The All-Important Handoff

Josh on June 13th, 2008

One of the interesting challenges created by a discipleship process is the possibility of creating silos at each step of spiritual growth.

Early in ministry I staffed the volunteers by purpose, which I think is still a good thing, creating 5 volunteer “pastors” that oversaw their respective purpose. The concern was that each person only saw their part of the process and not the whole. The key for the leader is to help everyone see the overarching crisis that our mission is responding toward as a collective whole. At the end of the day, the problem for me laid in the handoff between these groups.

The weekend volunteer has to handoff to the small group volunteer who hands off to the HABITS volunteer who hands off to the Ministry Team/Student Leadership volunteer who hands off to the missions volunteer.

If anyone fumbles the handoff or we are unclear in any way, the discipleship process comes to a grinding halt. Even today, I’m looking to figure out ways to reduce the number of handoffs and make sure we don’t drop the ball when we do have to make one. For right now, that means the weekend (evangelism) hands off to a small groups team (fellowship), which now also includes HABITS (discipleship) and ministry teams (discover). The less handoffs, the better.

JG

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Matt McGill at 8:07am June 20

the hand off is key, that’s for sure. another way to look at this is to go the other direction: the small groups pulls from the weekend, HABITS pulls from small groups, etc.
The word “pull” probably isn’t the best, since it’s easier to push something…but you probably get my point…
If a person is really passionate about their area, they may be more motivated to get people there rather than expecting them to push them our of their area….