CHAPTER 1
Tangible Love

Emperor penguins can teach us a lot about teamwork. Spending their entire lives in Antarctica, Emperor penguins are the only penguin species that breeds during winter. From the sea’s edge, they trek along ice for 50–120 kilometres to breeding colonies where the female lays a single egg, before returning to the ocean to feed. Her male breeding partner then incubates the egg over two months, withstanding some of the coldest, windiest and harshest conditions on earth.4

The males endure the coldest environment of any bird by forming very tight and compact huddles (also known as the turtle formation), ranging in number from ten to hundreds. As they do so, each penguin leans forward onto a neighbour. Then they slowly shuffle to the side in a collective spiral which gives each penguin a turn on the outside and the inside. This instinctive action means that no penguin endures the conditions alone, but shares it equally. The tightness of their bond traps heat inside the huddle, ensuring warmth for themselves, their fellow penguins, and, most importantly, the eggs and recently hatched chicks (nestlings).5

The Emperor penguins’ close bonds are a remarkable example from the natural world of the relationships that should characterise teams. It is a vivid picture of the first relational principle of team we’ll explore, which islove.

Love is the foremost principle of team ministry. Love should undergird the whole fabric and function of a team. Without love, everything a team does is superficial and cosmetic. Without love, a team defaults to duty or task. Without love, a team can quickly dissolve into factions and silos.

There are many exhortations in the New Testament for Christians to love another (Romans 13:8; 1 Thessalonians 4:9; 1 Peter 1:22). Loving one another was a particular theme of the apostle John’s writings (1 John 3:11, 4:7, 4:11–12; 2 John 5). I want to focus on the one reference to ‘loving one another’ that was spoken to a team. Found in John 13:34–35, it records the words of Jesus speaking to his disciples (cf. John 15:12,17). This chapter will examine these words of Jesus and their applica