Colossians: Team Ministry

Team Ministry in the Body of Christ

Introduction: Learning from Emperor Penguins

We're finishing our series through Colossians by looking at this final passage and thinking about what it means to do faith in community. This list of names might seem like an odd thing to preach about, but there's so much we can take from it. This passage shows us that the letter wasn't written or received in isolation—it was all done in community, in what we're calling team ministry, doing life of faith together.

Let me start with penguins. Emperor penguins are brilliant examples of what it means to do life in team and community. During Antarctic winters, temperatures can reach minus 70° Celsius. To survive, penguins huddle together, generating heat that keeps them alive. They shuffle around constantly—not just for fairness, but to give those on the inside a break. Inside one of these huddles, the temperature reaches 37° Celsius. That's an incredible transformation: from -70° to +37°, all because they work together as a team.

Any penguin that decides it doesn't need the team won't survive long. Neither will there be any future generations. Teamwork really does make the dream work.

We Are Built for Community

It's not just true for penguins. We as humans are actually built to need each other for our very survival. During COVID, we were reminded that social isolation is deeply damaging for the human body. Studies show that isolation leads to anxiety, depression, and serious physical health impacts: increased stroke, type 2 diabetes, dementia, and early death.

When babies are born, they need other people for survival. In orphanages where children aren't picked up, cuddled, and looked at, the death rate is much higher. When you smile at a baby, you're literally creating neural pathways in their brain that help them develop the ability to attach to other human beings. Without one another, we cannot survive. We need people.

For humans, teamwork also makes the dream work.

Jesus: The Heart of Community

The centerpiece of the entire book of Colossians is one person: Jesus. Nearly every sermon in this series has kept coming back to Jesus. Paul constantly places Jesus front and center, because He is the very person who chose that we would never be alone.

We are made in the image of a God who is relational. God within Himself—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—is not alone. He is relational. We bear His image and are built to be relational. God expresses this by reaching to us. Despite our sin, we would never be separated from God. Jesus came to be like us, forever taking our form and likeness, to demonstrate that without someone else, we cannot go it alone.

We need Jesus. We cannot save ourselves. We cannot forgive ourselves. We cannot produce everlasting life for ourselves.

At the root of our faith, we are like an emperor penguin: if you think you can go it alone, you will die trying. You need team. You need Jesus.

Having been united with Christ, we're invited into this incredible body of Christ, where we need one another. Throughout the New Testament, Paul uses the image of a body to show that you can't function without other people. If God is relational, if we as humanity are relational, it shouldn't surprise us that as a church, we're called to be this way too. We're built to do this together. We're never supposed to go it alone.

God Doesn't Build Dream Teams

One critical thing we can take from this passage: God is not building a dream team of people.

If I asked you to handpick people for a dream team, what would you want? People like you, with the same heart and passion. But the reality is, in church life and kingdom ministry, you don't get to pick a dream team. That's never how God has operated. God calls people who are broken, hurting, gifted—people in all sorts of different places.

The beauty of church life is that we don't get to do the picking. God does. God is the one who calls, draws, and saves. Ministry isn't about head-hunting the greatest talent. It's God inviting people and the Spirit knitting together the body of Christ.

Look at the diversity in Paul's list of greetings:

• Aristarchus: A traveling companion and fellow prisoner with Paul
• Jesus (called Justus): A believer we know little about
• Epaphras: The one who preached the gospel to Colossae and formed the church
• Luke: Called a doctor—the only place in Scripture where Luke is identified as a physician. He's a Gentile who will write Luke and Acts, bringing huge impact to the church
• Mark: Likely the one who wrote the Gospel of Mark. But Mark has a complicated story.

Mark abandoned Jesus during His arrest—he's the young man in Mark's Gospel who ran away naked, terrified. His family was full of faith (the church met in his mother's house), and he went on missionary journeys with Paul and Barnabas. But in Acts 15, something goes wrong. Mark does something that upsets Paul so much that Paul and Barnabas separate over it. Paul refuses to take Mark again. Mark has caused problems.

And yet here he is. Paul even tells them to greet him and welcome him.

We also have Paul himself—a former Pharisee, a persecutor of the church, an overseer of Stephen's murder. We have Onesimus, a runaway slave who has done something wrong. And at the end, there's Demas, who just gets a bare mention—no accolades like the others. Later we learn he abandons the ministry because he loved the world.

This is not a dream team. There's no one-size-fits-all in the kingdom of God. The former Pharisee, the prisoner, the runaway slave. Jews and Gentiles. Even a doctor. People who have disrupted ministry. Men and women.

Consider the twelve disciples. If you had to handpick twelve people to ensure the future of Christianity, to make sure the message of Jesus went out and the church didn't die in its first few years, not a single one of the twelve would be on our list. Yet Jesus chose them.

Everyone Has a Place

Everyone is valuable, and everyone has a place within God's team. No one is disqualified. No one's story means they can't be included in God's family. We must never count ourselves out.

There's a sense in the world that if you don't get picked for the starting team, there's no room for you. But that's the opposite of what God says. There's no elitism here. We don't get to choose—God chooses. That should be a source of incredible joy and excitement: God chooses people like you and me. Our names can be on the team sheet of who God is including—a team sheet that isn't just eleven starting players, but a multitude so numerous that no one can count.

