How Church Staff Unity Actually Happens on Mission Trips

In this episode of the Healthy Church Staff Podcast, Todd Rhoades discusses the benefits of unified mission trips for church staff. While individual mission trips can be transformative, they often lead to isolated experiences that do not promote staff unity. Todd argues for a collective mission trip experience, enabling staff to share stories and challenges, leading to stronger team cohesion and a shared vision. He challenges church leaders to rethink their missions and staff development budgets to promote a single, unifying mission trip for their team.• Individual mission trips often lead to staff feeling isolated rather than unified.• A shared mission trip can increase staff unity and promote a shared vision.• Experiencing challenges together helps staff see each other's skills and callings.• Todd encourages a collective experience to transform staff dynamics and cohesion.• A shared mission trip can shift staff meetings, budget discussions, and church announcements positively.• Todd invites church leaders to reconsider budget allocations for shared mission experiences.

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Transcript

Introducing The Unity Solution

Why Individual Trips Miss The Mark

The Case For A Together Trip

How Shared Stories Change Culture

A Practical Challenge And Next Steps

Ways We Can Help And Connect

SPEAKER_00 0:07

Your worship pastor just got back from Guatemala. Your youth pastor's been planning a trip to Kenya. Your executive pastor wants to visit your sister church in Mexico. Three different trips, three different times, three separate experiences, and somehow you're wondering why your staff feels like separate apartments instead of one unified team. Sound familiar? Let's talk about it today here on the Healthy Church Staff Podcast. My name's Todd Rhodes, one of the co-founders over at Chemistrystaffing.com. And at Chemistrystaffing.com, we are all about church health and helping you and your staff lead healthy. All right, today we're talking about mission trips. Now, some of us in our churches tend to send our staff on mission trips like we're just checking boxes. Everybody gets their turn, right? Everybody gets their experience. But here's the problem: nobody gets the shared story. And here's what we're missing. Your staff comes back from those mission trips changed, but they're changed alone. They've got stories nobody else lived, and perspectives that nobody else shares, and passion that nobody else caught on your staff. And instead of unity, you've got excitement, but you also have isolation. Instead of shared vision, you might even have, and you may have seen this, some competing priorities about how my mission's trip is better than your mission's trip. Everybody's inspired by different things that they can't explain to people who weren't there. Now, listen here, I'm not saying individual mission experiences are bad. They're absolutely transformative, as I've already discussed. But if you want staff unity, you really need to shoot for shared transformation as well. The together trip is what I'm proposing. Take your staff on one trip together. One missions trip together. Let them see each other outside the office walls. Watch your children's pastor comfort a crying kid in a difficult language. See your facilities guy figure out plumbing with no tools. Notice your admin coordinator become the team translator. Staff unity happens when people discover other people's hearts in real time, and a missions trip is a great way to do this. This happens, unity happens when they share the same stories and they process the same challenges, when they carry the same burden home with them. And here's what changes, okay? They stop seeing job descriptions and they start seeing calling. They stop protecting their turf and they start protecting each other. That shared experience and the mission becomes shared instead of segmented, and the vision gets carried by multiple voices, and everybody's on the same page. Everybody's telling the same story. Your Monday staff meetings change when everybody references the same week in Honduras. Your budget conversations will shift when everybody felt the same needs firsthand. Your church announcements sound different when three staff members can tag team the same story. So here's the bottom line staff unity doesn't happen in conference rooms. It can. But it happens when you're sharing things and sharing life in the trenches. And I can't think of a better trench sometimes than a shared mission trip. So here's your challenge. I want you to take a look at your missions budget, your staff development budget, and instead of sending five people on five separate missions trips, plan one trip for your core team. Pick a destination, set a date, and go together with other people from your congregation. Your staff team's waiting for a shared story that meetings, staff meetings just can't create. So give them one. Give them one. Hope this has been helpful. My name is Todd Rhodes. You're listening to the Healthy Church Staff Podcast. Would love your input. How do you do missions trip at your church? Love to hear some more input from you on this or any other topic that has to do with church health. And if there's any way that I can help you or your church, feel free to reach out to me. You can go to my website at church at todd.church. Todd.church. Kind of a weird domain name, but that's it. Todd.church. You can leave me a message at the website and check out Chemistry Staffing, the work that we do over at chemistry staffing.com as well. If there's any way we can help you, my team or I, we would love to be able to step in and help you with anything. Search related, hiring, firing, compensation, any of that kind of healthy church staff work is what we absolutely are passionate about. So we'd love to be a partner with you. That's it for today, and this is episode 569 in the books. Thanks for listening, and I'll be right back here to round out your week tomorrow on the healthy church.