Where do you gather?
I often think about the different places we “gather” and why they matter so much. Places we hang out, places we make memories, places we go to share our lives.
Above is a picture of one our my teams gathering places. This is the “Ding Dong”! Jeff’s got a few pieces of killer furniture in his office and one of them is this simple ottoman called a “Ding Dong”.
When we were upstairs in our previous office space we’d kick back, put our feet up and talk about life and ministry around this crazy Ottoman every week and it was awesome! It would be our excuse to be close and hang out. Now that we’re in our new office space (our department moved offices) and have an actually meeting room we haven’t used the Ding Dong much and I can tell. I might have to boycott the table for GSM meetings and bring in the ding dong so we can regain the connection we felt when we were around it and continue to get stuff done!
Sometimes we have to change things up a little to get just the right environment for our teams to flourish. The question then becomes are we committed to doing whatever it takes to get our teams in environments where they can flourish?
I’m going to continue to try my best to do that and I hope you will to, they deserve it!
For us: In theory, the conference table is practical and makes more sense. In real life, it doesn’t work for my teams dynamic…feels to formal, we’re farther away from each other, makes things seem to serious, & we just work better in a more relaxed organic non-formal setting (ie. when we can throw balls to each other, bounce tennis balls off the wall, throw pens at each other, get side-tracked a few times, wrestle, make fun of the girls for not joining in the shenanigans, you know…that sort of stuff.)
