Too Big to Run on Relationships: Getting Your Structure Right as a Large Church (Part 1)
If your church is over 1,000 in attendance, you’re too big to just run on relationships anymore.
At some point, the way you’ve always led stops scaling. Not because relationships don’t matter (they do), but because the ministry is now carrying more complexity than your current structure can support.
This is where many churches get stuck—they don’t make that transition. And if you don’t get intentional about systems, roles, and decision-making, you’ll keep feeling the same pain: confusion, bottlenecks, burnout, and frustration that “we’re working hard, but it still feels chaotic.”
In this series, we’re going to get really practical about how to structure around systems and strategies.
In this episode, we’re starting with the question: Are we overstaffed or understaffed? Because sometimes we get the data wrong—and we end up hurting the team.
- More People vs The Right People
- Equipping Volunteers to do Ministry
- Get Your Math Right: How Much Staff Do You Actually Need?
The pressure a staff team feels to add more staff is often the result of running a menu-driven church. [episode 464] #unstuckchurch Share on X As you scale, you want fewer people who need a stage and more who are willing to grab the mop. [episode 464] #unstuckchurch Share on X Don’t structure the church for the church you have today. Structure the church for the church you’re becoming. [episode 464] #unstuckchurch Share on X
This Episode Is Brought to You By Tyndale House.
If Jesus walked into your church right now, would people recognize him? We’ve created a personalized Savior who exists primarily to meet our needs, bless our lives, and guarantee our spots in heaven.
But here’s the problem. That Jesus would be unrecognizable.
In the book The Missing Messiah, bestselling authors Kyle Idleman and Mark More will help your church rediscover the Jesus based on Scripture, not on culture. Plus, check out the six-session companion study guide with free access to streaming videos.
Learn more at missingmessiah.com.
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Transcript
Sean:
Well, welcome to the Unstuck Church Podcast. I’m Sean, managing director here at the Unstuck Group. Today we’re kicking off a brand-new series that we’re calling “Too Big to Run on Relationships,” focused on how to get your staff structure right as a large church. I’m here with Jonathan Smith, lead pastor of OneChurch.to in Toronto. Jonathan and I spent a stretch of June together talking about leadership development, so some of you have heard from him before. Jonathan, it’s really great to have you back with me for this series.
Jonathan:
Hi, Sean. Great to be back with you and the Unstuck listeners. I’ve been a fan of this podcast long before I ever contributed to it, and I love learning. What I’ve always enjoyed about the Unstuck Group, and what I hope our listeners enjoy about this today, is that it’s always rooted in data and real church narratives. As a leader, that’s something I love. I get to learn about what’s really working and what’s not helping. No spin, just real. Sean, it’s great to see you, my friend. I’m looking forward to these conversations.
Sean:
I love it. Thanks for doing this again with me, Jonathan. Let me tell our listeners where this series came from and what we’re planning to cover over the next four weeks.
First, if you don’t consider yourself a large church—and I said that in air quotes for some reason, Jonathan, even though I know nobody can see me right now—don’t tune out. We’re going to cover structural principles that you’re going to need someday, maybe sooner than you even think.
There’s a moment that happens in every growing church that I think few plan for, at least from what we’ve seen in our experience. For years, the way your team worked together just worked. You knew everybody on the team, and decisions happened in hallway conversations. Things at your church were easier because you were doing ministry shoulder to shoulder. A lot of your progress was built from relationships. I would say, Jonathan, that’s how a smaller church is supposed to run. Relationships are the operating system, and that works in smaller churches.
Then, somewhere north of a thousand in terms of attendance, it stops working. Those hallway conversations don’t reach everyone on the team anymore, and they start happening less and less often. Then you notice things start to fall through the cracks. What makes it so surprising is that nothing’s broken. You didn’t do anything wrong. The ministry just became more complex as your church grew, and your structure didn’t change to support the new scale of work that you had in front of you as a ministry team. That’s where we’re going with this series. At some point, you get too big to run on relationships. Relationships still matter—they always will—but they can’t be your operating system anymore.
