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We must be team because God, as Trinity, is team

By Cliff Bembridge.

Mention the terms ‘Group’ or ‘Team Ministry’ in a church context and there will be someone who will say you are simply reinventing the Methodist Circuit by another name, and someone else who will want to enter into a debate about what exactly we mean by the terms ‘Group’ and ‘Team’.

Those who would argue the parallels with Methodism make a valid point, although I sense that in many cases, while there may be similarities, there are often significant differences. A friend, who is a Methodist Superintendent, assures me that there is no set pattern in how circuits function and there are often significant local variations.

It is interesting to note that the Methodist Church in Ireland is currently exploring team ministry and seeing it as something different to traditional circuit ministry. Their current website makes the comment that

‘There is no such person as the omni-competent minister. God has made sure of that! It is helpful to think of the ministry of Jesus. When he left his disciples, it would have been impossible for a single one to continue his ministry. So... he gave them his Spirit, TO DO IT TOGETHER!.’

This would certainly imply that the Irish Methodist Church sees team ministry as something different to traditional circuit ministry.

Whereas in Ireland the Methodist Church sees team ministry as theologically sound, in England - in the Church of England - there are pragmatic reasons for advocating team ministry and distinguishing between groups and teams, based on the requirement of the Church of England to legislate for clergy from different parishes to work together. Hence in a team, there is a Team Rector who is the incumbent, but is required to share the cure of souls with the Team Vicars and curates, whereas, in a Group, the clergy from different benefices agree to work together (See Team and Group Ministries Measure 1995).

In other denominations, the word ‘group’ is used to refer to a group of churches, and ‘team’ refers to the ministers/laypeople who serve the Group of Churches. On a number of occasions, when I have been drawn into the debate about terminology, I have sensed the participants have been using the discussion to avoid the more challenging debate on what collegiate ministry is all about.  Personally I am much less concerned about definitions and much more excited about the focus on getting ministers and churches working together.

Resistance

Often there is a resistance to groups/teams as they are frequently linked to the question of ministerial deployment.  In the mind of the average worshipper, they relate to less ministry and worse still, a watering down of the traditional pastoral link between pastor and congregation.  On the minister’s side, there is often an equally strong resistance to working with colleagues. I regularly come across colleagues who would rather take responsibility for one or more additional congregations than face up to having to work collegiately. I recently spoke to Craig Bowman, the URC Secretary for Ministries, who suggested a possible link between this tendency in ministers and what he believes to be the case that the majority of our ministerial candidates come from our larger churches where there is a single minister who may have played a significant part in helping the candidate from the point of call to acceptance for training and beyond. In addition, I wonder just how much stress is put on preparation for collegiate ministry in our training courses.

New Testament roots

If we go back to the New Testament, there is a lot of evidence of team work in the ministry of Jesus. The colleagueship of Peter, James and John stands out as a particular example. Furthermore the twelve were not sent out on their own, but in twos.  Although we often see Paul as a lone practitioner, for much of his ministry he is linked to someone else. We read of Paul and Barnabas, Paul and Silas, Paul and Timothy. The model was very much about young learning from old and both giving each other confidence in a hostile world.

In Ephesians chapter 4, we read: ‘The gifts he gave were that some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors, and teachers to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for the building up of the body of Christ....’ (Ephesians 4:11-12 NRSV). Yet traditionally, when it comes to seeking candidates for vacant pastorates, we attempt to look for ministers with all those skills and often settle for all round mediocrity rather than the chance to call more than one person to achieve a broader range of skills and talents.

I am sometimes amused that people who clearly know little or nothing about the concept of teamwork nevertheless know what might go wrong (such as the ministers falling out  or one church voting against a possible new candidate, while the others voted in favour), but are anxious to avoid discussion on what might be achieved if things went right.

Nothing new

My sadness about this built in resistance to collegiate working is all the deeper because we are not talking about something new when we see a pastorate as more than one building, and ministry as more than one person. As we have noted, in one sense it has been part of Methodism from the beginning, and it was one of the models of ministry experienced in my training in Manchester in the 1970s.

Tony Burnham, who was to become General Secretary of the United Reformed Church, joined the staff of the Congregational College, Manchester, as I began my course. Until then, the practical side of training had been on the level of baptising teddy bears and working in a student pastorate one summer of your training. Tony was determined to engage us in a more hands on approach and signed up local churches to be our training grounds.  Soon those churches which had enjoyed little stipendiary ministry for some time realised that they could achieve much more and have a higher level of ministry if they worked together as a Group. By the late 1970s, there were seven churches and three ministers in what became the South West Manchester Group.  

