MODULE 1 - Section 1
A Strong Foundation
15 Minutes to complete section and related assignments
In this section, you will learn:
A healthy foundation for short-term teams requires a focus on Purpose, Priorities, and Perspectives.
Short-term efforts are best invested in ways that support long-term transformation.
The importance of a establish a foundation that lends its toward a teachable posture for incoming teams.
Imagine a group of people who are committed to engaging in a season of prayer and training before they even arrive in the community. They learn about their spiritual and cultural lenses that influence the way they engage with the world and how their short-term presence contains the potential for both healthy and unhealthy impacts.
As best as they can, they show up as learners with a flexible, teachable posture that comes alongside the vulnerable - ready to listen and learn instead of fix and solve. They know that their efforts are short-term and, therefore, are best invested in ways supporting long-term transformation.
Meanwhile, they intentionally encourage local leaders and long-term workers who will carry on the work after the team is gone. And they return with a curious mindset about how God may lead them to stay engaged with your community as a prayer, giver, and/or goer.
Does this sound like a team you want to be a part of your community? It can be!
To receive teams like this requires a foundation we can build on for every STT opportunity. To help you integrate your unique community context into short-term teams, the STTs Dept has developed an initial foundation that will attract, guide and empower goer-groups to create healthy teams from our very possible vision above.
The three parts that will make up the healthy STT foundation for every STT opportunity are Purpose, Priorities, and Perspectives.
Purpose
Whatever our distinct role is with short-term teams, our collective purpose in engaging them is to create healthy short-term team opportunities that introduce individuals and goer-groups with our communities and that invite those relationships to grow.
STT opportunities are like an on-ramp of a highway or the open end of a funnel. They introduce people to the work of integrated community transformation and what God is up to in the community, while also providing accessibility and proximity to the work happening in our communities.
Access and proximity are important for goers to not only grow in their understanding of the very real circumstances of the vulnerable, but to also become personally impassioned as they see God’s heart for the community and what He is doing there. In the end, access and proximity remove the barrier of what is happening ‘over there,’ and makes transformational work real, personal and meaningful.
Once a goer is introduced and has a greater understanding of the story of the vulnerable and long-term transformation, we want to invite those same people - as individual team members or as partnering organizations - to next steps that help them grow their relationship with the vulnerable, our communities, and our organization.
As we work together then, our hope in using STTs is multi-pronged:
To help individual goers grow in becoming passionate prayers, giver and goers for your community.
To help organizations create sustained relational momentum with your community through partnership opportunities.
To fuel and empower you, your local team and the work of the community.
And to feed long-term transformation that supports the vulnerable.
In the end, short-term teams are another powerful way we can bring people together to help the oppressed!
Priorities
While Purpose is our foundation or why we do what we do, our Priorities & Perspectives will serve as the framework or our what we are about as we engage short-term teams, each in their own unique way. Priorities and Perspectives could also be called our approach.
Let’s use the analogy of a house. Our Purpose is our foundation. We are using that foundation for all our STT opportunities. However, while you can have the same foundation for several houses how you finish the exterior framework will affect the architectural look and feel.
Priorities are like the architecture of a home, giving the house its style or culture. In the same way, Priorities inform and help us stay focused on the culture of what we are about when it comes teams.
For example, if we are finishing our house with a rustic, log cabin look, we wouldn’t purchase modern fixtures knowing they aren’t consistent with the rustic look we’ve already decided upon. In the same way, Priorities help guide us to stick to what we are about, which in turn, helps us to know when we are getting off track.
In short, we want people who interact with us during a STT opportunity to experience our Priorities through both the way we interact with them and our execution of teams, even if they do not know what those Priorities are specifically. In essence, we want them to experience our intentional differences throughout the STT process much like someone pulling up to a home and getting a feel for it through its design and architectural feel.
You will get the opportunity to develop Priorities related specific to your community and how you will approach STT opportunities at the end of Section 2.
For now, if you want to understand what Priorities look like and see examples how they make a tangible difference in the relationship-building and execution of a STT opportunity, you can access the STT Department Priorities and Perspectives resource at the end of this section to learn more.
Perspectives
Let’s go back to our house. The foundation has been laid (Purpose) and it has a specific architectural feel (Priorities). We now need people to inhabit the house. The way the residents go about filling that house would each be different bringing their own energy, rules, decoration, customs, and so on. In simplest terms then, Perspectives are the unique way of how we go about what we are about throughout the short-term team process, or, in other words, perspectives are the unique perspectives and approaches we embrace as we go about our values-driven culture.
Again, you can check out more on Perspectives, what they look like and how they impact the STT process by viewing the STT Dept’s list of departmental Perspectives and Priorities at the end of this section. Use them to help you thinking about what yours might be given your unique context.
In addition, while you may wish to create your own unique list, know that many of the Perspectives and Priorities in the resource below are part of the posture we are training teams to embrace as they prepare to visit your community. This is part of our way of bringing about a vision of healthy teams into reality.
For now, our Perspectives and Priorities are what differentiates us from other STT outfits and organizations. You will see these elements even impact the language we use, when you view the available resource Defining Terms in Short-Term Teams and Why Call It Short-Term Teams? below.
In your case, this foundation-setting will differentiate the unique way your community will host short-terms. In both cases, we are communicating an intentionality in the way we are creating short-term team opportunities that introduce individuals and goer-groups with our communities and that invite those relationships to grow.
Section 1 Resources