Over the next four weeks, we’re going to get really practical about what to do about that. Today, we’re going to start the conversation with the question: Are we overstaffed or understaffed? Sometimes we get the data wrong and end up hurting the team unintentionally. Next week, we’re going to talk about the roles and who owns what. You can’t fix the org chart until you know exactly where you’re going and how you’re going to get there. In week three, we’re going to talk all about the people on your team. Who goes where? How do you assess leadership capacity honestly? What do you do when the role outgrows the person who’s in it? Then, in week four—and this is going to be the hardest week of all, I think, Jonathan—how do you actually make structural changes without blowing up your church? It’s going to be a good series.
Jonathan:
Yeah.
Sean:
Let’s get to the content, but before we do, let me pause and say thanks to this week’s podcast sponsor, Tyndale House. For us as church leaders, if Jesus walked into our church right now, would people actually recognize Him? Tyndale House is announcing a brand-new book called “The Missing Messiah.” It’s by bestselling authors Kyle Idleman and Mark Moore, and it helps your church rediscover Jesus based on Scripture, not on culture. There’s a six-session companion study guide that goes with the book, along with free access to streaming videos. You can learn all about it at missingmessiah.com.
Let’s dive into the tension, Jonathan. In my seat, I get the privilege of talking to a lot of pastors—not just pastors we work with, but hundreds, actually this year over 200 so far, who reach out to us for conversations. Most of those conversations, especially for larger churches, come back to structure and people issues. Pastors hesitate to make people decisions based only on a gut feeling. One critical issue in churches as they grow is adding staff. Pastors and executive leaders tend to hear from their staff that they need more help on the team. We start drafting job descriptions and looking at new roles, but a lot of pastors I talk to wonder if they really need more staff or if their current staff need to lead their teams more effectively. You sit in this lead seat at your church. Have you run into that tension at One Church, and what’s your reaction to it?
Jonathan:
The uncomfortable answer is that the church I’m leading right now was significantly overstaffed when I arrived, and the staff still felt it was understaffed. As it turns out, those two things can be true at the same time. I’ve heard similar stories with every church I’ve walked into. When I start somewhere, I always interview the staff from the bottom to the top of the org chart. I ask them simple questions: What’s working? What’s not? What do you hope never changes? It’s just a way of taking the pulse. I’ve never once sat in those interviews and had somebody tell me, “We have enough people.” Not one time.
The feeling is real, but a feeling is data about pressure. It isn’t data about capacity. I think that’s where staff sometimes get confused. Often, what a staff team is feeling when there’s pressure to add more staff is the result of running a menu-driven church. The menu is eleven pages long, and if we’re honest, we’re mediocre at best at most of the menu items. Nobody has the nerve to take anything off the menu. We’re always about addition, never about subtraction. I’m sure you’ve seen this a few times in your years with the Unstuck Group, Sean.
Sean:
Absolutely.
Jonathan:
You get staff sprawl and you manufacture energy from the platforms on Sunday to get people to show up at events that your staff don’t even want to attend. Consequently, those events that are genuinely good are competing with revenue-neutral events for the same rooms, volunteers, and families. The church isn’t understaffed. It’s overcommitted. Every yes we said five years ago is still sitting on someone’s calendar and in someone’s role description. There’s a version of this in the corporate world called Parkinson’s Law, and you’ve probably heard it. It states that work expands to fill the time available. In our context, ministry expands to fill the staff available. The trap is that hiring will always feel like it worked because the new person will be extremely busy within 90 days. But busy isn’t fruitful.
In this dance, I have to own a piece of this as a lead pastor, and I think I’ll be speaking to the experience of some of the people listening right now. When somebody on my team says they need help, they’re usually right about the pain but wrong about the solution. I get it because I’ve sat exactly where they’ve sat. When you’re drowning, you’re not asking for swimming lessons. You’re asking for another body. The question I have to answer is whether I built an environment where people have enough bandwidth left to raise up volunteers or develop people.
Sean:
Oh, that’s a great question.
Jonathan:
Equipping is slow, right? Handing something off to a volunteer takes three times longer than doing it myself. If I’ve loaded my team to 100 or 110 percent, I’ve made discipleship economically irrational for them. They always do it themselves because it’s easier. The first question I’d ask a pastor listening now is not, “Are you staffed, overstaffed, or understaffed?” It’s, “When was the last time you stopped doing something?” If you can’t name it, you might not have a staffing problem. You might have a subtraction problem, and you can’t hire your way around a subtraction problem. I’m positive you have seen this before, Sean. We can’t be the only ones at One Church.
