Leading church as a team

When we planted Reflect Church in 2021, we defaulted to leading as a team of 5. I'd like to say that this came from some sort of theological conviction but it didn't. The honest answer is that we were afraid. We'd seen the dark side of top-down leadership and were looking to mitigate the risks.

As we made major decisions (like signing a building lease) as a church in this way, I began to study the scripture. I wanted to understand my own gifting and role and I stumbled across something surprising and undeniable. The early church was led by a team. In this episode I unpack the core idea around the role of elders and show that in the early days of Acts and the New Testament, teams of apostles planted churches and then appointed teams of elders. That's not to say that this is the only leadership structure that is possible. But understanding the origins of the early church can give us a healthy basis for what we build today in the modern age. 

I believe this way of leading can be much more sustainable and life-giving for leaders and churches.

Praying you find this helpful!

If you're still reading, my name is Sats Solanki aka Digital Rabbi. I lead Reflect Church in London, UK. If you'd like to connect then head over to Insta @satsolanki or head to https://digitalrabbi.co. To find out more about Reflect Church head to https://reflect.church

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:08

Well, hello and welcome back to the Leadership Horticulture Podcast. My name is Satsolanki, otherwise known as the Digital Rabbi. I want to say a huge thank you for listening today to episode two and for all of the love, support, and encouragement that I've had on the Launch of the Podcast. It's uh it's very encouraging. So thank you very much. And um, if this content is helping you, I'd love to ask you to consider subscribing so that you can just keep getting these episodes coming your way. Um and this podcast is really all about church leadership and culture and health, trying to build healthy, fruitful, successful churches, however we define that, and bringing us back really to the New Testament model for the church. Now, I think it's important to say that just because the early church did something doesn't mean we have to do it, right? Like, we don't really model ourselves exactly as the early church did. We're we're here in 2026, uh, we're in different nations, different cultures, etc. It's not gonna be exactly the same. However, I do think a proper understanding of the early church and the context is gonna be the best baseline for how we build what we should do today. And so um, in today's episode, I want to talk to you um about um plural leadership. And so, this is the idea of leading a church um as a team instead of leading the church uh with a pastor, a senior pastor, or a couple who are the senior pastors. And I want to just talk to you about my experience of this. Um, as we planted um the church in London uh in 2021, coming out of the back of the pandemic, we'd been part of another large multi-side church, which sadly sort of imploded and had a lot of drama, and we sort of came out of that, bringing a lot of this is just how we've done it before, but also how we've done it before doesn't look very good. So, how do we build the new? And so for us, as we as we started in this process, my wife and I had been um the location pastors of the church in London. So we were seen as the you know visionary leaders, we were the uh we weren't senior pastors technically because we're part of a multi-site, but we still occupied that space of we're the people in charge, right? And so it was top-down, it was hierarchical, it was, you know, the anointing flows down, that kind of stuff. That was very much um the way of thinking. And to be honest, um, it kind of works, right? It kind of works. Like it's simple, it's clear, you know who's in charge, you know who's making decisions, and uh, you know who's accountable, who's responsible if it succeeds or fails. And actually, one of the big questions that comes up a lot when I talk about plural leadership is people really feel like, but but surely somebody has to make the decision. Surely there's one person where we need to assign responsibility to. And I think this is like a really genuine concern that we can talk through. Um, but uh, I want to just maybe just tell you a bit about um our story, how we ended up leading as a team. And before I go any further, let me just say that my team, our team that we're a part of, would see things through a different lens. We all have a different perspective on what's happening. And within our team, some would say, well, no, Sats is still kind of the senior pastor sort of guy. He's still a visionary leader. I would push back and say, I have a gifting um that I'm bringing to the table. I'm on paid employment for our church, um, but that doesn't necessarily mean I'm the senior pastor. And so my lens may be slightly different. And that's part of, I think, the healthy tension of actually um building a church as a team. And so I welcome it. I welcome the robust discussion. Uh, and we've really had to um learn as we go. And so we started leading as a team from day one. And even though we came with the, you know, well, Satson, my wife's called Emma, uh, they're the pastors, you know, we still kind of came with that sort of thing. But when it came to actual decision making, um, there was like a lot of fear in us. So I don't want to tell you that I studied the scripture and I saw this and you know, this revelation came, and that's