As part of a team, how have you been encouraged to take initiative and move forward in your own ideas and creativity?

When I am asked to help, then I am encouraged to climb a mountain or swim a shark-filled ocean to go after innovation. HOWEVER – this drive will be immediately canceled if everything and anything that I suggest is faulted and discounted as unworkable. If it has a chance, give it a chance.

Often, it might be better if “senior leaders” bow out and let another lead the way. That way it will not be all about the boss getting his way in what he wanted to do all along. It’s a subtle danger that will often smother creativity, but I really think we need to get out of the way.

The old geezers should be constantly urging the rising generation to “go for it.” The elder generation should make it clear that their passion is to see great success in the days to come, and to admit their own tiredness! Be open about our own limitations and the boxes in which we have confined ourselves.

I read an article about “Student” ministry. This is often the official term used to apply to the “Next generation of the church” – but this seems to be a wrong approach to my mind. They may be the Next Leaders, but they are NOT THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE or the “Future of the Church.” They are the Church right now, in the PRESENT.

As I have been conversing with a number of emerging leaders from Asia through secure texting apps, I am always asking them what they want to gain from our conversation or from a Bible Study. Often when I do leader training I will open with a discussion of THEIR expectations from the time we have together, then I will adjust the training to fit their very perceptive and insightful input.

So to encourage them I am advocating that we give them a sense of ownership in the Church, or in a training event. Likewise for a leadership team – if we really want participation and contribution to the work and the agenda, then we must give our teams an increased sense of ownership – that it is their project, their initiative – and as senior leaders we are making ourselves available to serve them and help them accomplish the dreams and ideas God has given them.

We must be less about having them help with good ideas to help us with OUR OWN goals and our own ideas. “It is your project as a team – not mine as the leader.”

JIM B

“Encouraged to take initiative and move forward in your own ideas and creativity”.
That was not my experience with teams during seven decades.
Team members by definition must “pull together” to reach an agreed or assigned goal, through agreed or dictated means. “Team development” has as its objective to conform or to eliminate deviant members. In evangelicalism, teams members work under constant threat, from their organization, of informing their supporters that they need counselling and please to direct your donations to another member who remains compliant.
Thus, instead of building long-term teams, chaired by politicians, form small, temporary work groups that concentrate on getting their work done, instead of making team members compliant to an external authority.
Our missionary “team” took twenty years of wrangling and firings to plant its first church. Later, by authorizing one-year, renewable, work groups, we saw new churches planted every few months. For we became focussed on our task more than on preserving a big, quarrelsome, non-biblical team.

I have been encouraged by the leader of our team who shared their different responsibilities with me in order to give me the experience of “leading”. I sensed that they were not just giving me “unwanted tasks”, but valuable and viable ministry opportunity and experience.