Gaps vs. Overlaps
Lately I’ve been exercising my spiritual gift of poking my nose in where no one has asked me to (that was one of the gifts Paul texted about rather than sent an epistle about, and we don’t have a record of it because his cell plan wasn’t very good. #didyouseewhatididthere).
I’ve been curious about areas on our team, in my own ministry life, and the church as a whole of where we have gaps and where we have overlaps.
In my estimation, we all have some gaps: those areas where we assume that someone else is doing something, they assume we’re doing that thing, but at the end of the day, no one is actually doing it. We hope for the best and we kind of get the worst.
When gaps happen, people fall through ’em. Opportunities are missed. Easily-bridged ravines tend to get wider rather than narrower.
On the flip side, we all have some overlaps: those areas where it’s hard to tell where our nose ends and another begins. One ministry is executing a project that’s just two degrees off from a project of another ministry. We may be doing a great job, but we’re effectively doing the same job.
When overlaps happen, there’s wasted energy. Because we’re doing basically the same thing, we don’t have time or energy to do some new thing.
So how do we spot the gaps and overlaps? There are many ways, but there’s a simple solution we’re working on: take the individuals or teams that you suspect may have a gap / overlap issue. Get ’em all in a room. Have them work through their job description / tasks / projects / understanding of their role. And figure out who’s doing the same thing, and which thing isn’t actually being done at all.
Who knows: we might find brand new opportunities for ministry we didn’t know existed, and we might find a lot of extra time we didn’t know we had.