Sean:
Not at all. What I see often in larger churches, one of the most difficult shifts for them, Jonathan, is when they’re under a thousand in attendance. There’s nothing magic about the thousand number; it’s just the size and scale at which you’re doing ministry around that number. When you’re under a thousand, you tend to hire doers. That makes sense. When you’re smaller, you need somebody to run the thing, so you hire somebody who can run that thing.
Then you grow, and there’s a tendency to keep hiring the same way: another specialist. They’re probably a really godly, capable person who will faithfully execute one piece of ministry at a time. Every one of those hires makes sense in the moment. That’s the part that gets a lot of leaders. You don’t hire any bad people in this. You make several good decisions that add up to a team that, because they’re doers, can’t scale up.
A team of doers doesn’t multiply itself. You’ve added to the payroll, but you haven’t added to your capacity. There’s a version of that that stings a little more for leaders. If your staff are doing ministry that volunteers could actually own, you’re not solving a staffing problem by hiring. You’re paying a professional to do work an unpaid leader would do, often with more ownership than the staff person would have.
Our founder, Tony, called this outsourcing people’s discipleship. We say it often when we’re working with churches: You cannot hire your way to health. Adding a role to the team with no leadership leverage just makes the ministry more expensive while maintaining the same level of health. You don’t take a step forward.
The question isn’t, “Do we need more people?” The question is, “Do we have the right people doing the right work at the right level?” In addition to the point you just made, Jonathan, we should ask, “Are we doing the right amount of work?” You can’t answer that from your gut. You need real numbers to make that call.
Jonathan:
I would add something that’s hard to admit. Sometimes we hire because it’s cheaper than having a conversation. I’ll say this as a person with a pastoral heart: There’s a person on the team who isn’t carrying what the role now requires. As you level up, the role requires something else. When you move from doers—which we tend to hire under 1,000 because we have so many things to get done—to equippers, it can be glaring when people on your team are still operating in the doer model.
Instead of sitting down and being honest with them, we write job descriptions and hire around them. We tell ourselves we’re just adding capacity when we’re actually avoiding conflict. We’re spending $60,000 a year on a role instead of having a 20-minute conversation. I’ve done it. I’m not proud of it, and I’m not judging anyone listening. I’m not trying to make light of how hard those conversations are. But the tell is always the same: The new hire’s job description is a list of things somebody else was already supposed to be doing. It could be that we have too much work, or maybe we have too many doers and not enough equippers.
The other piece I’d add is theological, and you’ve already been knocking on this door, Sean. I think it matters more than the budget pieces. When we staff our way through every gap, we’re not just making operational choices; we’re making discipleship statements. Ephesians 4 doesn’t say leaders do the work of the ministry. It says leaders equip the saints for the work of the ministry.
Sean:
Right.
Jonathan:
If the number of paid people determines what the church can do, we’ve quietly inverted that ministry model. We’ve built a church where the congregation attends the ministries that the professionals perform. The irony is that the volunteer you’re replacing with a hire often would have greater ownership of that role. Nobody serves in kids’ ministry for eleven years for a performance review. They’re doing it because it’s their calling and their heart. We keep hiring people to do work that somebody in our church may be eager to do.
Sean:
We talk about this a lot on the podcast, but we have to keep talking about it because, consistently, in our work with churches, we see overstaffing over and over again. We see the challenges it causes when you play that out over time. Churches tend to hit this 1,000 barrier, go up and down around it, and become frustrated. A big part of that is how they’re approaching staffing and structuring their teams.
Let’s shift to the practical side of this because I want leaders to walk away from today’s podcast knowing what to do. There are two things you need to know before you make any staffing decision. The first is your staffing-to-attendance ratio. We talk about this metric often: How many full-time-equivalent staff do you have per attendee, based on average attendance over the course of a year?
Here’s the math: Take your average weekly attendance and divide it by your full-time equivalents. I want to be careful with the word “equivalent,” so for clarity, two half-time people equal one full-time equivalent, not two staff members. Sometimes we find a staffing surprise when we add up part-time hours and realize how many FTEs that actually represents. What we’ve seen consistently is that healthy churches land right around one FTE for every 75 people in average attendance. That number starts to put things in context for leaders. If you’re at one to 100 right now, it’s possible you’re feeling stretched and hiring might be the right call. If you’re at one to 50, you have more staff than churches your size, even if everyone on your team would tell you something different.
