Sometimes I Am People | What the Team Cannot See E1

Your team conflict is in the Bible. Not as a footnote. Not as a case study in somebody's leadership book. It is in there as the reason half the letters got written.

Every new member of The Church Collective answers a few questions when they join. What are you carrying. What is hardest about this work. Almost six hundred worship leaders have answered those questions now, and one answer has stayed with me longer than any other. Someone wrote that people are the hardest part of ministry. People let you down. People break your heart. People can have messed up priorities. And then they finished the thought with the truest sentence in the whole pile.

Sometimes I am people.

Welcome to a new season. Last spring we walked through What the Room Cannot See, ten episodes about the wound inside you. This season is about a different set of wounds. The ones between you and the people in the room. The volunteer who keeps declining. The musician who is better than you and knows it. The person at the console who finds out everything last. The setlist argument that will not die.

When I say team, I mean the whole team. The person mixing front of house is leading worship. The person at the lighting board, the person clicking through ProPresenter, the person behind the camera. If you shape what the room hears or sees or attends to, this season is addressed to you.

Anchored in Philippians 2:1-5, where Paul hands a team he loves the word his culture used as an insult, tapeinophrosyne, lowliness of mind, and calls it their survival skill. Each counting others better than himself. Not because the others are more talented. Because that is the shape of the mind of Christ.

A question to sit with today: where in this team am I the people.

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