Several times a year, Life.Church pastors and leaders 'team teach' with Pastor Craig. Team teaching allows you to take the baton from Pastor Craig and preach your own portion of the message. On Open, we provide flexibility for you to participate in team-teach or not. To participate, use the 'opening segment' and 'closing segment' as bookends to your own message; to run a full message from video, use the 'message video,' in conjunction with the opening and closing segment. Read on to hear from Pastor Craig about how to leverage team teaching.

Several years ago, Life.Church gave each of our multisite staff members the opportunity to preach. We called it our first “Developmental Weekend.” Since then, we've done different versions of this at our campuses (we now call it "team teaching"), and we've seen excitement from both staff and attenders every time we do it.

I’ll share what we did in case you'd like to try this in your ministry:

• I prepared an outline for everyone to use. The outline gave the staff members a consistent message but plenty of room to personalize the texts and application. From campus to campus, attenders would hear the same general principles but through the unique lens of different speakers.
• I prerecorded an explanation to get our church behind the concept and motivate them to support our rookies.
• I also prerecorded a seven-minute introduction to the message and a seven-minute ending-plus-prayer time.
• Our Campus Pastors selected people to preach one or more services at our then 14 different campuses. We selected Missions Pastors, LifeGroup Pastors, Youth Pastors, Host Team Coordinators, and more. Each speaker had about 15 minutes to speak.

We love this experience. Here are several of the noticeable benefits:

• The Campus Pastors spent time preparing and investing in their team members.
• The church embraced the idea of developing the next generation of leaders.
• The staff members who spoke got exposure to large groups of people, increasing their pastoral influence.
• Our staff learned that your position doesn’t determine your influence. You could be called on to do more at any time.

*The series How to Neighbor includes one team-teach week. You can find the team-teaching notes under week four, "Lonely Loved."

*The message Labels includes a team-teach message.

*The message series Stand includes one team-teach week. You can find the team-teaching notes under week five, "Stand Firm in the Fire."

*There are many other team teach weekends now available on Open Network