Here’s something that’s been one of the most surprising learnings for me personally in working with churches over the past nine years: The most overstaffed churches I work with are usually the ones that feel the most desperate to hire. When we step back and think about it, it shouldn’t be surprising. When a team is full of doers, adding another doer feels like an obvious fix. So they hire. Then the feeling doesn’t change, so they hire again, and they perpetuate the tension.
The other number to consider is your staffing budget. Healthy churches generally spend somewhere between 45 and 55 percent of their total budget on staffing. The attendee-to-FTE ratio tells you whether you should hire. The budget percentage tells you whether you can.
Jonathan:
Let me have a moment of confession. I’ll enter the confessional box with you, Sean, and commiserate with the other lead pastors who might be listening. As it stands right now, our staff-to-attendance ratio at One Church.to is one to 61. Not optimal, not terrible, but not optimal. The percentage of our budget spent on staffing is 56.2 percent. Some of that is environmental. Toronto is one of the most expensive cities to live in Canada, so our percentage of the budget tends to be higher because of cost-of-living allowances. But some of it means that we’re not where we need to be. That’s why we’re bringing in the Unstuck Group again to help address some of these areas.
I want to build on what you said: It’s important to know your numbers and realize that your numbers have context. We aren’t where we want to be, but we know where we are. That’s a beginning point. You have to know where you are. Our church is becoming a second-time client of the Unstuck Group because we’ve reached a place where we’re starting to feel that we can’t keep operating the way we are.
Along with those two numbers, there’s a third that I find fun to track as you begin to transition from doers to equippers: volunteers per staff member. Attendance-to-FTE tells you how many people you’re serving. Volunteers-to-FTE tells you whether your staff are leading or simply laboring. When you look at the spread among individual staff members, you’ll notice that some might have 80 volunteers while others might have six. You have to add context because not every staff role is the same. A finance person won’t carry the same number that a kids’ ministry person will. But that number can show you the difference between a doer and an equipper. At minimum, it’s a helpful conversation starter: Are we leaning more heavily toward the doer side than the equipper side?
Because sometimes we can use language, and it’s really aspirational language. It’s not, but this is the way you can get in to say, is this just aspirational or are we tipping towards equipping? It’s easier to answer the question of whether you’re overstaffed or understaffed when you have the numbers and context figured out. I’d encourage every listener to participate in the Unstuck Church Report. Even before I became part of the Unstuck Group or engaged you to help us, this was incredibly important to us. The report comes out every quarter and allows you to compare your numbers with other churches. Sometimes our numbers are part of a larger trend happening culturally. We may simply be caught up in a cultural moment. Other times, the numbers are more reflective of how we’re performing.
I know you’re going to talk about the Unstuck Report in a little bit, but it’s worth mentioning that churches of every context and size are represented. People ask whether there are Canadian churches or rural and urban churches, and the answer is yes.
Sean:
That leads me to another point, Jonathan. One of the things we did in the most recent Unstuck Church Report was look at how churches distribute their staff across ministry areas based on church size. So we actually broke it down into different sections or sizes, and we looked at how are you allocating your staff? Your total ratio can be perfectly healthy while your team still feels broken if people are in the wrong places. We often see a church overstaffed in one area and understaffed in another at the same time.
We worked with a church that had about 30 FTEs. Roughly 20 percent of their staff were allocated to worship, which would be six people. At the same time, their next-generation team was at about 11 percent, which was only three people. The benchmark for a church of that size, based on our most recent Unstuck Church Report, is closer to 14 percent for worship and 21 percent for next generation. Do the math on that. They had about two too many people in worship and about three too few in next generation.
Think about how that feels inside the staff. The next-generation team is responsible for several hundred kids and students each week, and they’re probably running on fumes while sitting in the same staff meeting next to the worship team, which has significant margin. Nobody’s at fault in that story. None of those teams are at fault. But the next-generation team has to wonder why staffing resources keep going somewhere else.
The ratio tells you whether you have too few or too many people, but the allocation tells you whether they’re in the right ministry areas. Most churches look at the ratio but not at the distribution. Maybe they simply don’t have the numbers. Make sure you get the Q2 2026 Unstuck Church Report. So they either hire when they shouldn’t hire or they don’t hire when they should. And some ministry leaders still end up asking for staff because we’re not allocating our staff very well. So take a look at the report. We break it down across ministry areas by church size: senior leadership, worship arts, next generation, adult ministries, digital, communications, and operations. It’s all there. We’ll link to it in the show notes.
