Ministry Farm Teams
Spring Training in Arizona and Florida is over for another year as Major League Baseball has officially started its second week of a new season. Thousands of minor league players compete each year for a chance to prove their abilities at the major league level. Since its inception over 140 years ago, Major League Baseball has had almost 19,000 players who’ve run up the dugout steps to play on a major league field. Most of those players have moved their way up through the minor league system.
Major League Baseball refers to the grooming of those younger, less advanced players in the minor leagues as “player development.” Those minor league affiliates are informally called farm teams.
Farm teams provide mentoring, training, coaching, and practical experience for younger players with the expectation that as a player matures, he or she will advance to a higher level of play and responsibility. The foundation of the minor league system is to invest in younger players for the future of the team. A major league team with a weak farm system may have success for a time but will rarely carry that success into future seasons.
Congregations tend to plan and implement in the moment since the responsibilities of Sunday comes every week. So, thinking about finding and training both volunteer and paid ministry leaders, facilitators, teachers, worship team leaders, players, and singers is rarely a consideration…until a vacancy occurs.
The necessity of farm team player development is realized when a congregation attempts to fill on of those vacancies. What most find is that the pool of potential replacements out there is often very shallow and those who are available are an unknown quantity that doesn’t often resonate with the culture of the searching congregation.
Implementing a farm team model of developing younger, less advanced team members from in here can offer a trusted and familiar resource pool for future leaders. Investing in those who already understand the culture, personality, ministry language, and mission of your church has a greater potential for developing major league leaders for future seasons.
Our success in ministry will be judged not just on how well we did it ourselves each Sunday, but on how well we helped train others to do it too. So, if churches want great ministry leaders in the future, they must invest in not-yet-great ministry leaders in the present.