Too Big to Run on Relationships: Getting Your Structure Right as a Large Church (Part 4)
People issues, and especially people changes, can be the most divisive thing that happens in a church.
Suddenly, a staff member people love is not on the platform anymore, and nobody’s really clear why.
The church leaders have had months to process the change, but the congregation and staff have to catch up in the length of one conversation or announcement.
And they don’t sit in it neutrally…they fill it with a story. Not about the decision, but about the church itself.
We’re wrapping up Too Big to Run on Relationships, our series on getting your structure right as a large church. And we saved the hardest conversation for last—how do you make structural and staffing changes without blowing up your church?
- The Change Cycle
- Sequencing Communication in the Right Order
- Developing a Communication Plan and a Care Plan
Change should be the most normal thing in the church world because God is all about transformation, which is change. [episode 467] #unstuckchurch Share on X Every personnel and structural change you make has to clearly connect to how it helps you better accomplish your mission as a church. [episode 467] #unstuckchurch Share on X The cost of moving too fast is real. The cost of never moving at all is so much greater. [episode 467] #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:
Welcome to the Unstuck Church Podcast. I’m Sean, managing director here at the Unstuck Group, and I’m here again with Jonathan Smith, unstuck consultant and lead pastor of One Church.to in Toronto, Canada. Jonathan, this is our last conversation in the series, and honestly, I think we saved the hardest one for last. We’re gonna wrap up this too big to run on relationship series, our series on getting structure right in large churches. And let me just do a quick rewind because back in week one, we asked whether you’re overstaffed or understaffed as a large church. Week two, we talked about how structure follows strategy. Last week, we talked about getting the right people in the right seats, that character, chemistry, competency, and then taking an honest look at leadership capacity. And the most common last question to all of that is, how do you make structural and staffing changes without blowing up your church? So Jonathan, I’ll be doing the asking of the questions today, and I’ll just let you respond. How about that?
Jonathan:
Hey, well, Sean, glad to be back with you and the listeners. I’ll do my best.
Sean:
Good, good. All right, before we jump in, let me say thanks to our podcast sponsor for this series, Tyndale House. You know, if Jesus walked into your church right now, would people really recognize him? Tyndale House is launching a brand new book called The Missing Messiah. It’s written by bestselling authors Kyle Idleman and Mark Moore. And it’ll help your church rediscover Jesus based on Scripture, not just culture. There’s a six-session companion study guide that goes with it and free access to streaming videos. And you can learn more about the book at missingmessiah.com.
All right, so Jonathan, we’ve got a lot to talk about. We’re gonna get right into it. And I wanna start by talking about why this is the conversation that really scares people. People issues, and especially people changes, I think they can be one of the most divisive things that happens in a church, even more than a worship style or a building project. This is when a staff member people love is suddenly not on the platform anymore or not on staff anymore. And sometimes nobody’s really clear why.
Now, I mean, certainly there is some information that isn’t appropriate to share, but most of the tension, I think, is simpler than all of that. A lot of times church leaders spend months on this people work. They do all of that data gathering we talked about last week. They have lots of conversations. They go through an assessment process, and hopefully they pray, and then they make hard decisions. It’s several months of work. By the time they’re ready to move, they’ve fully processed all of that. They’ve grieved what they’ve needed to grieve. They’ve made peace with it. And then the tricky part is they’re actually excited about what’s next. And then those changes happen, right? And they’re genuinely surprised when the church doesn’t share that same level of excitement.
But think about the math on that. The leadership team has had four or five months. The congregation has had maybe a day. So you’re not asking people to agree with you. You’re asking them to really catch up to months of processing in the length of probably one conversation or one announcement and that is just not possible. Jonathan, I know that you’ve led change at One Church.to and you’ve walked other churches through it. What’s the tension that you see when a church starts making these types of changes?
Jonathan:
Yeah, I think your math is right, Sean. And here’s what people do with that gap. They don’t sit in it neutrally waiting for information. They fill it with a story. And the story they land on is almost never about the decision because they don’t have enough to evaluate the decision. The story is about us. What kind of church is this? Is this a place that discards people? That’s the actual tension. This is one of the hardest things in church leadership. And I’ve learned a long time ago to talk about it long before it ever happens.
