Total Ministry may start for financial reasons: God uses mundane things to point the way to where God wants us to go: bread & wine, water & oil, and, in this case, money.
This is not a stop gap until you can afford a full time priest to take care of things. It is a new way of doing ministry in your congregation.
Bishop Wesley Frensdorff was one of the early visionaries of Total Ministry. He writes of his dream of "a ministering community rather than a community gathered around a minister".
We cannot emphasize enough the importance of prayer. If you are not praying through this entire process, start now. This is based in Christian spirituality, and here more than ever you will need the leading of the Holy Spirit. This is not to say that the Holy Spirit is not active in your life and the life of your congregation. But the Paul's admonition to pray without ceasing is very apt (1 Thess 5:17). The waters of Total Ministry can be very stormy and chaotic. You will not get through without prayer, corporate and personal. Throughout this site there will be admonitions, serious ones and funny ones, to pray. Think of prayer as looking through God's eyes, aligning your self with the will of God.
PRAY PRAY PRAY PRAY PRAY
Did we mention we think you ought to be praying?
A good description of the difference between baptismal ministry (ministry of all the baptized) and total ministry is found on the Diocese of Northern California's web site, http://isite82186.web07.intellisite.com/files/Total%20Ministry/totalministryassumptions.pdf
"When we speak of baptismal ministry we refer to our lifelong engagement as members of the Church of Jesus Christ, living a life of love of God and love of our neighbor for God's sake in Christ... When we speak of Total Ministry we refer to the concept, processes, and curriculum used by the Diocese of Northern California to revitalize congregations by developing and affirming the ministry of all baptized persons. This is a clearly focused strategy for action and for encouraging a more widely-participatory discernment of God's call to live out the promises of our baptismal covenant."
Many congregations come to Total Ministry when they are in crisis mode. This is well and good, but it must be remembered that you are not going to move from crisis mode straight to Total Ministry. Crises come in all forms: financial, sexual misconduct, problems with certain people in the congregation, and so on. Healing must happen before you start Total Ministry. An analogy that comes to mind is the unhappy couple who believe that having a baby will solve all their problems. It won't, it will compound them. Total Ministry will compound the problems within the congregation if they are not brought out into the open and dealt with.
Grace is not a zero-sum game. God has an abundance of grace so great that we cannot fathom it (infinity sign). Total Ministry is not born into a scarcity of God's grace. There is enough to go around and then have 12 baskets left over (Mark 6:43). In our sinful and crisis modes of living, we forget the abundance of grace. In the kingdom of God we are promised life and life abundant (John 10:10). Total Ministry is a way of tapping into that grace in a specific way.