why we started leading as a team because that isn't what happened. What actually happened is we started leading as a team out of reaction. We were reacting to top-down authority that had gone wrong. And we thought, how do we avoid that situation? How do we make sure that we don't end up there? And we thought, well, the the safest way to do it is just to run everything by everybody, and so in our team of five, um, we would just be like, well, if we're gonna make a major decision, like what we're gonna do, what we're gonna spend this on, we would just run things by one another. Why? Because we wanted to protect ourselves, and to be honest, we were just afraid. So that's where it started, right? Came from a place of reaction, came from a place of fear. But as we were sort of just leading in this way, uh, we kind of noticed it was just working. Like it worked quite well. And so we were creating space for challenge. Like I remember back in the old days, you know, I would come into the team meeting and I would come with some vision or this is what we're gonna do, and I'd have this idea, and it would often be an exciting idea, it would often be a good idea, not always though. And uh I then I would expect people to come on board and I would pitch the vision and I would sell it to people if you like, and then the the process of the team, sometimes there could be pushback, but ultimately, if I decided we were gonna do this, everybody had to get on board. That's how it worked, right? And and so that there are some benefits to that in the sense that there is a simplicity to just having somebody tell you what to do, right? And so working as a team I found is actually harder because now people can challenge you properly. You can say, Well, I think that's a terrible idea. And is that even in the Bible? And we can have this robust discussion, um, which means that I am not actually the final decision maker. Now, I still operate, as I've said before, in that visionary capacity. I still tend to be the person who God speaks to about something, about direction, about future, and I bring that to the team. But my question for us today is just because I have a visionary gifting, does that mean that I am therefore the senior pastor? Does that therefore mean that I sit at the top of the hierarchy? And I believe, and my conviction, and I'm gonna give you some scripture um in a moment, is that that is not actually the case. And the reason I know this is because as we were going on this journey leading as a team, I started to study the Bible because I was like, I I know that what we're doing is unusual, um, and I didn't really have any theology for it. I was just like, it seems like it's working kind of well, but I really wanted to understand um not just the team, but I really wanted to understand myself. What is my gift? What am I supposed to do? Where do I fit in the scripture? Because just in a pursuit of you know self-identity, what does God call me to? And as I was wrestling with these things, I just ended up starting to study church leadership structure in the Bible. And so I I want to just say say something about um the word pastor. Um, so the word pastor means shepherd, right? Uh you guys all know this. And uh the the thing that is really surprising when you look at the scripture is how infrequently the word pastor is used. Um, so for example, as a noun, if we if we take the noun pastor, shepherd, and we get rid of the literal shepherds that are in the Bible, you know, in the New Testament, we've got shepherds around the birth of Jesus, etc. We get rid of those sort of references, and we also get rid of references to um Jesus himself as the shepherd. You know, Jesus is called the chief shepherd, right? That's arguably senior pastor, is probably the best, uh, closest uh language we could use there. Um, if we get rid of all of those references to Jesus and to literal shepherds, what we actually find is there is actually only one noun reference to the word pastor, and that's in Ephesians chapter 4, where often we get the idea of the fivefold ministry. Might have to do another um podcast episode on that in particular. But one of the things that that I've I only learned recently is that when it talks about, you know, and he gave the apostles, you know, the prophets, the evangelists, etc., when it comes to the words shepherds and teachers, it actually removes the definite article, meaning it doesn't say um, you know, the shepherds and the teachers. It actually says the shepherd teachers. That's the best translation we've got uh from the Greek. So even in the only reference as a noun to the shepherds, they're not even called shepherds, they're called shepherd teachers. And I think this is just uh does this really matter? Well, kind of and kind of not. I I just think it's fascinating that that particularly in my side of uh the church and the body of Christ, that we have sort of institutionalized the idea of a pastor and the idea of a senior pastor, and we've made it such a thing that it is like an unquestionable doctrine, but I'm still trying to work out where does it come from? Because the references in the Bible to leadership tend to refer to elders. This word elder. Now, are we just splitting hairs? Are we just complaining about language? Well, maybe, but what I think is really important to notice is that elders are nearly always described in plurality. In other words, there are multiple elders in a church. And so, for example, uh Paul says to Titus, I think it's in Titus, he says, you know, go and uh uh appoint elders in every city. And