Build a Healthy Team Culture

by Jay Murphy

I believe a successful worship team is one that continues to mature, makes relational connection their top priority, and is always checking their hearts.  Building healthy culture is a crucial part of the role of a Worship Pastor.  While developing processes for scheduling and team membership, you should also consider how you are developing your team’s culture. Is it safe within the team to give and receive feedback and to have challenging conversations? 

Getting Started

When thinking about what kind of culture you want to develop, spend some time praying about how to build it:  

·      Just because something works at your friend’s church doesn’t necessarily mean it will work for you or yours.  

·      Take the unique personalities of your team members and leaders into consideration as you’re building. Make a priority of knowing your team well.  If your team is large, knowing them all well will be more of a challenge, but you can still establish an environment where people feel known.  

·      God has in mind how He wants you to build, and if you listen, He’ll show you.

·      Next, check pride at the door. The standards for health on your team will start with you. What you prioritize will become the priorities for them. What you let slide, they will let slide.  

How We're Doing It

We’ve been encouraged by the successful growth of our team’s culture. It’s been a process and we're continually tweaking things. We started building slowly. We would have the worship team meet each Wednesday to worship together and encourage each other prophetically. We would have a brief teaching, then we would take turns praying for one another and asking the Lord to give us an encouraging word for each other. We would write it down and share it. Then we’d go home. It was a simple, God-inspired way to begin building the priorities of encouragement, relationship, team worship off the platform, hearing from the Lord, and ministering to one another.

We started small. And as our team grew, we would communicate to new members that these types of practice were a priority. Why did we do this? So that the team that met to lead worship on Sundays had already met during the week to worship and seek God together. There was unity. We were “tilling the ground” and learning that a big part of worship is to declare the word of God over a room.

After that, we began implementing other processes for things like scheduling, joining the team, rehearsals, etc. We borrowed some processes from other churches to help us organize and we modified them to suit our growing team and culture. Things have been tweaked and changed over the last seven years, because we’re always trying to improve.

This is how it worked for us. Each church family and team will be unique. I encourage you to discover how you can best shepherd your team.