I remind our staff and our church family regularly, leadership is temporary. I’m temporary. Everyone on this team is temporary. We all have an entry moment, and every one of us will have an exit moment. And that exit moment, even when you prepare people, it always surprises people. Even when it’s good, even when it’s retirement, you’ll still have people mourning the departure of someone they dearly loved or someone they felt genuinely loved by. So let people grieve about it. I think leaders make a mistake when they announce a change, pivot straight to what’s exciting next, because you can tell the congregation their sadness is inappropriate in those moments. Name the loss first, and you’ll earn the excitement later.
Practically, we take communication plans seriously. And I know you’re gonna talk about this in a moment, Sean, but when we walk through a departure with a staff member, whether they’ve been the catalyst for the change or we have, we work through it until we’re nodding in the same direction that this change needs to happen. Then we agree on communication plans together. I’m not a big fan of NDAs. I’d rather have an agreed-upon statement because I want us to be able to hold our heads high about how we treated someone. And I know I can’t control how a person feels or how they, when they leave, what they’ll say. I keep coming back though to, in many of these moments, you wanna be able to pray what David prayed in Psalm 25, “May your integrity and uprightness protect you.” That’s a prayer. It’s not a strategy. My job is that side of the street. Maintain integrity, uprightness, kindness, generosity, and those four words apply whether it’s a great departure or even a hard one.
One more thing in sequencing: the people closest to the staff member, their team, their key volunteers should hear about this before the congregation does. And I think you’re gonna explain a little bit about this in a communication plan, because you need a space and a room where they can ask questions. Those are the people who are gonna carry the story either way. But the real work happens at the front end. When we hire someone, we talk about the ending. I’m especially deliberate when we’re hiring from inside our church family because an ending is far more jarring for someone who worshiped in this community, was hired out of this community. So during the hiring process, we say it. Someday this is gonna come to an end. It might be age or stage. It might be that the church changes. It might be that you’re not the right fit anymore. And maybe we’re not the right fit anymore. How do we wanna agree to handle that now while we’re all happy, while we’re getting started here? And you can’t hold people to that conversation. That’s not really the point. The point is you built in an expectation that endings are a normal part and rhythm of life. And the more you normalize it at the front end, the easier it is to navigate it when that moment inevitably comes.
Sean:
Well, here’s another complicating factor I’d add to that, Jonathan. Most of the church today, most of your church, pastors, is completely satisfied with the way that things are right now.
Jonathan:
That’s true.
Sean:
And that’s not a criticism of them. It just is what’s true. They’re not in your meetings. They didn’t see the numbers or hear the conversations. They aren’t feeling the same bottlenecks that you’re feeling. Many of them would be perfectly happy if your church never changed a thing. So when you announce a change, you’re not delivering good news to a room that’s been waiting for it. You’re actually introducing loss to people who didn’t even know anything was wrong.
Jonathan:
And I think that’s what makes change so hard. That’s exactly it. I talk about this at One Church.to, you know, more than people probably want me to. A little bit like what I just said, everything’s temporary. I remind them constantly everything changes. Everything God touches changes, church changes, people change, culture changes, and it’s not gonna stop. Change should be the most normal thing, though in church world because God is all about transformation, which is change. He changes everything he comes in contact with. He’s the only thing that doesn’t change.
But the hard part of that, of course, is that although change might be normal, it doesn’t make all change right. And if the only time the congregation hears me talk about change is the week that I’m announcing a change in the staff, then they’re gonna see it as positioning. You gotta say it in the seasons when nothing is happening. That kind of immunizes a church in advance because our natural propensity, even when we know it isn’t healthy, is to prefer familiar over the unknown every single time.
So to your point about loss, I push it one step further. People aren’t resisting the change in the abstract. It’s costing them something specifically. And I think it builds empathy with me when I realize it’s costing them a relationship with a leader who maybe walked them through the worst year of their life. It’s costing them, if you’re shutting down a program on Wednesday night, that work for their family schedule. So name the cost out loud before you have to. Nothing lowers the temperature faster than a leader who says, “Listen, I know. I know this is costing you and I’m not gonna pretend it’s nothing.” Which is why I think you have to treat every departure like a grieving moment. And grief is something everyone processes a little bit differently. There’s sometimes denial, and then sometimes people go into a deep funk and they have to struggle their way through it. That’s why you walk with people through this.