so I think, you know, what's kind of fascinating in the English is it kind of sounds like he's saying, appoint one elder in each city. But if we look at the Greek, it actually says, appoint multiple elders in every city. And so the default, and this is really my argument and my uh theological conviction, is that the early church was always led by a team of elders. Um, you can call that a team of pastors if you like. And so what one of the interesting things is that all of the other references to shepherding, to pastoring, are given in verb form to elders. So elders are called to shepherd the flock, right? And and so um, pastoring is the verb, it's the thing that we do. We love people, we care for people. It's really important. I don't want you to think that I'm not a fan. I'm a huge fan. I think we need people to pastor people. We need, if you like, pastors. But pastor is never a title, pastor is always a function that flows. The title given is the word elders. Now, in our church, we we we're not obsessing about language, right? Because at the end of the day, like, does it matter what we call, you know, the people who lead the church? Not really. What matters is that the function takes place. But I do find that in language we get clarity around structure. In language, we give meaning to um things and we explain. And so, am I saying that uh the senior pastor model, anybody who's a senior pastor um who takes that more hierarchical approach is is doing a bad job or has wrong with theology? No, I'm not saying any of those things. I have lots of friends who are senior pastors and are doing a great job leading their church. Um I I'm I'm just simply saying that it's wrong for us to say that the early church functioned that way because they didn't. Uh, and so there's a huge confusion around the role of people like Paul and people like Timothy, and we go, well, they're senior pastors. But think of for a moment, where was Paul pastoring? You know, where was his local church? Where was the place where he stayed for 20 years? And you won't find it because Paul didn't do that. He was a traveling missionary and um he was an apostle and he moved around establishing and planting, and he didn't stay as the senior pastor, he didn't stay in control of what was happening. Actually, what he did is he and his team, um, which is Timothy, by the way, and Titus, they would go around together. He would send people. Timothy went to places like Ephesus, for example, but he wasn't in Ephesus for 20 years. Timothy was in Ephesus probably for like six months, maybe one or two years maximum, to what? To establish the church, to make sure that elders are in place and so that that church can continue to run. And so what we see throughout scripture in the New Testament is a pattern where we have teams of apostles are establishing churches, planting churches, and then they appoint teams of elders who then continue to run the church. It makes sense, right? Because we need that visionary gifting, we need that pioneering gifting to get things going. But actually, if you think about all of the issues that have often come out of, you know, the church scandal stories, they're nearly always apostolic visionary characters who have overstayed their welcome. They've overstayed their gift and their role. And and you know what happens over time is, you know, I I I've really thought about this, right? Because if if if you're an apost apostolic visionary type person, a senior pastor type figure, you start the church, like if you succeed, you do yourself out of a job. And this can be really hard. Like, what do you do when you've established the church? Well, then you just keep starting new things, then you keep exerting your authority and you find that you're in a place where you move outside of the grace of what God has called you to do. Now, not all senior pastors are apostolic, but typically the ones who start the churches are, um, and that's often that founder model when the founder stays for a long-term time. This is not even just in the church, but also in business. We see often um, you know, issues kind of come out and with that level of power and so on. And so for me, in the scripture, you can see that teams of apostles uh appoint teams of elders, and you're gonna find this everywhere when you start looking. And and I promise you, every single example you can think of right now of the, oh no, no, but how about that? I promise you, if you look at the scripture, you will find that that model works. Because I've looked at all of the, I'm still looking, uh, but I'm I'm trying to rule them all out, but that's what I can see. So if we go to Acts chapter one, let's go there for starters, because Jesus is obviously, you know, he is the chief shepherd, he's he says he's gonna build his church, he's instituted the way he wants the church to run. And then in Acts chapter one, Jesus is like, cool guys, risen from the dead, uh, fantastic news. And and his disciples, the the the 12 apostles and the others, are like, is this the time? Is this the moment where you're gonna, you know, uh the the kingdom's gonna be restored to Israel? It's gonna be amazing. And he's like, Well, uh, actually, I'm gonna go, but I am gonna give send you the Holy Spirit, and you are gonna be my witnesses, and and so on. And so I want you to just think about what Jesus left behind. Did Jesus leave behind one person? I mean, that's what the Catholics think, right? You know, they they've kind of retrofitted the role of Peter, you know, and if you study the papacy and how it came about, it's it's