Questions about our teaching team????

Our Orchard Teaching Team met yesterday. We meet once every two weeks to work together on the teachings that we will bring to our church family on Sunday mornings. It is fun and, I believe, healthy for our congregation to have multiple voices speaking God's truth to our congregation. I love our teaching team which regularly has 7 teachers and a couple of regular subs--Ed, Mike, Alice, Doug, Tim, Kurt and myself!

When I travel and meet with other church leaders, our teaching team is the most often asked about part of our ministry. Many churches tell me that they are hoping to move in this direction. But, having a high trust teaching team that is willing to share the pulpit (if we used one?) can be a challenge. A part of each of our meetings this fall has been a time for us to build trust between our teachers. It can be hard because we don't really spend a lot of time together and we are very different people. It's working well and I believe our congregation benefits from different voices with different passions and life stories.

So, how does it work? We outline a teaching series together and in general agree what we will teach from God's Word and what our congregation needs at this point in their journey. At that point, each individual teacher takes that information and develops their own teaching. Jonny Rogers helps us package the teaching series in a way that we hope will be sticky to our congregation. We hope and pray that our teaching team is helping each person in our congregation grow.

What about favorites? I think it's ok to have a favorite teacher or two. It's natural that one or two of our team would be most helpful to you. I'm certain that each of our team is someone's favorite. What's really important, though, is that each of us is open to God speaking to us from His Word brought by any of the teachers. When you listen to a teaching live or on-line, be sure to listen for God's voice much more than the human voice of the teacher!