So along with a communication plan, you need a care plan. Who’s going to step in and pastor the people the staff member led? Who’s caring for the volunteers who they were connected to? And that should be a person with a genuine shepherd’s heart, not just an administrator. I think here’s the mistake, and I’d warn people about this. Don’t put your next catalytic leader into the seat right away. That ministry needs time to grieve. You don’t need vision yet. You need someone who can pastor and shepherd; in a sense, they’ve gone through loss. If you drop in the builder from day one, they’ll start doing what they do, launching new things, trying to create energy, and they’ll wonder why there’s such resistance. We prefer when we make a transition to put in a shepherding person temporarily. It’s always an interim role, so that they can be cared for. We can do some healing. We can do some moving forward. And then the catalytic leader gets off to a great start. The ground is settled when they arrive.
And the last thing I think is a piece that most churches miss. Make a care plan for the person who left. When a staff member exits a church, they’ve lost their job, their church, their small group, their friendship in the same week. It could be all of those things. Somebody needs to be checking in on them. Somebody needs to be helping them land. And it’s not often the person who’s had to have the hard conversation. They’re not necessarily the person that should. We recently had someone leave our staff team, and I couldn’t have been prouder with how our team leads and others handled this, because this person is still in our church, as volunteering in our church, landed in a healthy place. And I think it’s because both sides just handled their part so well.
Sean:
That’s good. Yeah. I wanna get to solutions, Jonathan, but you just made me think of something. I’d just add to that. When you don’t communicate at all, which is a whole lot more common than you might think, I think a lot of pastors tend to get nervous, so they end up saying nothing in this. And we figure that, you know, sometimes changes can speak for themselves, but that silence doesn’t create calm within your congregation. I think it creates more of like a vacuum of information. And the vacuum, it gets filled by people having side conversations in the parking lot or by a group text that starts up. You know, somebody is telling the story about what’s happening in your church. I think the question for pastors is, would you rather that be you? So that’s all the more reason to speak up.
Jonathan:
That’s amazing. Yeah, that’s a great statement.
Sean:
Let’s talk about solutions and really how pastors can lead through this well. And before you build a plan, I think you have to understand how people actually process change, because if you don’t understand what’s happening inside of your people, I think you could easily misread the reaction that you get from them. So there’s a book that I’d recommend here called The Change Cycle. It’s by Ann Salerno and Lillie Brock. And the framework in it, I think has been really helpful for the churches that we work with. Their premise is that people move through six very predictable stages when they experience change, not because they’re difficult, but just because they’re human beings. So let me walk through the six, just kind of one by one here.
Stage one is loss. When people are processing change, the first thing they feel is loss. And the first reaction to change isn’t just analysis or data finding, it’s what am I losing? And even when the change is good, the first feeling is what’s actually going away. And people sometimes I think in this stage feel unsafe. Then they’ve transitioned to stage two, which the authors call doubt. This is where people question the information that you’re giving. Is this really necessary? Do those people know what they’re doing? People get skeptical, and they may even start talking about it with each other. The third stage they transition to is discomfort, anxiety, frustration, low productivity. This is really the messiest stage in the change cycle. And here’s the important part about this. This is where people either push through or they check out. If they don’t get enough information and enough support here in the discomfort stage, they can actually slide backwards.
Then we shift onto the other side of the cycle. Stage four is discovery. Something here starts to shift. People stop looking backward, and they start seeing the possibility. They start to think about what could be instead of what used to be. Then stage five is what they call understanding. This is where people’s confidence returns. People get their footing in the new reality, and they start being productive again. And then the last stage, stage six, is called integration. The change isn’t change anymore. It’s just how things work now, and people have really made it their own.
And here’s why I think every pastor should know about this. When your congregation reacts to a change with resistance, that’s usually not rebellion. That’s stage one and two of that change cycle, and that’s normal. And it’s actually the beginning of the process, not the end of it. And when a church leader gets defensive at the first wave of pushback, they can actually make things worse. They read grief as disloyalty and that’s just not true. The other thing I think this framework tells you is that you cannot skip stages for people. You can move them through faster with good communication, I think, but you can’t jump them from loss to integration all of a sudden because you’re ready for them to be there.
Jonathan:
Just to pick up on that defensive part, I think this is why being a healthy leader is so critical. If your first reaction is to be defensive, of course, that shuts down the conversation and short-circuits the cycle that you just presented, Sean. And I think it’s critical as leaders, we kind of are also maintaining and caring for our own souls. I know you know that. I just know it’s the last thing usually on my to-do list.