something that has been put back on um a few hundred years after. So we have this idea of bishops, and then uh the bishop of Rome, then sort of have a sort that you sort of a specific role, and then we say, well, he's sort of got authority over the rest of the churches, then oh, that person's the Pope. And you know, it's it's kind of laughable to see how it's happened. Um, and Pentecostals, you know, sort of laugh at the idea of the Pope and yet still implement the same idea in the local church. And so Jesus didn't leave behind Peter, Jesus left behind 12. How many people are 12? It's a team, it's a team of apostles. Why? Because teams of apostles start churches and teams of apostles establish churches, and then those churches need to have elders um appointed. So uh I want I want to address just uh there's so much I could say on this this topic, um, but I want to just uh show you right at the very inception of the church how team leadership worked. Um, because the big question that people often ask is, yeah, but who makes the decision? How does it work? And if we come to Acts chapter one, the first decision they have to make is well, Judas has you know done his thing, betrayed Jesus, and so now we need to replace Judas in his role as a puzzle. And so Peter stands up in verse 15. He stands up amongst the brothers, says there's about 120 people there, which is kind of just fascinating if you think about how we define success. Jesus, the greatest leader of all time, uh, you know, only has 120 people in the room following his resurrection. But Peter stands up, and so here we see leadership, right? Peter um initiates, he takes the lead, and he says, Hey, we we need to um get get another guy to replace Judas. And so um he suggests, hey, why don't we pick somebody who's been with us all the time and uh has been a witness. And then it says in verse 23, it says, And they put forward two, Joseph called Bar Sabbas, who was also called Justice and Matthews. And then it says, And they prayed and said, You Lord, who know the hearts of all, show which one of these two you have chosen to take the place in this ministry and apostleship, from which Judas turned aside to go to his own place. And they cast lots for them, and the lot fell on Matthews, and he was numbered with the eleven apostles. I want you to just think about the references to they, the references that refer to the church as a whole and the team as a whole, and and you know, this is not Peter making a decision. Peter initiates something, Peter brings his gift into the mix, Peter feels some sort of inspiration from God. Hey, we need to do this, we need to make this right. But then it says that they prayed. They prayed. Nobody made the final decision, they prayed and then they collectively came to consensus and they sensed together and they came to alignment. And and the thing is, guys, is that this is not possible without the help of God. And even though at this point the Holy Spirit has not come yet, they are casting lots, which is a way of inviting the Spirit of God to direct, right? So they cast lots and that there is an alignment, and they choose this person. It doesn't say that you know people disagreed, and it was like somehow because they were uh submitted to God, there is this sense of uh togetherness, this sense of unity. And isn't this what Jesus is trying to create in the church? Unity says, I want you to love one another, I want you to become one, as I and the Father are one. He's inviting them into unity, he's inviting them into a way of leading and a way of making decisions that sounds ridiculous to the corporate world. It sounds like, yeah, but you need somebody to make the decision. And that is until you realize that when the Holy Spirit is leading each of us, we can arrive at unity, we can arrive at oneness. And so far in our journey, this has been five or six years now of leading in this way. I bring my gift, everybody brings their gift, I often initiate, but we have never had a major decision, and we've made a bunch of major decisions, and we continue to make major decisions. You know, three years ago we we signed a lease on a building. That was a big decision. And so you know, it's fascinating. Maybe a year before this, I had brought this building to our team and said, I think this is God, I think we should go for it. And back in the old days, you know, people would have hesitated, but they would have eventually gone on board. But this time, because we've created an environment and a culture of team, true team, there was pushback, and people were like, this doesn't really feel right, you know. And I was like kind of annoyed because I'm used to getting what I want. I was like, I know God's spoken to me. And I I learned such an important lesson because I've learned um with my visionary gifting that often my clarity is really accurate about what I can see, but the thing that I often miss is the timing. So, you know, I live in the future and I'm like, this is now, but actually sometimes it's not. And so my team overruled me, and I was like, all right, like let's go with it. And then a year later, I felt the prompting again to bring it to them. And um, this time everyone was like, This feels right, this feels really good. It felt like the obvious uh point, and the church was at the stage where we could now enter into that lease. And right now we are coming to an end of that lease, and we've we've got all sorts of big decisions, big financial decisions as a church that we're making, and you know what, we're making them as a team. We've never reached