3 Teams to Make Your Life Dramatically Easier as a Pastor

As a pastor, you’ve got a lot of plates spinning. You're preaching, counseling, visiting the sick, leading meetings, planning events, and a million other things – all while trying to bring your best every single day.

But let's be real, sometimes it feels like you're just barely keeping your head above water. You're struggling to craft engaging, biblical sermons with engaging visuals. You feel the pressure to make sure the worship services are done with excellence. And those are just the things related to Sundays. It can be a lot.

But don't worry, you don't have to go at it alone. By building and leveraging the right teams, you can not only achieve excellence in your ministry, but also avoid burnout and find some much-needed collaboration and creativity along the way. 

Here are the three teams that will dramatically make your life easier as a pastor.

1. Creative Team

This is a team that will likely involve your worship leader and a few additional people with a creative bent.

The purpose of this team is to add additional flair to what happens in the worship service. They will usually gear their work and ideas around a new sermon series. 

When they meet and collaborate, they will give time and attention to the stage design, brainstorm ideas for additional elements to be used like videos shown, and even object lessons the preacher could engage in.

They will weigh into the sermon series design elements as well, offering feedback on how the series graphic could look and discussing ideas for the sermon bumper video.

After their meeting, certain members of the team may even be the people doing the design work, the video production work, and the stage design implementation. Or, they will be responsible for making sure these things get done whether alongside of another team or through outsourcing the work to a contractor or freelancer through something like Fiverr.

2. Sermon Research Team

If you have an associate pastor who has some extra capacity and is a skillful exegete and theologian, they might be your first addition to this team.

This is a team that isn’t so much focused on the design elements that surround a sermon series, but the content of the sermon series. Ideally, they’ll be digging into the already identified passages of scripture for the upcoming sermon series.

They will add their insights as they study, meditate, and reflect on the text. They’ll identify interesting angles to approach the passage from which will lead to additional sermon illustration and application ideas. They might even compile various resources and stories that connect with the passage from history, literature, pop culture, and even research studies.

This doesn’t need to include regular meetings as it can be done through a shared Google Doc with the settings enabled for each of the team members to be able to edit the document.

The end goal is for you—the one preaching—to either have a helpful starting point as you get started prepping for that message or to have some curated research to reference once you get to the commentary stage in your preparation. How you implement this into your process is obviously up to you and a good argument could be made for both approaches.

3. Sermon Planning Team

This team doesn’t need to meet very often but when it does, it accomplishes a lot. Ideally, you’ll include one person from the Creative Team and one or two people from the Sermon Research Team. 

The Sermon Planning Team will typically meet once a year or twice a year, depending on how you want to lead it. The goal is to plan out the next year of preaching. By the end, you’ll want to have the majority of your sermons and sermon series identified.

Something like this:

I like to do this through an all-day meeting (or two, if necessary). You’ll want each member of the team to come with ideas that are the fruit of a lot of prayer leading up to the meeting. 

Want Help Creating These Teams?

Now, I know what you’re probably thinking: assembling all three of these teams feels daunting. 

I get it.

And that’s why I’m excited for what Ministry Pass provides pastors and churches. 

They are able to provide you, in one subscription, all three of these teams.

They can become your Creative Team, providing you series graphics, series bumpers, and service countdowns.

They can become your Sermon Research Team, providing you sermon guides with illustration ideas, bottom line ideas, and insights on the passage you’re going to preach on (so you’re not starting from scratch in your prep).

They can become your Sermon Planning Team, providing you with sermon calendar options to help you plan your preaching ahead and be intentional on what you teach your congregation.

Partnering with Ministry Pass doesn’t keep you from assembling these three teams in your local church. In fact, they’ll be great partners even as you put these teams together. 

And if you use my link and become a paid subscriber, I’ll make myself available for a 45-minute strategy call for free to help you implement Ministry Pass into your church.

Grow in Your Preaching

If you want to be faithful to the text, prepare efficiently, and craft your sermon memorably, I’ve got just the thing to help. It’s called the 10-step guide to writing a sticky sermon and it’s yours for free. Just click here to grab your copy.