John Trent - Leading from Your Strengths: Ministry Teams

This book is dedicated to Bill and Dave Bonnstetter, a father and son team who have dedicated their lives to helping others understand and use their unique strengths and who have supported our efforts to do the same. May God richly bless both of you.

Acknowledgments

I'd especially like to thank Doug Barram, Bob Leenhouts, and Doug Childress for the way they've encouraged me to lead from my strengths for years, in spite of knowing and seeing my weaknesses. Special thanks too to Cindy, my life partner, and to Kari and Laura, who are precious gifts to us as well as being wonderful, godly daughters.

John Trent

I will be forever grateful to Bruce and Carol Mazzare for introducing me to the principles of personality and for their love and wisdom. I'd like to thank John and Cindy Trent for their creativity and love for the Lord and for taking a risk in developing new ways to help people build strong, God-honoring relationships. I want to thank my wonderful wife, Elizabeth, whose unfailing support through trials and triumphs has allowed me to follow my dreams, and my daughters, Ashley and Amy, who bring great joy to our lives.

Rodney Cox

We would like to thank Patrick Poole for his contributions to this book. We would also like to thank Dr. John Michael, Brent Rowland, and the rest of the Leading From Your Strengths team for all of their hard work.

Ministries Hanging
in the Balance

IT'S 10:20 P.M. AND A PIERCING winter wind refuses to relinquish its iron grip on an early spring night. Kevin sits alone in his office. Normally this senior pastor of a growing church would have raced home from work, wolfed down his dinner, and gotten ready for a weekly small-group study at his house. That study was a high point of the week for Kevin and his wife, Karen.

Not tonight.

Tonight, Karen got a call saying Kevin was staying late and to go on without him. The florescent lights from his office shine out onto a dark, empty parking lot as he sits at his computer and struggles with the words on the screen.

Kevin isn't wrestling with the right phrases for Sunday's sermon; he's working on his resum. In fact, he's seriously thinking about getting out of pastoral ministry altogether.

For twelve years at his last church, Kevin experienced a fruitful, fulfilling ministry. He'd built a small, close-knit staff; worked well with his deacons; and been able to focus on preaching and teaching his flock. Now, after only a year and a half at his new church, Kevin had become so frustratedso deeply angry with Rick, the senior music ministerhe dreaded even coming into the office. That wasn't the worst. His internal tension level had risen so high because of the conflict that it often overflowed at home. He snapped at his kids and even pushed back from his wife.

Day and night the emotional burden of these unresolved issues weighed on Kevin like a seventy-five-pound pack. That weight became a constant feeling of failurea nagging heaviness that he had let down his family, his God, and especially the people in his flock. As Kevin typed his resum, struggling to paint a positive picture of his gifts and strengths, he thought about adding words like hypocrite, loser, failure, and quitter.

How could he talk about reconciliation and forgiveness on Sunday and yet have so many unresolved issues with Rick? It wasn't from a lack of prayer or face-to-face effort to make things right. He'd never tried harder in his life to get on the same page with another person. But these two committed Christians were polar opposites. On every issuefrom the look of the bulletin to the style of music on Sundaythey had different points of view. And every time Kevin tried to bridge the gap and make things better, he seemed to make things worse.

You might ask, As the senior pastor, couldn't he just fire the source of all this frustration? Kevin knew this wasn't an option. There were no ethical or moral problems and no question that Rick worked hard and wanted the best for the church. This, added to the fact that Rick had been at the church for seventeen years and Kevin less than two, meant that Rick went with the furniture.

His unsought adversary wasn't going anywhere.

Which was why on this dark, windy night, Kevin thought of going somewhereanywherewhere there wasn't so much pain.

STEPPING INTO A POWER STRUGGLE

Sandy was a new Christian who had answered the call to be part of a volunteer committee for her church's women's ministry. When the Sunday bulletin announced that they were looking for someone with marketing and promotional ideas to help with special events, Sandy felt God's Spirit tap on her shoulder. After all, she was a full partner at a noted advertising agency and had won industry awards for running entire brand campaigns. Using her marketing skills to serve the Lord on a committee at church seemed right down her alleyuntil she discovered the back-alley politics going on in the group.

The politics began before Sandy even got inside for the first meeting! That's because a lady named Jennifer met her in the parking lot as soon as she stepped out of her car. Between the parking lot and the meeting room, Jennifer quickly explained to Sandy the way things operated on the committee. Of course, during the first break in their meeting, another vocal lady named Michelle made a point of cornering Sandy. It was clear Michelle was on a mission to tell her the way things happened in the group from her standpoint.

For years Sandy had walked into clients' offices where there was an obvious culture of conflict. She expected that in the rough-and-tumble corporate advertising world, but she never thought she'd see such intense lobbying and politics inside a church. While their focus was to be on helping women in the church love and serve Jesus, the friction in the room was equal to or worse than anything she'd seen in a corporate meeting. Instead of getting to use her strengths to serve, Sandy and the other committee members basically watched Jennifer, the irresistible force, spar with Michelle, the immovable object, from the opening prayer to the closing prayer. The constant verbal and nonverbal tug-of-war between these two kept anything positive from happening in the group. So much so that after bottling up her emotions for weeks, one night Sandy blew up and walked out of the meeting.

As she started her car in the church parking lot, brokenhearted and discouraged, Sandy vowed she'd never volunteer for anything at her church again.

RUSHING TO REJECTION

And then there was Dan, the only single man that this historic church had ever asked to serve as a deacon. He was honored when he'd been asked to become a deacon, and he thought that his accounting skills would help resolve some of the financial difficulties he knew the church faced.

The day before his first deacons' meeting, he received a package containing the most recent financial audit, a set of deacons meeting minutes for the past three years, and a copy of the proposed annual budget that the deacons were to vote on the following day. What he saw shocked him. For three years running, the ministry expenses had exceeded donations by more than 20 percent each year. Virtually every area of the ministry was consistently over budget, and the shortfalls were being covered by a fund that had actually been designated for other purposes.