By Tim Swanson
I read this really great book about Christian education when I was in College. It was called Christian Education: Foundations for the Future. There is one statement in that book that has heavily shaped the way I lead my team today. Talking about the difficulty of volunteer recruitment, the authors say, “The American family of the late twentieth century is living in a pressure cooker. Many times both parents work outside the home just to keep up with the continual mounting pile of bills” (p.472). That really got me thinking. This statement suggests that I am not the only one who is over committed and stressed out. It would seem that the other people on my team are like me; wearing a smile on an otherwise cracked and crumbling framework of self. To make matters worse, my volunteer’s huge responsibility levels outside of the church make it difficult for me to stay connected and monitor individual stress levels. When I lose touch with my team, I tend to forget about the weight of their lives. At that point it’s really easy for me to burden them with a bunch of ministry related responsibility. And that is how people get burned out. I learned a very difficult lesson about this during my first year as a Worship Leader.
It was 2005, and I was leading the music for a Sunday evening service that was geared toward young adults. The church wasn't paying me anything, which was fine because I had zero experience and no idea what I was doing. I was fortunate to have a committed team, most of whom I am still in contact with. At the time, I was your average, flustered, disorganized college student. I often showed up for our Sunday afternoon rehearsal without any idea what we were going to be playing that night. Of course this mean that I didn't dedicate a single second during the week to learning the music. I was always one step behind, and running too fast to do anything about it. So it was no wonder that I had no idea when one of my team members slipped into deep depression.
I showed up for rehearsal one week and my bass player was nowhere to be found. Comically I was upset with him for being unreliable, while I personified the word. Instead of considering what was detaining him, I immediately consumed myself with replacing him. That is what bad church leaders do. I was completely focused on myself and how I was going to look in front of everyone during the service. I had no consideration for other people.
My bass player was MIA for a number of weeks. Then he came back and told me that he had been struggling in his personal life, and he wanted to get back into playing bass again. I smiled and told him I was glad to have him back, while holding onto my resentments in the back of my mind. He played for a few more months before his disappearances reappeared. Eventually I just stopped inviting him to play and got another bass player. Again I was only concerned with what was going on in my life. I never even considered what his problems might be. When he told me he was “struggling in his personal life” that should have been a red flag for me. The Church is supposed to be all about our personal lives. The goal of church leaders should be to help people marry the awesome truth of Scripture with their personal lives.
A few months passed by where I didn't hear anything from this young man. Then one day I was in a meeting with the rest of the leaders for the young adult service. The teaching pastor asked me if I had heard from my bass player recently. He asked with that tone that people get when they ask not because they want an answer, but because they want to tell you something. I told him that I had not, and he said, “Oh, then you don’t know that he is getting a sex change”. Deer in the headlights would be a mild way of describing my reaction. He went on to tell me that he had (been doing the job I was supposed to be doing) meeting with the young man and listening to him talk about his struggles. The bass player told the teaching pastor about his frustrations in feeling that God had made him the wrong sex. He struggled with it his whole life. He struggled with it when he joined the praise team that I was leading. He continued to struggle with it as I blindly led. He was deeply depressed, and I had no idea.
I still think about that bass player all the time. I’m not delusional about it, I don’t think that I could have somehow magically solved his problem for him. But I know I could have, at the very least, been more compassionate toward a guy, who is now a girl, and who thinks God is an inconsiderate idiot.
My favorite part of my job is getting to watch people grow and realize their potential. But I have to be careful not to add the load that will break their backs. Today, I work a lot harder toward staying in touch with my team members. It’s difficult to do when they are all, like me, moving a million miles a minute. It is hard to get people to stay still for enough time to really connect with them. So here are 3 things that I do to stay connected with my team when we are all going to fast to take a breath.
1.Take advantage of prayer: Get some sort of prayer journal, and make a page for each person on your team. Call each person and ask how you can be praying for them. Write the date of their prayer request. Then pray once a day for some of your volunteers. Select a time limit on how often you want to keep in contact with your team. I have about 40 people on my team, so I call every one of them at least once every other month. This way you can keep relatively current on what’s happening in their lives.
2. Don’t Let Sunday Morning services become check out time: Our church does a couple of sixteen week life group cycles during the year. During those cycles, I host discussion groups on Sunday morning in my green room during the sermon (of course I encourage my team to sit in on the sermon during the other service on those mornings). I play the role of discussion facilitator during that time. This keeps me from having to focus on teaching, and I can keep my attention on leading the music for the services. I’ll typically look for an article or a page from a good book on worship, and then craft a couple of thought provoking questions. Then I have everyone take turns answering. It is amazing how those times have united my teams.
3. Ask in passing, “where is your stress level at right now on a scale of 1 - 10?” But be careful. If you ask this at the right moment, you might be on the receiving end of an hour long emotion dump. If this happens, relax. It just means that you’re providing that person with some much needed time to vent. When it happens to me, I repeat my mantra in my head, “more listening, less advice giving”. I try to only give advice when people ask for it.
Hopefully at least one of these is helpful to you. What kind of things do you do to stay in touch with people? You can post them in the comment section below.
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