Unfortunate Team Dynamics

This is the third blog post in a row. They're written over the last week, because our Internet access day is Monday. I'm going to call people back home when it gets later in the day, since we're ten hours ahead.

Our team leader, Mikaela, may be ahead of the curve to lead a team at the mere age of 19, but I still keep being surprised when she does something really immature. Here's just one story that gives a perfect picture of a pattern that's been making half the team a bit disillusioned with team dynamics...

We have team meetings. At one meeting, Mikaela was gone, so Luke was facilitating. And Kara, Sam, and Madi mentioned their teaching positions are extremely frustrating to them, partly because they say they aren't really the teaching type. They were hoping we could add a street ministry, or maybe Kara could perform with her guitar at a bar. Part of the problem is we keep going to Busanza for the small country church we're planting, and Luke keeps preaching there, but they don't have any real roles, aside from let the kids touch their hair and hold their hands. So we brought it up at this team meeting. Now, we wanted to be very careful that Mikaela doesn't take all this personally again, so we talked a lot about the best way to bring this up to Mikaela. We decided that Luke would give her a heads up, and then the dissenters would talk to her individually.

On Sunday, as always, we went to a restaurant for dinner like we always do. We did the affirmation circle, which took a while with ten people. Every person was in the hot seat and other people just started saying nice things about them. And after being there at least an hour and a half, it came to be 8:30. We asked what time the busses stop running, and Elijah said 9:00. I also thought we were being rude for not clearing out so long after we had finished eating. Mikaela decided that we still had to bring up something quickly and shouldn't wait til we got home. She first mentioned that she felt a bit sad that we hadn't been completely open and honest with her. Then she brought up the problem of people not having their hearts in the right place with the ministries they'd been given. Then Luke preached a sermon to us about “How bad do you want it? Isn't God worth it?” Then they wanted our feedback, and I chipped in that first, we hope Mikaela doesn't feel sad because we were very intent about being open and honest with her in the most Christ-like way. She said she really appreciates that a whole lot. But she didn't really connect it to her introduction about how she felt sad that we weren't being open. We didn't have much time for feedback, because we had to leave. We were too late for any bus to come by us, so we had to walk for a while to a main bus stop and try to find a bus home. There were only a few busses and there were a lot of people trying to cram into them. A couple Rwandans saw us and started arguing with others on our behalf because they felt that we should be pushed ahead onto the bus because we were guests in their countrry. So we got onto a bus and made it home.

It would have been much more mature to wait until we got home so that we could have had an actual discussion. I understand she was anxious to bring it up, but she gave in to impatience. And her response to our original point was just defensiveness. I like the ministries we've gotten to do, and I am happy to be here. But working with a childish leader is now another thing that we're doing for God.

They had planned it out to do affirmations right before rebuking us. Using affirmation time as a ploy took away from it a bit, but I was still pretty happy with what people said about me....

“You have an insane amount of knowledge, but you're extremely gentle about it.”
“You have unlimited patience, especially in your teaching.”
“You're a really, really good listener.”
“You're really funny.”
“You're an encourager.”