Organizational Change

Most of the major decisions in our church come from our Lead Team, which is a group of pastors that lead the church.  Over time, this group has grown in size, but we recently made a change that I believe will help us grow.

We’ve shrunk the size of this team.  It’s not because we don’t value input or ideas.  In fact, teamwork is one of our core values.  Instead, we’ve made this team smaller so that we can lead bigger.

I want everyone that works for Oak Leaf Church to be good stewards of their time.  It doesn’t make sense for our children’s leaders to be sitting in a meeting where we are talking about capital campaigns or greeters.  He needs to be meeting with and leading his teams.  I don’t need our worship and production people sitting in a meeting about financial systems.

By shrinking the size of this group, our staff is  becoming more like a football team…with specialized players.  The offense and the defense both have the same goals (win the game!), but they don’t do the same drills or sit in the same meetings.  When this team is talking about production, we’ll bring in the right people.  When we’re talking about children, we’ll bring in those people.  But we all don’t need to devote half of a day to things that are outside our area of expertise.

So the Lead Team has become the Directional Team, and we’ve gone from 6 people down to three people.  I’m sure that will change over time, but at this stage, we feel like smaller is simpler.  And simpler is better.