Sean, you’re right. I’d name one more thing. Often, you can’t share what’s going on. You can’t share all of the conversations, the reviews, the reasons, especially if we’re talking about a staff change and it’s been a hard departure; you just can’t. Confidentiality is real, and honestly, some of it is just not yours to hand out. So the question becomes, what do you give people when you can’t give them information? When I was a little boy, as clear as it was yesterday, I remember my dad taking me to my first funeral. It was my uncle Harley. And he was at a box in the front of a funeral parlor on display for everybody. And I gotta admit, I did not understand it, and I was nervous. In fact, I think I was getting scared watching some people cry, and I wasn’t processing it well. It was hard.
At some point, my dad caught my eye, walked across the room, left the conversation he was in, walked over, and all he did was put his arm around me, and he said, “Are you good?” And now I was. He didn’t explain death to me. He didn’t give me one piece of new information. He just came and stood beside me and that was enough. On our leadership team, we call that, air quotes, being the “adult in the room.” I wanna be careful with that phrase, because I’m not talking it in some pejorative way that somehow talking down to anybody. In that story, I’m not the adult. I’m the boy who didn’t understand and needed somebody steady to stand next to me.
But when you’re the one in that role, it means you swallow a bit of the pushback. You keep your poise. You don’t let your discomfort change your character. You stay kind, you keep listening, and sometimes you practice the discipline of holding your tongue when you badly wanna defend yourself. And this is exactly why the change cycle you walked us through matters so much. When you understand that people are at loss and doubt, you stop hearing their reaction as an attack on you, and you’re free to understand and be just present with them. You can’t hand them the information, but you can absolutely put an arm around them.
Sean:
Yeah. And Jonathan, that’s true about our staff team too, right? I think sometimes even more so. Because your staff aren’t just processing a change; they’re processing a change that affects their job, their reporting lines, sometimes even their friend’s job. So one thing I’d say to leaders, the same senior leadership team that’s been living in this work for the last, you know, six months or so will be tempted to, I think, expect the rest of the staff to catch up in one meeting, like we talked about with the congregation. They won’t.
Jonathan:
Right, right.
Sean:
They’re starting at stage one too, just like everybody else.
Jonathan:
Yeah. And that’s why it’s so important to remember, Sean. Here’s what surprised me every time I’ve gone through a change on the staffing side. How many people either saw it coming or already understood that something had to shift? I’ve realized that, and I’ve seen it time and time again play out that way. But there’s something underneath that that matters even more. If you built trust with your staff team, they’ll extend that trust to you even in the vacuum of information. When you’ve gone through and you’ve established real evaluation processes, clear expectations, honest check-ins, you have care and development built into your staff rhythms, they’ll know that the decision you arrived at didn’t come from nowhere. They know it isn’t arbitrary. Many of them don’t want to know the information. They know it’s not knee-jerk, it’s not reactionary, it’s not personal.
And that’s exactly why the how becomes more important to the why than the staff. They’re not sitting there wondering whether there’s a process. They already trust that there is one. What they’re watching is how you treat the person while they’re walking through it because they can’t help but put themselves in that person’s shoes. Every departure is a message to everyone who stays about how this could happen to them. Practically, that means a few things. Tell your staff before the congregation; we already talked about that, in a room where they can ask questions, including the questions you cannot answer, because being present, even for unanswerable questions, is worth more than even having the answers at that. They already know you can’t give all the answers.
So here’s how I’d frame what you’re actually asking of the team in that season. You never want to invite your staff to be part of spinning anything that would lack integrity and character, and we don’t need to do that if we’ve handled it well. What you’re asking them to do is not spin, but become a sponge. When somebody comes to them who’s hurting, confused, absorb it. Lead people through it. When they honestly don’t know answers to questions people are asking, say, “Listen, I don’t have answers to this. I’m happy to connect you with someone that might be able to help.” And you always just point them to someone higher in the org that might be able to give a little bit of color without giving too much information, because most of the people, they just need to be heard in this moment. And when you can be a sponge, this actually helps the body of Christ heal and move forward. And, you know, for my lead pastors, and I’m sure you’re all in this seat anyways, be generous to the person leaving. Severance, runways, good references, proper farewell, whatever you’re able to do, because what you spend on that person walking out the door is exactly what your remaining team believes they’re worth.
Sean:
Yeah, that’s a great reminder.
