of functions you've developed and clarify who's doing what, so everyone knows how they fit into the picture.

   • Let them become a part of adjusting the details. You will probably find that they bring some great ideas to the plan that you will want to incorporate. Be prepared to make some changes.

   • You may also find that you have to adjust your strategy and two-year plan around the team that you have, just as one would in team sports. You don't decide on a strategy and try to force the team to fulfill it regardless of who they are; you adapt the strategy to maximize the strengths of the team you have, as well as looking where necessary or possible, to add people to the mix.

Of course, there is no fool-proof way of doing this. And you will invariably have some difficulties and pain along the way with those who are part of your team. But attention to some of these matters in advance can go a long way in making the process less painful, and more productive, then it would have been otherwise.

Want to read more of where this came from? The Vineyard church planting Coaches Manual is full of strategic information on how to go about planting a church from developing a vision, to raising money, to knowing what to look for in the first six months. You can order a copy of the book ($22.00 USD, including postage; additional postage for overseas orders) by calling (847) 328-4544 or you can purchase it online.