Church Teams – What are they?

When I was in America recently, I kept seeing a book on display whose title intrigued me. The title was The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. When I got back to the UK I tracked down a copy of the book to see if it has anything to say to the issue of teams as they operate in the Church. The short answer is that the book was not terribly helpful for church use. The context and setting of teams in business, which is what the book was describing, is such a long way from what the Church calls teams. But for all their radical differences, teams everywhere still have in common the existence of dysfunction.

Trying to read a book about teams has made me think afresh about my own love/hate relationship with the Church team idea throughout my ministry. Let me say quickly that I have never worked in a formal team situation. There have been times when I felt it would have been helpful to discuss difficult pastoral/theological issues with trusted colleagues. But, overall, I am glad that the situation never in fact arose. I witnessed what was the effect that team working had on others. I know that I would have suffered far more than I would have prospered.

Let me mention some objections to the so-called Team-Ministry idea as it is practised in the Anglican church today. In secular teams, the kind that function together to build Crossrail or motorways, there are groups of highly trained professionals who come together to make a project a reality. Each member of the team has been specially chosen and will have the needed expertise for the project and years of training. At a meeting of the management team, their expertise is listened to carefully and weighed up by the fellow team members and the person in charge. Everyone present is essential to the project and thus there is respect and dignity being offered to each person in the room. Each member of the Team may also be in charge of hundreds of workers under his/her instructions.

Church teams, such as those which come together to run a large parish, do not necessarily seek to balance complementary skills in ministry. The team is normally a group of random clergy who agree to work in this way. One of the Team is designated Team Rector who will oversee team meetings. He or she will probably have been ordained for a longer time with greater experience than the others. The members of the Team will typically be fairly junior clergy who have been ordained only two or three years. While each of them may accept some overall responsibility for an area of work across the whole, the main work will be done on their own patch. This is the part of their job-description where they are solely in charge. Team meetings, when they are expected to show enthusiasm for the large entity which constitutes the Team Ministry, will often be regarded as a chore.

One problem bedevils every Team ministry that I have ever encountered. The major handicap that I identify for successful team functioning within an Anglican parish situation is that there is now far less consensus about what a parish is for and how it should establish priorities. I have mentioned before the anecdote about the words spoken to a distressed woman linked to my church who called on an Anglican minister. He simply said to her ‘We don’t do pastoral’. By that he meant that he was only interested in swelling the numbers of ‘saved’ individuals through converting them to Christ. The bread and butter tasks of mundane caring for people, helping them through the pain and joy of everyday life in or out of church had passed him by. In vivid language, he saw his ministry as snatching branches out of the fire so that they would not be destroyed. This of course is not the only area of differing opinion about how parishes should run. The huge changes in the approach to visiting parishioners in their homes could create an enormous wedge and make me unsuitable for most Team ministries.

A second big problem for teams in the church today is the legacy of patriarchy. For centuries men have pontificated in church affairs and said what will happen and how it should happen. This tradition has never been a good foundation for team working. Entirely absent has been the idea that junior members of staff might have something valuable to offer the whole through their youth or education. I never remember any of my ‘training’ Vicars showing any interest in things I had studied in college. The patriarchal assumptions at the time of my curacies set out the pattern that the assistant curate was there to be the passive receptacle of the wisdom of the experienced priest.

I could go on to talk about the petty jealousies and rivalries that appear in team functioning in or out of the church. But that would only dovetail into what my readers would already know of their own exposure to the difficulties of working in a team. Many would summarise these issues as the ‘ego-problem’.But, in spite of difficulties, I still believe it is legitimate to sketch out the outline of what might be good team functioning. My thoughts for this come under five headings.

A team exists because of the underlying assumption that every member of the team has a vital contribution to make to the success of the whole project.

Each member of a team has the right to be properly heard with respect.

The team leader is there to ensure overall responsibility for the project but his/her views and insights do not necessarily carry greater weight than those of the team members.

The proceedings of team meetings should be carefully minuted. It should normally be assumed that these minutes are in the public domain unless there are cogent reasons for that not to be the case.

It is important that there should always be full disclosure of the source of information or ideas when external material is introduced by team members. This will ensure that team functioning is not compromised by unseen coercion from outside.