a point where there's just a complete like, well, we can't make a decision. The Holy Spirit has always led us, and uh, I I believe that because when you think about it, the church belongs to Jesus, he is the one building his church, and what happens when you live like that is the pressure that leaders often carry, particularly the senior leader, um, completely changes because this lease right now, like I'm not the person who made the decision, I'm not the person who forced it through. We made this decision as a team. So later on, when you know there's challenges, well, what happens when you can't afford that lease? What happens where you know it affects something else? What if you've realized oh maybe that was the wrong decision? Well, the thing is we made the decision as a team, so now it's not on me, it's on God. Like, God has to come through for us, God has to prove Himself. We made that decision, we're listening to the Holy Spirit. So the whole idea that the leader carries everything, and they've got to be this um, you know, man of God. It's just like it's so old testament. And even Moses in the Old Testament, he was burning out. He he was like, his father-in-law is like, dude, this is not working. You you need to rethink how this is working. And he had to start empowering people. And now, today in the New Testament, Jesus is building his church, Jesus is in charge, and you and I are doing great work, doing good things. You know, I don't want to de I'm not trying to devalue what I bring as a leader. I know I bring something, friends. I know that God has called me to do what I'm doing, but I also know that ultimately the responsibility is not on my shoulders, the responsibility is on his shoulders and his way, as he invites us in Matthew. He says that um, you know, take up what my yoke says it's characterized by lightness and ease. And I just keep coming back to that because I hear so many leaders talking about how hard it is, the pressures people don't understand. And it's like, I get it, I understand all of the challenges, but I also know that when we carry too much on ourselves, that's what gives us that experience, that experience of loneliness, that experience of heaviness. And Jesus is inviting us, yes, not into a life without problems, of course, there's different challenges, but into a life that is characterized by ease, a way of leading. Like if we're gonna be followers of Jesus, like and it should there should be lightness, shouldn't there also be lightness when we lead as well? How can we lead people to Jesus? How can we lead people in the way of Jesus if we're not experiencing that, right? And I found that plurality of leaders is one of the big keys to getting rid of that pressure and uh creating a culture of lightness um in the church. So I hope you found that helpful. There's a lot we could talk about here. Um, this there's questions about bishops and overseers, which We can get to maybe in the next episode. Um, there's is you know pastors, elders, there's deacons, there's there's all sorts of different things. But what I want to encourage you to do just as we close, I want you to look for this thread in the scripture that teams of apostles plant churches, establish them, and appoint teams of elders. That is something you're gonna see in the New Testament. Acts chapter one is one we read. We're also gonna see in Acts chapter 15, really key uh decision-making point where we have various voices standing up. It's around, you know, uh, what do we tell the Gentiles to do? You know, uh do they need to adopt, fully adopt Jewish customs? Um, and they come to a consensus, and we see from time and time and time again, um, you're gonna see plurality. Plurality the whole way through Acts, the whole way through the New Testament. So um have a look for it. I hope you find that helpful. That's just uh a kind of teaser, if you like, as we start um this topic. Thank you so much for listening today and to this episode. Uh, I would love to ask you to consider subscribing and also sharing this, and particularly if you have pastor friends, I just want you to know that I'm a fan of the church, I'm a fan of leaders, I'm not here to tear down, I'm here to build people up. But sometimes we do need a bit of a prophetic slap um just to challenge the way things are. And isn't it didn't Christianity start? Like if you it it was a subversive Jewish cult. That's how it was seen. It was seen as like some weird little rebellious little uh, you know, kind of thing, like a sect, and they were like, What is this? It started with the rebels, it started with the change makers, it started, you know, with the pioneers. That's where the gospel started, that's where the church started, and I fear that we've lost some of that and we've institutionalized too much. Even in the Pentecostal space where we pride ourselves and the Holy Spirit being free, it's like, are we really free? Have we just come back to the same institutions that we left in the Catholic Church? We brought them all back and we've institutionalized them and then we we've made them sacred so no one can challenge them. Anyone who challenges this way of thinking around leadership, well, they must be a hater. They must be, well, friends, I'm not. I'm I'm doing this life just like you are. I believe I found something, I want to share it with as many people as possible. So I'm gonna ask you to share this and um I welcome your questions. And uh you can reach me on Instagram at Satsolanke, send me a message if this is helping you. Bless you guys. We'll see you in the next episode.