My friends Warren Bird and Ryan Hartwig took some time to talk with me about their new book, Teams That Thrive: 5 Disciplines of Collaborative Church Leadership, based on research conducted with the senior leadership teams at hundreds of churches across the country. Here are a few of the highlights:
- Many of the senior leadership teams believed their chief end was to advise the pastor, rather than to decide, own and implement vision and plans together, as a unit.
- More than half of the teams surveyed couldn’t even agree on the number of people on their SLT!
- When asked to explain the purpose of their team, many of the senior leadership team members in the study responded by giving the same purpose as the church. They didn’t have a clear sense of how their role fit into helping the church fulfill its purpose.
- “We have this amorphous sense that what we’re doing is really important, but we really don’t know very clearly what it is that we have to do as a senior leadership team.”
- Teams that had clarity of vision and strategy performed the best.
This book is designed for you and your senior leadership team to read and work through together. Check it out! Because you’re one of our readers, InterVarsity Press is offering you a 30% discount on the book with coupon code 506-447 through April 30. You can order your copy online at ivpress.com.
