Roach puts Next Level on display
JEFFERSON CITY—Missouri Baptist Convention (MBC) Ministerial Services Specialist George Roach is focused on Next Level Leadership Training these days as the vehicle by which the MBC can achieve church health in a variety of settings.
“I’ve seen churches buying into the process, and it’s very simple,” he said.
On Nov. 5-6 at the Baptist Building, Roach hosted a training time for nine Missouri Baptists and a staff member from First Baptist Church, Orlando, Fla., that featured the presentation skills of John Fream, a North American Mission Board (NAMB) leadership trainer and pastor of First Baptist Church, McAlester, Okla. MBC staffers, Disaster Relief personnel and directors of missions participated in the training.
“There’s a lot of good stuff out there, but this seems to fit who we are in Missouri, with the amount of small churches that we have,” Roach said. “We have great folks in the field.”
Fream said Missouri Baptists are building a good foundation.
“We try to expand who’s using this material and getting it into churches, associations, and obviously starting with state conventions,” he said.
Central to the training is a strategy for building powerful ministry teams. The six components of the strategy are: excellent communication; common purpose; clear rules; accepted leadership; effective processes; and solid relationships. Visually the parts are displayed on a wheel.
“If you want to check the health of your church, let’s walk around the wheel,” Roach said. “If you want to check the health of your committee, or your team, look around the wheel. It works well.”
Excellent communication is where it all begins, Roach said.
“If you don’t communicate well, where are you at?” he asked rhetorically. “That’s part of our problem out there. I went into an interim (pastorate) one time where there’d been a lot of conflict in the church, and as I began to unpack what was going on, I found out that the key leadership and the pastor all went hard of hearing and got hearing aids about the same time. There were blanks in the conversation that they weren’t hearing, and they filled them in wrong, which caused conflict.”
“Effective process helps you to move your strategy along,” Roach explained. “In that piece, you have a general direction, then you come to a point where you have a divergence of ideas, and then in those divergence of ideas you have conflict over what you’re going to do, and then as you walk out of the conflict, if it’s handled properly, then you come together with convergence, and then you have a shared vision or a shared purpose and you’re able to move forward. Sometimes we call that process I just described brainstorming.”
“I ask, Father, that You bless their ministries, that you would enlarge their territories,” Roach prayed, focusing on the men in the Gold Room who came to Jefferson City for the Next Level Training. “Father, that by working together, we will see the brightness of the light of Jesus Christ begin to flood our state and our nation and our world.”