Respect, openness, tolerance and equal dignity are all hallmarks of secular teams and one feels that the same rules should apply to Church teams. But, rather than applying higher ethical standards than the secular world in teamwork, the Church seems to fall short in many respects. The word ‘team’ is quickly added to many new initiatives in the Church even when the groundwork to ensure proper team functioning has not been done.

I want to finish with a topical example from the Church of England. Five years ago the national Church started to expand its central work on Safeguarding as it became apparent that one person could not manage the work on their own. Problems have begun to surface as one person has exploded into a taskforce of thirteen and a half full time posts, collectively known as the National Safeguarding Team (NST). By calling itself a team, the Church gives out a totally false message about the way it is in fact functioning. The NST fails as a team because first it does not operate with openness and clarity. There are also serious problems of accountability to external groups, such as the House of Bishops. Where do its ultimate loyalties lie? It has no clearly defined stated aims. Survivors might expect that their interests would be properly represented by at least some of the members of this team, but this is apparently not the case. The methods of the NST operating are so opaque that many are calling for its abolition as being not fit for purpose.

The word team has been freely adopted by the Church over the years. This reflection is suggesting that the Church has in many cases debased the use of the word by simply failing to address what the meaning of the word might really involve. The NST is the latest in a long line of failures to grapple with the central question that Christians might ask. What might a team look like in a Christian context? We do not possess any models to point to at the moment.

About Stephen Parsons

Stephen is a retired Anglican priest living at present in Cumbria. He has taken a special interest in the issues around health and healing in the Church but also when the Church is a place of harm and abuse. He has published books on both these issues and is at present particularly interested in understanding how power works at every level in the Church. He is always interested in making contact with others who are concerned with these issues.

20 thoughts on “Church Teams – What are they?

  1. I appreciate on reading your post that the ministry team in which I work has many of the attributes of good functioning that you describe. This also means that I and the other Readers in the team are accepted as full members alongside ordained colleagues in various different positions. Credit to our Rector (a woman) for enabling quite a large group of very different individuals to work together so smoothly. Teams can have a lot to offer the churches they serve.

    1. Jealous! I can honestly say, I have never actually experienced a good team. In fact, I’ve never really been part of the team I was supposed to be in. You’re very lucky, bro.

    2. I am glad wayfarer that you are part of functioning team. It may have something to do with the fact that patriarchy is absent. The narcissism that often upholds badly run teams is also somewhat less common among women.

  2. My favourite saw is the vicar who constantly talks about the importance of working as a team, and then routinely fails to include the organist in planning music. And then has the chutzpah to complain that the musician seems disengaged and uninterested — which then becomes the conversation the vicar proceeds to have with the musician.

    I think one of the key ingredients not touched on here is the importance of expectations in people joining to work as a team. The CofE Safeguarding Team is a gathering of people out of necessity, and one imagines largely driven by the need to save the furniture for the insurers. They serve a need that is both obvious in the legal sense, and completely obscure at the pastoral level of responding to complaints that have been made. Which reinforces the poor behaviour of bishops and other clergy.

    I think the other key ingredient here is that churches often function as informal teams, and that this is a source of dysfunction. There are key personalities that manage the power in the situation, often functioning as poorly equipped leaders with high social capital. If you add a priest whose conception of the church is rigidly pyramid-shaped, then conflict will ultimately happen.

    Teams are more than their leaders, and leadership is still vitally important for clarifying expectations and helping the collective setting of directions. That’s just not how the majority of the clergy function, whatever they learn through training and formation.

  3. Thank you Kieran for your observations and insights. You are right to suggest that the church locally and nationally is a random coming together of people. Hardly a good start for team building. I sometimes think that House of Bishops is a dysfunctional team. No one knows what the church nationally should be focusing on so there is confusion and obvious dysfunction going on behind the scenes when they have to agree on something. No one wants to talk about the pyramid structure that you refer to. It is there everywhere and people assume that power has to be the powerful telling the less powerful what to do. What I object to strongly is the using of the word Team when quite clearly nothing team-like is going on. Not a single member of the NST seems to have survivors as their remit. The whole structure is an exercise in damage limitation on behalf of the bishops and the church.