Despite the biblical precedent and clear advantages that collegiate ministry can bring, local churches are still largely reluctant to let go of what they see as the single minister ideal.  Furthermore, many ministers have seen it as a virtue to be isolationist. Even in the Anglican Church, where the norm is to begin as a curate working with a vicar, this is temporary and the aim is to get your own parish. The suspicion seems to be that working in Groups is detrimental to the life of the local churches that constitute it. However, this has not been borne out in my own experiences.

Personal experience

My first church was in a small ‘working class’ town in Cheshire with a brief from the District Council to develop a group. In time, this led to the six churches SE Cheshire Group with two ‘stipendiary ministers’, and what we would now call an NSM and a Local Church Leader. The Group still exists and has enabled the URC to continue to provide ministry to that part of rural Cheshire.

In 1981, I moved to the Halifax Group which reinforced my belief in just how creative groups can be.  There were 4 churches - a strong town centre church and even stronger suburban congregation, a struggling but once grand congregation in the part of town with the largest percentage of Black Minority Ethnic (BME) residents (mainly Moslem) and a small congregation on the edge of town in a mixed housing area. Here my colleagues (there were 2 over the 13 years I was there) and I did a lot of experimenting - at one point one minister was allocated to the two smallest churches as it was agreed they needed most support and one for the bigger two which had a larger pool of skilled church members.

The four churches had a desire to serve the community, and we discovered we could be more adventurous as a group than any single church, no matter how strong. By learning from the highly successful South Leeds Team Ministry and with the assistance of a minister from Ghana with community work experience who became a member of the team for a year, we set up a charitable company to deliver government training schemes. At the peak we had 500 trainees and a £1m annual budget.

All the churches grew in confidence and in particular the two smaller ones. The one with the high level of BME residents found opportunities to work with the local community and witnessed its vast decaying Victorian plant transformed into offices for the new group charity. The out of town church dramatically increased its community involvement through the transformation of a redundant church hall into a significant community resource.

Where do we go from here?

In 1995, I accepted the call to Southampton to a medium sized single minister pastorate. While I discovered the strengths of a single pastorate and the privilege of being part of the team that delivered a major redevelopment of the buildings, I missed having trusted ministerial colleagues to work closely with.

In recent years, as with all the main line churches in the country, the URC has spent a great deal of time agonizing over ministerial deployment and exploring future patterns of ministry. In its early days, the URC made a commitment to give every congregation, no matter how small, at least part of a stipendiary minister. Such a promise is now widely acknowledged as being unrealistic with only 591 stipendiary and 110 non-stipendiary ministers compared to the 2,000 stipendiary ministers of 1972. Proposals for change are at an early stage, but look to much greater use of Local Church Leaders with stipendiary ministers being spread still more thinly.

A local solution

In 2005, acknowledging that the future must be different from the past, eight churches in the Southampton area began to explore the possibility of working together as a Group. In the end, four were left with links to two LEPs. It was hard work initially, but as we moved from the natural ‘what is in it for us’, to the more adventurous ‘what can we do together that we could never do on our own’, much progress has been made.

Slowly the early concerns lessened as we adopted the slogan ‘Fewer Ministers, but more ministry’. That ministry will come from two stipendiary ministers, rather than the current three, a Church Related Community Worker, four nationally accredited Lay Preachers and a locally accredited Lay Preacher. This ‘ministry team’ regularly meets  to share worship planning and services, and while each church has a named minister, the whole team is available to each church.

One of the smaller churches has already taken on a new sense of life by moving from asking ‘Do we have a future?’ to revamping their worship area and halls and asking ‘What is God calling us to be?’ 

In conclusion

Of course Groups are not right for every situation, but at their best, whether denominationally or ecumenically based, they can be life-transforming for ministers and churches alike. My experience has been that, within a group, churches are much more courageous and attempt things they would not do on their own, and as a minister I have been blessed and supported by colleagues who have encouraged me to give of my best.

My title ‘We must be team because God, as Trinity, is team’, is borrowed from Irish Methodism. I find it challenging, for if we can only begin to understand God through the collaborative work of Creator, Saviour and Spirit, what greater impetus can there be to seriously explore ministry in collaborative terms.