Jonathan:
There’s something in the way you touch somebody that matters well after this situation comes and goes.
Sean:
That’s good. All right. Let’s shift to the really practical here, and here’s what I’d recommend. First, this is gonna seem obvious, capture your plan in writing. I know it sounds like, well, yeah, no duh, but it’s the step that gets skipped the most, quite honestly. You know, after you go through a long planning process, everybody in your room together making these decisions feels aligned; we agree. And then we leave the last meeting feeling confident, and then a few weeks later, you’re gonna have two leaders who describe the plan in two different ways to two different people. Now, all of a sudden, you’ve got a problem. You can’t afford assumptions here, and you really can’t afford conflicting information. When people are already feeling anxious, those mixed messages, they don’t just confuse them. They actually erode the trust that you have. So, write it down. What’s changing? What’s not changing? Why? And what does it mean for each area of ministry? Put that all in one document.
The second thing, phase your changes out. Not everything moves at the same pace. Jonathan, you’ve talked about pace a little bit already, but some of this feels like a sprint, and some of it feels like a marathon. And the mistake, I think, is thinking that it all moves forward at the same time. It doesn’t. The way we coach churches is to kind of break it up into three, what I’d call, horizons for the future. The first 30 days, what has to happen immediately? Usually, these are the conversations that can’t wait and the changes that people will notice right away. Then the next 30 to 90 days, these just need a little more runway. Maybe there’s new reporting lines taking effect, roles that have to be kind of redefined, or maybe some of the teams that are reorganizing. And then beyond that, the next three to 12 months. So this is a longer runway. There’s hiring that needs to happen. Maybe there’s development, the structural pieces that you’re actually building towards but you can’t execute right now.
And I’d say this to leaders who wanna get all of that done by next month. A church coming out of a staffing and structure process typically takes somewhere between four and eight months to actually get restructured. That’s normal. So get comfortable with the idea that some of this will be slower than you really want it to be.
And then the last practical step here, assign an owner and a deadline to every single action step, and then sequence those in the right order. Every line in your plan needs a name next to it and a date next to that. Otherwise, you just have a wishlist on paper. And the sequence in that matters more than I think most leaders expect. You don’t announce a new structure before you’ve had the individual conversations. You don’t have individual conversations before you know what you’re offering, and you don’t tell volunteers before you tell your staff. If you get one of those out of order, you might spend a whole lot of time trying to make it up to somebody else in the future.
Jonathan:
I’ve spent time doing damage control, Sean. So, writing it down, like you said, seems so obvious. It’s so important. And just to double down on pace a little bit, because I think lead pastors talk to me more about staffing than any other topic. It’s the number one topic that seems to come up. And I don’t think it’s by coincidence, because the stakes are really high. Nothing accelerates growth in a church or health in a church like the right staff team. And nothing holds a church back or creates unhealth quite like the wrong one. It cuts both ways with enormous force. Jim Collins, eventually, he corrected one of his own lines in Good to Great. He said, “It isn’t people who are the most important asset, it’s the right people.” And that distinction is the whole ballgame.
So take your time. Whatever it’s gonna take that leaders should start to hear this process of unfolding change like this as being just normal, but there’s a tension to name, and it sounds like a contradiction, and you knocked on the door of it, is the timeline should be slow, but the moments inside the timeline need to be very intentional. Michael Watkins, he wrote a book called The First 90 Days. Great little read. I think you’d enjoy it. The whole argument is transitions carry leverage completely out of proportion to how long they last. So what happens in the first days sets the pattern for everything after that.
And this is what I’ve noticed in church world. We’ll spend four months deciding whether to hire someone and about 40 minutes planning their first day. We agonize over the decision and improvise the moment, and it probably should be the other way around. The same thing is true on the other end, which is really what this whole series has been about. The two moments every person on your team watches most closely is when you bring someone on and when you let someone go. Both of those are bookends, and they tell your staff more about who you are and what you value than your value statement ever does on the wall. So go slow on the plan, but be relentless in the moments.
Sean:
One last thing for me, Jonathan, and I think maybe this is the most important. You actually alluded to this earlier. Churches need to build a communication plan. This is one step you absolutely cannot skip in this, but here’s what you’re working toward. Every personnel and structure change you make has to clearly connect to how it helps you better accomplish your mission as a church. That is so important. If you can’t make that connection, don’t announce it yet. Go back and get more clarity because we’re reorganizing is not a reason. We’re reorganizing so that more people in our city meet Jesus. That’s a good reason.
