Doing Church as a Team

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A radically simple model of discipleship for churches and small groups

interview with Wayne Cordeiro | posted 7/16/2008

Topics:	Administration, Infrastructure, Planning, Preparation, Strategy
Filters:	Director, Pastor, Train
Purpose:	Discipleship
References:	Exodus 18:13-26 , Acts 6:1-7
Date Added:	July 16, 2008

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Note: This article has been excerpted from the SmallGroups.com training tool called Building a Culture of Discipleship.

In 1994, Wayne Cordeiro founded New Hope Christian Fellowship on the un-extraordinary notion of people putting their natural gifts and passions to work for the kingdom of God. But the results have been extraordinary. Using the concept of "fractals," Cordeiro has devised a radical yet simple model of discipleship—he calls it "doing church as a team." Leadership Journal editors Marshall Shelley and Ed Gilbreath spoke to Cordeiro about his vision for building churches and disciples.

A core aspect of making disciples at New Hope is doing church as "fractal teams." Where did that come from?

I had been to many seminars on organizing church leadership, and much of it was borrowed from the marketplace, which generally implies you work with organizations until they run like a machine. The only problem, I found, is that machines don't grow; they operate. They require grease, but they don't mature. I wanted to have a church that I could grow with, that would grow beyond me, and that I did not have to worry about, because it would be in order.

The Lord uses the body as a metaphor for the church. And if he chose that as a metaphor, I think it behooves us to study that carefully. It's a brilliant metaphor. As I looked at human anatomy more closely, I noticed something: from brain cells down to your fingernails, the DNA structure is the same throughout your body. There are repeating patterns in certain cells that, if you look at them under a microscope, look like little triangular shapes or oblong rectangles that just continue to repeat again and again, up to infinity.

When I mentioned this to my friend Loren Cunningham, the founder of Youth with a Mission, he told me he had heard a speaker talk about something called fractal patterns. There's actually a mathematical equation for these repeating patterns. It's like a fern. You'll notice a fern has a stem and then singular leaves off the side, left and right. Now, if you take one of those singular leaves off the left or right, you'll notice there's a major stem with singular leaves off each of them. You see the same pattern repeated over and over. Likewise, your body has major arteries and smaller arteries off of those. Everything repeats.

I wondered how I might apply this fractal pattern to leadership. So I organized our church in a repeating pattern, where growth is downward like roots from a plant. We started building teams in groupings of five (up to ten if team members are married).

How do fractals work in a church?

Well, let's take children's ministry as an example. In doing church as a team, my first step is not to jump in and start working with the children. Instead, it's to build a team of four leaders, with whom I will serve. That gives us a team of five people with similar passions and gifts.

Each of these leaders will then do the same thing in whatever their specific area of children's ministry is. So, for instance, the nursery leader finds a team of four people with whom she can serve. The first- and second-grade leader finds his team of four. And the pattern goes on and on. As each leader does this, it just keeps multiplying. The leader disciples downward, but he or she is also being discipled from above. The growth continues, and it falls naturally into discipleship groups.

How has this changed your ministry?

Even now, at about 7,000 people, I have less stress overseeing that size of a church than I did when we were overseeing 300 and I was chaotically trying to control everything. Now we can grow. Everyone has a small group, and they're serving and being served; discipling and being discipled. And everybody has a place in ministry and the same DNA. What I do with my four, they do with their four, and so on. The DNA keeps filtering down.

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