Teaming with Ideas

Lucy Moore

Lay aside all thoughts of your children’s leaders drooling over a huge tableful of Victoria Sponges, lemon drizzle cake and steaming pots of Earl Grey. This feature – alas – is on team based children’s work, not tea based work. But there are similarities…

I like the Rublev Icon of the Trinity. It shows what I take to be God the Father, Jesus and the Holy Spirit sitting chatting round a table over a cup of wine (not, by any stretch of the imagination, a teapot). They’re sitting very close together, intently listening to the figure on the left, heads on one side as if they’re trying to show him how important his words are to them. Despite the hard chairs, they look relaxed and comfy. It’s a very restful picture but very dynamic: the three characters are obviously discussing something important, but they’re also enjoying being together. They’re smiling as if they could stay there together forever (good job, really) but they’re also ready to jump into action. The colours of their robes complement each other; their body language is slightly different in each case, but there is a distinct family likeness between them. They are the same, but different. If they were to leap to their feet, they would move in very different ways and get on with very different missions.

And one of the secrets hidden in the icon is the way that you can draw a circle round the three of them and they fit beautifully and perfectly within. But! If you draw another circle, this time in the third dimension, coming out of the icon, you find yourself, the watcher, drawn into the circle and sitting down at the table in the spare place! Clever or what? And completely awesome. Me, a grubby little created lump of clay invited to sit down with the Creator, Sustainer and Redeemer of the Universe. God invites me to join his team.

This image of the way that God himself works as a team is crucial to the way we work best for the kingdom. Relationship is built into our faith. Relationship is what we understand in a more gutsy way than anything. As our own Alison Harris says, ‘Young children’s perceptions of God draw on their own relationships with their primary caregivers and their interpretations of the information about God given to them by adults…Children are relational beings from birth.’ And diving into Genesis for a moment, God muses to himself (presumably to the other two persons of himself): ‘It’s not good for the man to be alone.’ We are made to work together.

Is it pushing it too far to claim that if God himself chooses to work as a team (or – terrifying thought – as a committee! No! No! Anything but that!) who are we to try to ‘go it alone’? If we want what’s best for our children and for our leaders, we must look for a team, not for an individual save-the-day superhero.

The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. A team adds a certain je ne sais quoi that takes its effectiveness beyond what all its members operating separately could achieve. It’s a truism, but deserves to be reiterated nonetheless. It’s been really interesting to work on our Messy Church project. The planning meetings with all of us present result in a really zingy time of new ideas, interesting insights into the way the last session went and vision for the way ahead. One person on their own couldn’t possibly come up with all that diversity of creative energy. Lesley knows all about small children and their developmental needs; Denise is brilliant at thinking up really messy crafts and Jackie can think laterally and make suggestions I’d never arrive at in a month of Sundays.

Timewise, a team works to everyone’s benefit: leading one session a month for our weekly Rock On! children’s group and simply turning up to help at the others is manageable. If I had to lead every week, I would burn out and give up. And if one of us has to be away, the session doesn’t fold for lack of CRB-cleared adults – the rest of the team fill in.

Support-wise a team is crucial. We all need other people to pick us up when a session goes badly or to rejoice with when it goes well. We need to know people are praying for us, especially when the children are climbing the curtains and any mention of anything vaguely spiritual results in a groan of ‘Bo-ring!’ We need the informed wisdom of team members when crises occur, when we need to plan ahead, when we just need to talk an idea through.

And if it’s true that we learn most non-verbally, surely the children learn about the way ‘those Christians love each other’ best from seeing the way a group of adults operate without bickering, competitiveness or rivalry, but in empathy and mutual care.

‘Oh woe,’ I hear you wail and chant like Peter Pan over the comatose form of Tinkerbell: ’I do believe in teams. I do! I do! But we just don’t have anyone else!’ And I sympathise entirely. It can seem that you’re the only one with the time / energy / physical fitness / commitment / love of children / vision / availability to do any work with children in your church. Much as you’d love to delegate, there is no-one to be delegated unto.

Here are a few ideas that you could try, both for finding and keeping a team. They’re obvious, but aren’t the best ideas always obvious?
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1 Pray!
I was moaning to our prayerful church administrator that all of a sudden, I seemed to be organising the whole youth and children’s programme singlehanded. ‘It’s too much!’ I whinged pathetically. ‘What if I leave? It’ll all fall apart! I haven’t got time for this! It’s not fair!’ etc etc. Val went away and prayed for someone to coordinate all the children’s work that’s going on. (I was too busy moaning to pray.) The next thing I knew was that a friend, whom I’d assumed was too busy to be more committed, declared that she wanted to become more involved in church, wanted to do something with the children and could she please have something to do…’ On this particular occasion of answering prayer, God decided to be as subtle as a brick.