So let me share our recommendations for how you build out your communications plan. First step, start with your stakeholders and communicate down the funnel. You start with your board first, then the staff, then volunteers and lay leaders, then members and regular attenders. The principle with this is simple. The more stakes someone has, the more information they get and the earlier they get it. Your board gets a full report, your congregation is just gonna get the headlines. And for each group, ask a few questions before you say anything. Who does this change excite, confuse, disrupt, or threaten the most? What questions will they have? What are the wins if we communicate this well, and what are the risks if we don’t?
The second step, I’d say, determine your priority messages. Not everything belongs everywhere. Your staff and your board are gonna need the details, but the details don’t belong on the website. And you gotta be selective about this because, you know, you decide the most important messages ahead of time and then repeat them more than it actually feels necessary. You’re gonna feel like you’ve said it at that point, you’re gonna have to say it again and say it again, and then people are finally starting to get it.
The third thing I’d say, just watch your language. All the words that we’ve been using in the series, structure, span of care, FTE ratios, allocation, leadership capacity, those are all planning words. They are not congregation words. Nobody in your worship space is inspired by the phrase organizational realignment. So you’ve gotta translate it. And analogies, I think, for what this looks like seem to work really well here.
The fourth thing, I think you’ve really gotta nail the timing and hold your team to it. Everybody involved in the process needs to understand that sharing details ahead of the plan can really do damage, not because you’re hiding something, but because the wrong person hearing it in the wrong order changes how they receive this information and future information really forever.
The fifth thing here, write your FAQs before you communicate anything. And here’s why that’s important. You might never hand out frequently asked question responses. That’s not the point. The point is that anticipating the hard questions is how you find out whether your plan actually holds up. After every meeting, add what you’ve learned to that list. The questions you didn’t expect become your talking points for the next group.
And one more thing, which might be the most important tone note in this whole series, celebrate the past, but explain why you can’t stay there. There’s a real temptation when you introduce something new to frame it against what you used to do, to make like the old thing the villain. Don’t do that. Those roles and structures and people got your church to where it is, so honor that. The story isn’t, you know, we were doing it wrong. The story is actually God brought us here and here’s where he’s taking us next.
Jonathan:
Hey, Sean, I might add just on priority messaging. I learned this from somebody I thought was the master at this. His name was Pastor Keith Smith. He’s the previously pastor of One Church.to. He was a master at messaging. I was leading a church years ago in Montreal, and we went through a transition that was tough. And a lot had happened. And there was a lot of things to go behind in performance, deeper things were at work than just performance, and I couldn’t share them publicly. And on top of that, I’d inherited a church that had been through difficult seasons of staff transitions that weren’t always handled well before I ever arrived there. So people were not giving us trust. They weren’t filling in suspicion that with any of the gaps, that’s what went in there. And that was the story that was already sitting there waiting for me.
So I wrote a paragraph. I was planning to be proactive, to read it to the church. And I sent it to Keith. And what he sent back, he said, “Jonathan, I think you need one sentence.” And Keith was a master at this. A one sentence, a well-crafted one sentence that you say often, especially when you can’t say a lot, and you repeat often without saying too much, and it takes the high road. And here’s the part that stayed with me. He said, “Most reasonable people will see you’re holding back. And what they’ll read into it is that you’re valuing and protecting the person over your own comfort.” Which it was exactly right. Silence tells people nothing, but visible restraint tells them a great deal. They can see you choosing not to defend yourself, and it earns you more than an explanation would have.
I’d add one more honest qualifier that works when your track record supports it. In Montreal, someone who had had a rough departure kind of left saying some things that weren’t true, weren’t true about me, weren’t true about the leadership. And one of my staff was actually in the bathroom and overheard two long-term members speaking. And they were recounting what this person had said. And one member said to the other person, “Well, that doesn’t sound like our pastor. That doesn’t sound like our board.” And he dismissed it.
And I remembered in that moment, people are always doing math. If in the aggregate you are treating people well, if in the aggregate they see that you’re making decisions that are not making your life comfortable, but you’re really trying to do what’s best for the church. In the aggregate, people begin to do the math. And even in the vacuum, sometimes they’ll fill it with a narrative that you’ve been writing the rest of your tenured time there. And so I think the biggest thing is don’t let somebody else fill that narrative. You started it with saying that the temptation is to be silent around these things. And I think there is as a pastor, but you want to be vocal. But I would just say you’re really telling the story long before the crisis ever came up or the moment came up.