  4. I have recently watched from the outside a classic example of how this should not work. A new (male) team rector is appointed, comes in and immediately ‘takes charge’ of the team and starts reshaping it to serve his own agenda. No real attempt made, as far as I can see, to feel his way in, to discern what is already going on in the four parishes, or to come alongside the clergy who are already serving in any meaningful way. Predictably, he has alienated the (female) team member that I know who is now in the process of moving on to a new post.

  5. Thank you John D. I too have seen similar events unfold. Those who appoint Team Rectors often do not have a clue about teams and never ask the right questions at interview. If you have followed this blog you will know that I am quite sensitised to narcissistic behaviour and what you are describing is classic NPD style on the part of the Rector. Perhaps after another 20-30 years the powers that be will learn to spot them and do something to prevent the enormous suffering that ensues when an unhappy team falls apart.

  6. At the beginning of your post you say that:

    “In secular teams, the kind that function together to build Crossrail or motorways, there are groups of highly trained professionals who come together to make a project a reality. Each member of the team has been specially chosen and will have the needed expertise for the project and years of training. At a meeting of the management team, their expertise is listened to carefully and weighed up by the fellow team members and the person in charge. Everyone present is essential to the project and thus there is respect and dignity being offered to each person in the room’

    Having been involved with the church at all levels since I was a child I can safely say that this perfectly acceptable and professional description of a team is not one that I have ever encountered or experienced in the church, and each church ‘team’ deserves to be scrutinised against this excellent description, be it at parish level, General Synod or the House of Bishops themselves.

  7. Thank you D01903 for your comment. The point that I was making is that even the use of the word team seems to be inadmissable in most church settings because it fall so far short of this ideal.

  8. The attired elf the person leading the team is fundamental – they must be co-operative with other members of the team, rather than competing with them. I’ve been puzzled by clergy who feel threatened by staff who are talented, and then proceed to undermine, deskill or disable them. After all, if people in the team are doing good work, credit will rebound on the leader. It mystifies me that they can’t see this, but it’s all too common in the Church.

    On the other hand, however good and collaborative the leader is, they will get nowhere unless the team members are also co-operative and collaborative. I had a parish where a number of key church officers and lay leaders were still taking their directions from the previous incumbent and would not co-operate with me. That was an impossible situation.

    Probably more common are parishes where lay people who are heavily involved simply assume the new incumbent has detailed information about the way things work in that particular place, when in fact no one has bothered to share that knowledge with the poor soul. That’s a recipe for misunderstandings, with the new priest in charge being blamed for ‘changing’ traditions and customs they didn’t know existed! Or ‘failing to communicate’ when actually communication should have been a two-way street. In another parish it took me more than 6 months, and repeated requests, to get an address list for the congregation and care homes in the parish. And people wondered why I wasn’t visiting and taking holy communion to the homes!

    No, the Church doesn’t do teams well. Which is a big shame, because good teams are so effective.

    1. Your spell checker has declared UDI in the first sentence! I totally agree with you. I have found that the incumbent doesn’t ask! But it’s necessary for both to be right. I have been on a committee where the key workers were still meeting with the previous chair. And imagine the situation in two parishes I wot of where the incumbent bought a retirement home in the parish, and the Bishop gave her a Diocesan post. You’d need to pay me a king’s ransom to take that job!

  9. Er, after much cogitation I’ve decided ‘attired elf’ was supposed to be ‘attitude of’. Though I think I like ‘attired elf’ better! Don’t house elfs get freed when they’re dressed?My spellcheck is exasperating and amusing by turns. What’s frustrating is when it ‘corrects’ something after I’ve moved, and I don’t see it.

  10. I was part of the church ministry team for several years. During vacancies the team discussed ministry: pastoral, children’s work, social justice etc. During incumbencies the team discussed the rota… I think this may go back to the

  11. feeling of being threatened and worry about not being in control – rotas may involve disagreement but they are within “safe” parameters. (Sorry – it posted before I finished and I couldn’t work out how to edit!)

    1. Probably the clergy had all the other stuff worked out between them before the “team” meeting!

Comments are closed.