I believe that more churches are going to move toward that as pastors find out that they will tend to either preach well or lead their church well; but if they're trying to do both, something's going to suffer, and sometimes everybody suffers. So maybe we'll be a prototype for the team-teaching approach.

The advantage to the congregation is they hear the voice of God through different voice boxes. They discern the wisdom of God through different personalities and gift mixes. The other advantage is that the teachers get more preparation time so that what they bring to the congregation can be better researched, more thoroughly prayed through, and applied to their own lives. A lot of us pastors preach what we have not yet applied in our own lives because by the time we're trying to apply truth to ourselves we're already in preparation for the next time up. That often leads to some forms of hypocrisy -- it's unintentional but it's almost inevitable.

I really believe that the church ought to be led by leaders and taught by teachers -- plural -- and administrated by administrators, etc. We're heading in that direction, and I think that's exciting.

Preaching: How often as the Senior Pastor do you find yourself preaching?

Hybels: Fifty percent of the time. Most churches only have a Sunday morning service so that would mean twenty-six times. In the course of the year, I'll probably speak twenty-six weekend services, but also maybe eight or nine of our midweek services. It's important to me to nourish and feed the core of the church at our midweek services and it's important for me to be a consistent communicator to the non-churched community in our area.

Again, we make those decisions more by gift-mix. Two of us on the teaching team have very strong evangelism gifts with our preaching gifts, so we would tend to do more of the weekend services. The other two tend to be a little stronger toward the midweek services, so we would play to the strengths. One of the four of us is a pure communicator who can really speak in either place effectively -- that's not me, by the way!

Preaching: When you do a weekend you would take all four services?

Hybels: Correct, both Saturday night and both Sunday morning. That's the approach we're taking at this point. If we find out that that's too exhausting for one of the players, then we'll readjust and handle it differently.

Preaching: How far out do you try to plan the preaching schedule for the church?

Hybels: We have it planned out for about nine months. We do that in community. It's very important for your readers to understand that the elders, the teaching team, a few staff members, and a few lay people will huddle together and spend multiple retreats working out what we sense of the direction of God on that matter. We spend a lot of time discerning the Spirit on the preaching menu.

Preaching: When you do that planning, you're planning not only who's going to speak but topics?

Hybels: What the series is about, how many weeks, which series should follow which to provide some sense of continuity. That's closely scrutinized by a group of very godly, discerning people because if most pastors are honest, what they preached on in the last year will tend to reflect their own biases and hobby horses and strengths and so on. That's not necessarily what would serve the congregation best.