Jonathan, when you look at your own team through that lens—not the total number, but where people actually sit—how do you decide what a ministry area is worth in staff?
Jonathan:
Honestly, when the Unstuck Report showed the distribution of staff across those different areas, we realized that maybe we have a problem. That’s part of why we’re reengaging the Unstuck Group. I wish I were strategic enough to have known this from the beginning, but like most churches, staffing allocation is often a record of who has advocated best in the past, not a record of what mattered most. The loudest speaker gets the position. The ministry with the most weekly visibility gets the position because everybody sees what happens on a Sunday. Sometimes it comes from tradition. We’re a Pentecostal church, so worship is a major part of our church experience.
When I look at it now, I run it through three filters. The first is time horizon. Some ministries fail loudly, and some fail silently. If worship and gatherings are understaffed, you’ll notice within three weeks because everyone experiences it on a Sunday. If next generation is understaffed, you may not notice for a decade. Nobody complains, the kids don’t come back, and nobody files a report. I weigh toward ministries where the cost of being wrong is sizable, invisible, and delayed. Timing matters.
The second filter is leverage. For the next position, how many volunteers does it unlock? This is about shifting our mentality from doing to equipping. It’s not how much work the position absorbs—that’s the doing model. It’s how many people it activates. A position that unlocks 40 volunteers is a completely different investment from a position that unlocks zero. For example, our outreach team has unlocked many new volunteer roles in our food bank and recreation programs as we’ve made strategic shifts. We now have much more engagement.
The third filter is the future, not the present. If we’re going to be a church that reaches young families in three years, our staffing has to move before the young families show up, not after. Structure is a leading indicator of what your vision and your strategy is, but it’s a leading indicator of where you’ll see fruit. You can’t hire in response to growth, or you’ll always be reactive. You’ll always be a year behind, and your best people will burn out in the gap.
The hardest part is that sometimes all three filters point away from the ministries with the strongest advocates in the room. It takes a leader who’s willing to disappoint some people along the way to make sure your allocations are setting the church up for its healthiest years.
Sean:
I want to pause on that for a second, Jonathan. You are an Unstuck consultant, and your church has also been through the Unstuck process. Now you’re going through it a second time. You’re bringing our team back in to facilitate for you so you can sit at the table, add to the conversation, and lead your team through it. You know that one of the key conversations we’ll have on the structure side is how to structure around our strategies. You just mentioned several strategies that are unique to your church. That’s an important thing for church leaders to remember. We don’t want to structure around departments or what we’ve always done. We want to structure around our strategies because what receives personnel and financial resources is going to get done. That’s key when we want to see the right results through our strategies. I love the fact that you’ve recognized it’s the right time for your church to do this again.
Jonathan:
It’s so helpful to have an outside perspective and a voice that can objectively look at the staff who are here, how we’re structured, and our outcomes. Having someone else lead the conversation allows me to participate in it. I could lead our church through this process, but it wouldn’t be as objective and probably wouldn’t produce the same outcomes. That’s why it’s important for us, at strategic points, to bring in the Unstuck Group to help us. We don’t want to be a stuck church, and we realize that we’re always drifting toward that. At some point, we need to reengage to make sure we continue on the path of being unstuck and missional in our reach.
Sean:
For our listeners, if you’re thinking right now, “This is us,” here’s what I would suggest. First, get your leadership team in the room and do the math we’ve been talking about. It’s important that this is a senior leadership or executive team conversation. It’s not individual homework. Don’t take this and try to do it yourself. If you run these numbers by yourself and then take them to a staff meeting with all your conclusions already made, you create a team with many questions but no ownership of the decisions. You want your team to see the numbers at the same time you do. The conversation that the data starts is worth just as much as knowing the numbers.
Bring three things to that meeting:
– Your attendance-to-FTE ratio, actual number of FTEs. Know your number of FTEs, not your head count. You’ll have to do some work with your part-time hours.
– Your staffing as a percentage of your total budget. So what’s your personnel budget as a percentage of the total?
– Then look at your staffing allocation. What percentage of your team sits in each ministry area?
That should only take about an hour to pull together, but many churches we work with haven’t done that work yet. Start there.
