You can likely understand how radically different the diet of a 25-year-old Olympic athlete is vs. that of a newborn baby. Just as their capacities indescribably differ, so do their dietary needs.

In a similar way, we can compare our leadership structure and the needs of our congregation to diet and capacities respectively. When we were in our first couple of years, Trinity’s leadership was one staff member (me) and a leadership team of about a dozen volunteers. By our third year, we had two part-time staff members for administration, and we added Timo Strawbridge as a part-time Director for Community Groups, and we ordained our first three elders, who were supported by about 20 or so volunteer leaders.

Where we are today is like comparing that mature athlete to a baby because now we have 18 staff just for Trinity, another dozen for Campus Outreach, and additional part-time interns. That totals up to more staff than we had adults in our entire congregation when we launched in 1997! And if you recall recently, I outlined just how many volunteers we also regularly employ.

So let’s go back to the relationship between leaders and the needs of our congregation. Leaders are like the diet or nutrition necessary to fuel the capacities of what a growing body can accomplish. Any parent knows, as you can almost see or even hear your kid growing, you know they need more nourishment.

A regular theme you need to hear and get accustomed to is that our leaders are working hard both to prepare for continued growth and the eventual succession plans for our founding leaders. We have a rapidly growing kid (our congregation). We also have an expanding diet (our need for leaders).

Let me zero in on just a single area as representative of the whole. Community Groups.

When we launched, our core group WAS just about a single community group. But after the summer of 1997, we multiplied that single group into three. We believed (and still do) that the discipline of adults meeting regularly — for building community, worship, prayer, Bible learning, and mission — is a humble yet effective way to position people to grow and obey God’s commandments for how believers are to live in community. Is this the ONLY way in which to accomplish this? No, not at all, but it is the way Trinity leaders believed we could do it best and most consistently.

In our first few years, the leaders could mutually support one another. Then we grew. As we needed more leaders and those leaders needed to be trained and supported, Timo Strawbridge stepped forward—and took an almost unimaginable cut in pay from his home-building career—to do it.

Now, 25 years later, and with likely 40% of our adults being added to Trinity in only the last four years, they have no memory of his legacy. Now (my impression only) I’d say that some people love community groups, some people hate them, some would like to modify what a community group is to simply be a supper club, and some people resent that they can’t join Trinity until they get into a group, and that’s proven to be excruciatingly difficult because we lack the leaders to head up the number of groups needed to support our growing congregation.

So what do we do? First, just know this — this history, this dynamic that we’re all living in. We all help to make up a rapidly growing church, which, like a growing, healthy young adult, needs more nourishment than we once did. That means we need more leaders, and our staff, elders, and lead volunteers are all working on this singular need. Second, we’re also working to add staff. And currently in our time and culture, ministry staff are very hard to find. And third, please pray with us. Jesus told us (in Matthew 9) that as “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.”  Please pray with us that God would see this particular harvest of our need — especially for volunteer community group leaders, and ministry staff at Trinity — and that HE would raise up the laborers.

It is, after all, His harvest. And we can trust Him to provide us with all the nourishment we need, just as He has given us all the growth and vitality that we’ve ever experienced.