And to your last point, I’d underline that the hardest. Don’t make the old thing the villain. Because the old thing isn’t a thing, it’s people. You said it well, Sean, and a lot of them are still sitting in the room you’re talking to. Then those structures and roles that were built by faithful people who gave their best years to this church, when you frame the past as a problem, they hear you calling faithfulness a mistake. The story is not what we’re doing. The story is that God brought us here and here’s where he’s taking us next.
Sean:
That’s so good. All right, Jonathan, for the last time in this series, what do you want pastors to take away from this conversation today?
Jonathan:
I’d wanna end it just by saying, leadership is not easy, and I think you know that. And this might be the hardest part. Work like this makes you tired in a way that sleep doesn’t fix. So as I started this, I said, you know, care for your soul. Stay in relationship where somebody has permission to ask you a question. I’d even go further and say, build a group of peers around you who know what it’s like to sit in the seat you’re sitting because you’re processing change in the church. There’s nothing like talking to someone else who’s actually been there and carried it. I mean, your spouse will love you through this, but a peer can understand you through this.
And hear me on this. The fact that it’s hard on you, it’s not evidence you’re bad at this. It’s evidence that you take people issues seriously. And if this isn’t hard, that would be the problem. But here’s the one thing I’d say plainly, don’t wait for the next leader to make the changes you maybe even should have made. Everywhere I’ve gone, I’ve arrived and my wife Shelly and I, we’ve just committed together. How do we leave this place better than when we arrived? And I trust that question kind of cuts both ways. Sometimes it’s held me back from doing things I wanted to do, but maybe not good for the church in this season. And sometimes it’s caused me to walk towards some very hard decisions because in the end, it isn’t my church. It’s not your church. It’s Christ’s church. And we always wanna do what’s best for the church. I hope you feel from the Unstuck Group because I know we feel it towards you. We love pastors here, and we’re in your corner and we’re rooting you on. So it may be a hard thing you’re taking on right now, but that might be the right thing to be taking on.
Sean:
Yeah. And I would just say to wrap up kind of this whole series all four weeks, structure is not a chart and it’s not just a spreadsheet. Structure is how your church takes care of its people while it does what God’s called it to do. When you get it wrong, everybody can feel it. Your leaders tend to burn out, things fall through the cracks. Good people might even decide it just is not worth being a part of. When you get it right, though, I think structure mostly disappears. Nobody notices good structure. They just notice that things work and that they know what they’re responsible for and that somebody’s paying attention to them. That’s the hard work of these last four weeks in our series.
And if you’re sitting on a change that you know you need to make, I’d love to leave you with this. The cost of moving too fast is real. The cost of never moving at all is so much greater. So do the work with your team, write down the plan, give your people time to catch up and then lead through it.
Well, this is a wrap up to our series, Too Big to Run on Relationships where we’re looking at structure for large churches. And over four weeks we’ve covered whether you’re overstaffed or understaffed, how structure follows strategy, how to get the right people in the right seats, and then how to make the changes without disrupting your church. And if you’ve been listening and you’re thinking, “This is us.” You’re not the only one, and you don’t have to figure it out on your own. Everything that we’ve talked about in our series is what we do in our staffing and structure process. We come alongside your senior leadership team and help you assess your team objectively, and we build the right structure around your strategy and to get the right people in the right seats.
And we can help you with the part we’ve talked about today, really a phased rollout plan and a communication plan so you know who’s doing what, in what order, and how you’re gonna tell the story to your staff, your leaders, and your church. I think what pastors tell us most often on the other side of it isn’t that we told them what to do, it’s that we finally help them create clarity and a plan that they could see and then give them the confidence to really move forward. So if that’s what your church needs right now, let’s have a conversation. You can learn more about our staffing and structure process at theunstuckgroup.com/structure. Jonathan, thanks a lot for four great weeks. This has been really, really fun to go through these conversations with you.
Jonathan:
Thanks for having me, Sean. It’s been great.
Sean:
One last thing before we go, if this series has been helpful to you, would you leave us a review on whatever platform you’re listening on right now? It takes about 30 seconds or so and it genuinely helps more church leaders find these conversations. Thanks for being with us for this series and we’ll see you again next week.
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