2 Be personal!
Don’t put out blanket pleas for help: ask individuals to do a specific job. ‘George, you were so good with the lively toddlers on the church camp. We need someone to do the valuable job of running the crèche and I think you’re the perfect person to do it.’ Unless you buttonhole someone face to face and make it clear to them personally how brilliant they will be on your team, they will assume you mean everyone except them. Get up close and personal. It takes much longer, but will have more results. And it saves you the embarrassment of saying ‘no thank you’ if someone unsuitable volunteers.

3 Set limits!
Have clear expectations! Do you want someone to lead Sunday Club for the rest of the millennium or would just this term be enough? Have an upfront system of contracts that people can sign that show their start dates and finish dates. It’ll help them know this isn’t a life sentence and will help the church plan who to train up to take their place. ‘Mabel finishes Junior Choir next year – we need to get Horace along for a few weeks to see what it’s like for when he takes over…’ And set a time limit for meetings. And keep to it.

4 Work to your strengths!
Build your work around the needs of the children you’re working with but also around the gifts and availability of your team. If you have lots of elderly people in wheelchairs willing to help out with children, starting an evangelistic Bungee Jumping Club may not be quite the direction to head in. However, something featuring the skills they’ve acquired over a lifetime of experiences could be your starting point. Talk to them. If your helpers don’t get home from work until 6.30pm, forget about an after school club and think about Sunday afternoons instead. If everyone in church is too busy for a weekly commitment, would they commit to one day of one week of a Holiday Club once a year? (If not, why not?)

5 Take me to your leader!
Team Leaders are important. The team that can run without one is rare indeed. Someone needs to carry the can, however much that person delegates along the way. Do you have to have an actual children’s worker leading? Could it be a sympathetic person with no gift for children’s work but oodles of administrative skills? That would free the hands-on people from the duties of setting training meeting dates, pursuing CRB forms or putting up posters before an event.

6 Stay fresh!
Training is crucial to keep regular children’s leaders on track, inspired, in touch with new developments in children’s work and keen to try out new ideas. Paying for the training also shows how much the church values their work. Of course this is where Barnabas can join your team and work alongside you for a step or two of the journey: our training sessions and Quiet Days for children’s workers are designed to encourage and enable your team to do their job even better. Perhaps there aren’t enough of you at your church to justify having us over? Well, teamwork exists between churches, deaneries, areas, networks too – several churches meeting together for training can provide a crucial opportunity to build a wider team of people and resources to draw on.

7 Keep in touch!
Support from your church is important too. If all the children’s workers scuttle away during the service and miss coffee afterwards because of tidying up, when does the rest of church hear about what’s going on with the children? Have a regular slot to feed into your congregation / church eldership / PCC / pastors’ meetings to keep them in touch and to keep children’s work at the heart of church life. The wider church is part of the team too, through prayer support, fellowship and financial support.

8 Team up!
On this note, if you’ve prayed and buttonholed and still no-one appears to help, maybe the time has come to work across a wider area than just your church. Could you team up with the Baptists down the road, the URC on the corner or the Anglicans across the way? Chances are they have the same pressures as you. Children don’t work parochially: why should we?

9 Phone home!
Communication is easier than ever these days – short-cut the system by setting up an email list with all your leaders on. Have a list of phone numbers pinned to your noticeboard so you don’t spend hours looking everyone up every time. Make use of church notice boards and website notice boards.

10 Resolve problems properly!
If things go wrong in your team – which they probably will as we’re fallible human beings – make sure you have a secure safety net. Mutterings, gossip and stropping can poison a church, so wheel in a minister or member of the pastoral team sooner rather than later. Most problems can be sorted out by having a sympathetic uninvolved listener to ease the pressure.

We began with cake. And, speaking as a vicar’s wife, (though it pains me to admit it) tea-based ministry is time-honoured and valuable. What could replace the simple act of sitting down over a cuppa and enjoying one another’s company? (Or sitting down in the pub together, at a bbq, in front of the tv for a video and pizza together… why should the children have all the fun?) If teams’ success or failure depends on relationships, as modelled by the Father, Son and Spirit round their wine cup, we could do far worse than prioritise the friendship engendered by sharing a Victoria Sponge together.

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