This last week I led a quarterly offsite meeting for Faithbridge. Faithbridge is second home church for me as I serve as a leadership coach on the staff. Our focus of the day was the "challenge of structure." I started the day by anchoring the topic of organizational structure into a biblical-theological foundation. I asked the staff the simple question, 'When in biblical history did God provide structure as a solution." Here is some of the things on our list:
- Structure of marriage is a solution to man being alone
- Organization on the ark as a solution for preserving planet life
- The reorganization in Exodus 18 to provide wholeness, health and sustainability to people of Israel
- The levitical structure to provide worship and access to God on behalf of Israel
- Jesus choosing the 12 and sending the 72 as a solution for proclaiming the kingdom
- Smaller organized groups facilitating discipleship - Acts 2
- The selection of 7 leaders when Hellenistic Jewish widows were being overlooked in the distribution of the bread - Acts 6
We spent half the day rethinking ministry department structures based on the 40% rule: Every 40% of growth requires a new structure.
As I continued to think about structure as solution, I thought of the trinitarian structure. What problem does the trinity solve? It is the solution to God being loving and self-sufficient at the same time.