Second, compare yourself to the report we’ve been referencing. Pull up the Q2 2026 Unstuck Church Report. Look at the allocation data and put your church next to it. Where are you high in staff allocation? Where are you low? Don’t simply hit a benchmark and call it done. If you’re eight points over in one ministry and five points under in another, that creates a great question for your team: Why are we allocated this way? Is it strategic, or is it simply the way it’s always been?
In many churches we’ve worked with, the answer is that it’s simply the way it’s always been. Somebody was hired in 2018 for a reason that made sense in 2018. As the church grew, the org chart scaled up, but no real adjustments were made. So Jonathan, I’m really interested to hear from you on this. Because I genuinely don’t know. Have you done or do you do an exercise like this where you get the team together at One Church? I know you’re bringing us in to work on this with you, but do you do that consistently? And if you have, what did you guys learn through the process?
Jonathan:
The short answer is yes, we have done it, and sometimes it costs us more than we expect. The first time we really leaned into this was when the Unstuck Group helped us think about it. And it was actually Tony Morgan who worked with us the first time we worked with you. What we found was that we were chronically overstaffed in congregational care, operations, and administration, while being understaffed in outreach and communications.
The easy explanation was legacy. I arrived at One Church.to about ten years ago, and we were staffed for a world where pastors didn’t manage their own communications, events, or certain other areas. The structure wasn’t volunteer-focused. Admin assistants were needed for basic tasks and events. And that structure worked a decade ago. It continued after that decade ended without keeping pace with technological advances or the changing reality of how we work.
Legacy explains how we got there, but it doesn’t explain why we never fixed it. We never adjusted those seats because we love the people sitting in them. You’ll never look through the distribution of your staff and find villains sitting in those seats. You’ll find faithful people you care about, whom you may have hired for good reasons in different seasons, doing exactly what you asked them to do. It’s not about looking for bad decisions. Nobody made bad decisions. It’s an accumulation of good decisions that nobody went back to reevaluate.
This is why, on Sundays, one team can be burned out while other teams have plenty of margin. Perhaps the uncomfortable truth is that our staffing had been shaped by the loudest voices in the room. Some of that was our history. It wasn’t just individual voices; it was a history or tradition we had been part of. That was often fueled by people connected to church members. I’ve never joined a church that didn’t want more care, more programs, and more attention. The group that never sat at the table when we made staffing decisions was the unreached and unconnected. Nobody was speaking up for them.
We made some hard strategic decisions at One Church. We moved away from having a counselor on staff and outsourced that to professionals in our city. We stopped filling care-team roles when people retired or moved on. We equipped and raised up a team of 70 volunteer elders who now do all our care ministry. To be honest, Sean, they do it better than we ever could. They’re more distributed. People don’t call the pastors; they call the elders when they need care and support. That allowed us to move those dollars strategically into outreach and communications.
Having Tony look into our ecosystem and shine a light on the gap between how we staff and operate and what we dream of and aspire to do in our city showed us how large that gap really was. It’s important to make staffing decisions while remembering that the staff team exists to build environments and support systems that allow the congregation to do the work of the ministry. As you scale, you want fewer people who need a stage and more who are willing to grab the mop as quickly as they grab the microphone—people who show everyone around them what it means to serve Jesus and impact the city you’re called to reach.
Sean:
That makes me think of another question we get: As we’re thinking through staffing changes, how fast or how slowly should we go? This is the point where you probably need to slow down. The instinct for many leaders after a conversation like the one you’re going to have with your senior leadership team is to rearrange the org chart on Monday morning. Don’t do that. Staffing changes are one of the most stressful things you can put an organization through, even when the changes are good. Make a plan, sequence your plan, and move through it intentionally. We’re going to spend all of week four on how to do that without blowing things up.
The last thing is to run all of this through your strategy. Here’s what I don’t want you to do: Don’t structure the church for the church you have today. Structure the church for the church you’re becoming. Ask it this way: What strategic shifts are we making in the next two or three years? Are we launching a location? Are we adding a service? Are we rebuilding our discipleship pathway? Are we investing in the next generation? How would our staff size and distribution need to change to deliver that?
