THE EXECUTIVE TEAM

Good planning and timely decision-making are essential to a church seeking to be faithful to God's leading. Sometimes mission drift occurs because it gets bogged down in the inertia of church governance. Who is responsible for what? How do you get action on an idea that has implications for multiple ministry teams? How do you be certain that your mission is working out of your vision from God and the empowerment of the Holy Spirit?

Last weekend I was privileged to be a part of Houston 2010, a conference sponsored by Global Media Outreach. GMO is a division of Campus Crusade and specializes in internet evangelism (more on this in a later post). The conference was put together in 40 days to respond to an immediate and critical need in their ministry. They succeeded incredibly, in part because they had an executive team that used its best skills and clear lines of responsibility to respond to a leading of the Holy Spirit to conduct this event. Watching them at work, God gave me a sense of how an executive team might truly help a church produce God-class ministry.

The Executive Team would be composed of four persons:

THE CEO (or to use a popular term, Chief Cultural Architect) This is the Lead Pastor whose job is to be the vision-caster of the church and the chief teacher of its core values and identity as the Body of Christ.

THE COO or your council chairperson. This is the one who sees that a church board and its ministry teams are working in a coordinated manner. He or she also sees that the proper decision-making occurs in a timely manner that keeps the church "legal" constitutionally or structurally and with the denominational body and the state.

THE CPO or chief planning officer. This person heads a Strategic Advisory Team that works with Commissions and your church board to help evaluate ongoing ministry and develop a unified ministry that plan that keeps your church faithful and fruitful to its mission statement. Both this office and this team would have to be created in most churches.

THE CPI or Chief Prayer Igniter. In most churches this would be the chairperson of your elders. In my church the elders have the responsibility for spiritual oversight of the Body and to keep the church in tune with God as a spiritual organism in all of its efforts. Since prayer is the most critical element of any spiritual enterprise, this person sees that the church is at prayer for its decisions and its operations.

Together these persons work to see that ministry ideas and needs are assigned to the proper are to become the incubators out of which action is derived.

Next post: SPIRITUAL INCUBATORS