Summit Day Two

Summit is blessed with a staff team of 6 full-time and 1 part-time Pastors (or as we’d call them, Ministers), each leading a specific area of ministry. One of the major features of every Tuesday in the office is the Staff meeting in the afternoon, which lasts for two hours or more. This is something that impressed me, as I’m used to a culture in the UK where we begin a meeting by anticipating a quick end time and a good meeting is often judged by how short it was. The meeting began with Lead Pastor Gerry giving some background to the new series on Ephesians including some background Academic Theological issues that won’t otherwise come out in the sermons, and a summary of the sermon just past. Before we got into that though, we spent some time looking at the results of a Personality Trait Test we’d all taken from http://www.flagpagetest.com which focuses on Motivations. I was fairly happy with my results although a bit concerned that I showed up to have fewer Leadership traits than perhaps I should considering my future work. Considerable time is then spent gathering up and praying about numerous issues from the various ministry areas within the church, before going on to talk about a number of ongoing activities in the church’s life. It’s perhaps not surprising that in a fast paced Western culture like our own that being able to fully populate volunteer rotas, particularly during the summer is a major headache. I left the meeting with the sense that I’ve come alongside a very dedicated and close knit team of people, who work hard for the building up of the church. There’s lots of sharing of experience going on around the table, as well as mutual encouragement most importantly I think, lots of evaluation and searching for ways to improve things.