But here's the harder part: everyone around us is also chosen and has a space on God's team. Sometimes it's harder to accept that God might want someone we're not sure about. But something beautiful happens when we allow ourselves to be present and committed to the people God has brought to us.

The body of Christ is most beautifully reflected when the toe doesn't say to the hand, "I don't need you," or when the arm says to the leg, "I'd rather you weren't here." God's aim for His church isn't always the greatest productivity or highest output. It's that we would be so focused on each other and the ways God is moving in us.

God is not building dream teams. The team God is building is not always our handpicked dream team.

Faith Is Lived Out Together

Paul's whole point is that our faith, the truth of what we believe, is lived out with those who are around us. Our faith is lived out together.

Paul sends greetings to people in the church—brothers and sisters in Colossae and Laodicea, Nympha and the church meeting in her house. He says, "Read it in Laodicea. Tell Archippus to do this." This isn't an individual letter. It's a corporate letter to be received, read, understood, and applied together.

The Case of Onesimus: Faith in Practice

Let me focus briefly on Onesimus, because through him Paul gives the church a very real way to show that everything he's written needs to be applied and lived out together.

Onesimus was likely a slave of someone in the church called Philemon. Something happened—perhaps he did something wrong or a breakdown occurred—and he ran away. This was potentially a capital crime in the Roman world. But he becomes a follower of Jesus under Paul's apostleship.

When Paul hears the story, he tells Onesimus: "You need to go back. I'm going to send you back to your home city, to the church formed there, back to your very former owner. And I'm going to send you with a letter."

I encourage you to read the 25 short verses of Philemon. It's the gospel in a nutshell. Paul appeals to Philemon: "I want you to forgive him. I want you to be reconciled. I don't want you to welcome him back as a slave. I want you to welcome him back as a beloved brother."

Paul challenges their reconciliation. He challenges the status quo and creates an opportunity for the church to publicly display the truth of what God thinks about community and reconciliation. The whole church, hearing these words, now has to wrestle with what it means to live out their faith in a real situation.

It would have been easier to just ignore this. Onesimus might have thought, "Can't I just stay with you?" Philemon might have thought, "Did you really have to send him back? Now I have to display to the rest of the slaves I own and the rest of this city how I'm going to treat this. That has massive implications. Wouldn't it be easier to just push him away and brush this under the carpet?"

Perhaps the church thinks the same. "If this is what it means to follow Jesus, if reconciliation means actually doing that in my life, maybe I need to look at my life and see the things that aren't quite right."

Paul says: That's exactly what I want you to do.

The communities within which we live, the teams we function in, the families we live in, the church we come to—these are the very places where the rubber hits the road of what we actually believe. If we can't live it out, have we truly grasped it?

You can learn about love, but you can't love in theory. You have to love in practice. I once thought I was the greatest parent in the world. I had read loads of books, listened to podcasts, bought all the stuff. I was ready. Then I actually had a kid, and I realized perhaps I wasn't quite as great as I thought. All the learning makes no difference when you actually have a baby. Now you have to live it out in real life. It's not a theory. It's not a strategy.

A Real Example: Team Conflict and Reconciliation

When my wife and I were living in South Africa, we were running a team of about twelve staff at a Bible school. I suddenly realized there was a big relational issue. One person on our team had a significant issue with every other person. I thought, "How are we going to function as a team?"

Many team members said, "The best way we can function is if you ask this person to leave. Without them, we'd function so much better. So ask them to leave."

I thought about this and realized: that might be the simplest solution, but is it right? Is that truly what it means to be a team? Is that truly what we're teaching our students every day from God's word—that if things get tough, if people are challenging, we just remove them?

I said no. Instead, I sat everyone down and said, "We have two options. We can fall apart over the next few months, never really dealing with each other, and just go our separate ways. Or we can choose to try our best to be a better team by the end of these next few months. That's going to take work, times together, reconciliation, forgiveness, repentance. At every stage, we're going to have to do this. Do you want to be a simpler team by the end of the year? Or do you actually want to live out what it means to be a team together?"

Thankfully they chose the hard work. By the end, we were a much better team. (One person who wasn't the problem person decided they didn't want to do the hard work, but the rest of us became a far better example of a team because of the real situation we had to face and deal with.)

People are not an inconvenience. People are at the very center of where God's love and affection is placed. Working through these things—sacrificing, gaining self-awareness, forgiving, asking forgiveness, having compassion—these are the places where God forms us far more than anything else could.

Conclusion: Living It Out Together

God's church needs team. It needs to function together. When we learn to do that well, we actually better reflect the God we worship and have embraced.

We are always called to do life together. God's team is not a dream team. Which, thankfully for you and me, is true—otherwise we might not have made the cut. It's in those places of community where our faith is lived out.

As we think about our lives and what we're facing, this doesn't mean we can't ever walk away. There are times we need to walk away. Sometimes someone needs to leave. Sometimes reconciliation is hard. But the invitation is: God, what are the places where I need to step towards living out the reality of what I believe? And it's in challenge, in difficulty, and with the people you have brought around me.

We were made to be in community. God isn't forming dream teams. And it's in those places that our faith is lived out.