A staffing plan that only reflects today will always make you feel like you’re playing catch-up. You’ll be hiring for problems you already have instead of hiring for the mission you’re walking into in the future. That’s my segue to next week and next week’s conversation. You can’t answer how to organize your people until you’ve answered where you’re going and how you’re going to get there. Jonathan, is there anything you’d add or anything you’d tell a pastor not to do at this stage?
Jonathan:
I always love podcasts like this because the action-oriented part of me immediately wants to get to work. I would say to my fellow lead pastors, as I would say to myself: Cool your jets and slow down. Be careful not to manufacture urgency to get this done. I say that as someone who’s guilty of it. I’m wired toward action, and I think a lot of lead pastors are. I like the feeling of urgency. It can be useful fuel when you need immediate change. But as a leader, it’s important to slow down. Urgency is the wrong fuel for moving people out of seats they’ve been sitting in for years, even if you perceive you’re moving them to a better seat.
Think of urgency as energy. You’re bringing a lot of energy to a conversation or strategic decision that will have more than enough energy on its own. People are already going to feel a lot because it involves change, and change always brings energy with it—especially if you’re on the receiving end of the change. I’ve gotten this wrong. I would turn something over in my mind for months, and by the time I presented it, I thought it was well-developed and fully formed. But I forgot that my team was hearing it for the first time. I had months; I gave them one meeting.
People need space to get their heads around things. Sometimes they need space to push back and space to have a dialogue. I wasn’t always sensitive to that. Urgency doesn’t create space; it consumes it. The phrase I would use in place of urgency is “pace determination.” Not slow, but determined and paced.
If you’re wired the other way and tend toward hesitation, there’s no danger of you taking action. I don’t want to give you permission to delay, because delaying is also a decision. You need to make this urgent but unhurried. Waiting can feel pastoral, and sometimes it is pastoral. But beyond a certain point, it can be about protecting your comfort rather than organizational effectiveness. This is where the leader in you tells the pastor in you—and they collide. Both of those things are in us as lead pastors. There’s a pastor in you and a leader in you, and they both want to stand up at the same time. Sometimes the pastor has to tell the leader, “Sit down. Let’s slow down because there’s a person in front of me.” Sometimes the leader has to tell the pastor, “Sit down. It’s time to move because the whole church is waiting on us.”
Whatever you decide, vision-cast it. If your team only hears what is changing, they’re going to fill the gaps with fear—the fear of the unknown and fear about what comes next. But if they hear why it needs to change, the strategy that will inform the structure, that’s what’s gonna give positive energy, kinetic energy to help you make those structural changes.
Sean:
I love that. Jonathan, I love having you on these podcasts. I really appreciate your honesty and your perspective from your real-world experience leading One Church right now. It’s extremely helpful. What’s one thing you hope pastors would take away from today’s conversation?
Jonathan:
Maybe twofold: First, you’re perfectly structured for the results you’re presently getting. As Andy Stanley says, that might be good news, or it might be bad news. Much of what you dream of—and even what you hear on podcasts like this—is found on the other side of a decision. You don’t have to make those decisions alone. I need others looking into my church, staff team, and structure because I’m too close to it. You don’t want to make changes just to jump-start your church. You want to be intentional, measured, and think about what’s next—not just what’s happening now. If you’re going to change the staff structure, resist the temptation to make changes only for where you are right now. And Sean, you really did a great job of tabling that thought, but because change is hard, make those changes to where you’re going and what’s next.
Sean:
Here’s mine. You talked about this earlier, and it caused me to think: A lot of church org charts I’ve seen tell more about the history of the church than where the church is going. If you’re a large or growing church, that has to change. It starts with knowing your real numbers, being honest about your team’s leadership capacity, and then adjusting the structure to reflect your future and where you’re going. That’s why we’re doing this series. Next week, we’re moving on to the question of, “Who owns what?” I’m looking forward to that conversation.
If today’s conversation made you want to examine your numbers, start with the data. We’ve talked about this many times, but the Q2 2026 Unstuck Church Report has all the staffing ratios and allocation benchmarks we discussed. We’ll link to it in the show notes. You can also find it at theunstuckgroup.com/trends. If you want a deeper dive into your numbers and know you have structural issues right now, that’s the work we do with churches every week. You can learn more about that process at theunstuckgroup.com/structure.
Next week, Jonathan and I are tackling who owns what because you can’t fix the org chart until you’ve clarified the strategy it’s supposed to serve. Subscribe so you don’t miss that, and we’ll see you next week.
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