Empowering our teams

By Naomi Lawson
March 2026

There is something really healthy about having a team to work with — shared energy, shared ideas, a sense of the whole body working together. But teams can also make getting things done a lot harder. 

If you do everything yourself, there’s no one to rebut your ideas, you can plan at a time that works for you (even in the car on the way to serving!), you can control the quality of the product, you can fix things. 

But this is not the picture the Bible paints of how God intends his people to work together. God chooses relationship with us and to partner with sinful human beings in getting his work done. We see this in a weak Moses, a sinful David, a motley crew of Disciples and a stubborn Apostle, just to name some. Partnership is the outworking of our relationship with Christ. It displays unity to a world who needs God’s light. But God’s work is not micro-management — is patient, consistent teaching and waiting for growth to happen.

There is a lesson we can learn here. What is of higher concern to God? It is not that particular things get done “properly” by a person (otherwise Moses would not have stumbled over his words and the disciples would not have been allowed to desert Jesus at his death), but that people grow more in their love and trust of an awesome and powerful God. So too, our desire should not be for the shiny product, but for a church full of people who, by serving together, are growing in the love and trust of a dependable God.

This is what leads us to desire a leadership style of empowerment. An image that helps me wrestle with what empowerment actually looks like in practice is a candle. If I as the leader am holding a lit candle, and my team member is holding a candle, when I ask them to help with something, I have two options:

1) I can light their candle and then blow mine out — hand the task completely over to them, wipe my hands of it (but reserve the right to be annoyed when it doesn’t get done the way I had hoped…). This is not the picture we see of God working through his people in the Bible. We see a Good Shepherd who is always walking alongside His sheep.

2) So, the better option is that I light their candle but I also keep mine alight, because we are working at that task together. We both own it, we both plan for it, we both invest in a good outcome. More important than this, we both grow together by completing it. We grow in our conviction that the ministry we are doing is important for bringing people from death to life, or we grow in trust in a good God who works through our weaknesses when things don’t go to plan, or we grow in our delight in a God who chooses to bless us through working for His kingdom. There are so many wins when we work as a team!

In your ministry, what does it look like to keep your candle alight? 

Could it be that you need to start conversations earlier so there is time for some back and forth with your team members to make decisions, rather than making calls on the fly that undermine your team’s input? Could it mean loosening the reins to let someone else try something and then being available for a moment of self-reflection and feedback after the task? Could it mean proactivity to wrestle out some big ideas with your pastor so you can offer better clarity to your team? 

Empowerment can and will look different for each person and each team. This short article is aiming to encourage you that it is something worth taking the time to think about and act on, so your teams can be healthy places where everyone is growing in their love of God and their joy in serving him.