Doing Church as a Team

A special report from the DCAT 2010 conference in Hawaii

by Dan Lentz

I'm on "special" assignment this weekend as I have the privilege to attend DCAT 2010 in warm and wonderful Honolulu, Hawaii. DCAT stands for “Doing Church as a Team” and it is the annual conference sponsored by New Hope Christian Fellowship Oahu (recognized as one of the top 5 churches to watch in America).

I’ve been “watching” New Hope Oahu for a few years now, and today I had the opportunity to watch and hear Senior Pastor Wayne Cordeiro speak about “Passing the Baton.”

A little background first…New Hope’s “Doing Church as a Team” philosophy centers around a couple of key ideas:
-It is vital that we team up with the Lord in a daily devotional relationship with Him.
-And, ministry is done in teams through smaller reproducible groups where relationships are highly valued.

One of the group terms used around New Hope is “fractal.” Fractal is a math term that simply means making something infinitely reproducible. For instance look at any tree leaf and in various magnifications, and you see a network of veins and cells that mimic the entire leaf. The pattern is reproduced at the smallest as well as the largest levels.

A key to making the pattern reproducible (and groups reproducible) is effectively passing the baton. That brings us back to Wayne’s talk.

He noted there were two keys to making effective leadership and group multiplication sustainable.

The first—don’t loose the 2nd generation. It only takes the loss of one generation of leaders for the system to completely break down. Put your focus on the generation of leaders immediately under you.

The second—don’t wait too long to pass the baton. Obviously, this ties into the first idea, but the temptation is to work with the next generation of leaders, but wait too long to pull the trigger and let them lead. Wayne said it takes roughly 10 years to pass the heart of the baton and you rarely get the heart until you start leading. So pass early and keep working to develop the heart of the next generation.

More later…