Church Staffing Oxymorons (Part 3)
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We’re wrapping up our series on church staffing oxymorons by tackling perhaps the most challenging one yet – the perfect staff structure for never.
Many churches find themselves caught in a structure that doesn’t work for today’s needs and definitely won’t support tomorrow’s vision. It’s that nagging feeling that something’s off—workloads are uneven, decision-making is unclear, and leadership gaps are widening.
In Part 3, Sean and I explore why churches get stuck in ineffective structures and, more importantly, how to build a staff model that works for both present and future. Listen below to get some practical metrics to assess your current situation and strategic steps to move toward a healthier organizational structures.
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More Episodes in This Series
- The Understaffed Team With Too Many People – Episode 382
- The Team With The Right Wrong People – Episode 383
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Transcript
Sean:
Well, welcome to the Unstuck Church podcast. I’m Sean, your host here again with my teammate Amy Anderson. Amy, how are you?
Amy:
I’m doing pretty good. We had a great chance to talk with our advisory team today, which always puts wind in my sails and we just got some of the unstuck quarterly port data out that’s gonna be really fun to share in the weeks to come. So, doing well, doing well, and it’s not snowing today, so that’s always a good thing.
Sean:
That is a good sign. I wanna start today by actually bragging on a church. And there’s a great church here in the wonderful state of Indiana where I live, in a city called Hammond. And the church is called Anthem Church, and their XP, their executive pastor Christian Washington, he was in one of our leadership cohorts over the last year. And you know, he mentioned to us recently that their church has experienced some pretty incredible growth. They’re only four years old as a church. But they’ve grown to over 1800 in attendance and have had 50% growth in their church in just the last year alone. So one of the challenges that you gave the cohort together was to create an org chart for a church that was actually double the size than they’re currently at.
And what Christian was telling us was that exercise from the cohort has paid huge dividends for them now because they’re already moving into a structure for a church that’s about double the size of where they were at from when he started the cohort.
Amy:
That’s crazy.
Sean:
So I’m really proud of their team. The strategic work that they’re doing and the plan that they have to structure for growth. And we’re actually launching some new leadership cohorts soon for the year 2025. In fact, our East Coast multi-site cohort is already filling up and it actually starts in April, so it’s coming up here pretty soon. So if you’re listening to this episode on its launch date, registration for the cohort closes in just a few days, so you can actually find out more if you’re interested in either the multi-site or executive pastor cohorts, you can go to theunstuckgroup.com/cohorts, that’s theunstuckgroup.com/cohorts to find out more information there.
Okay. Well, in this series we’ve been diving into the staffing challenges that seem to contradict themselves, these staffing oxymorons things like being overstaffed and understaffed at the same time and having the both the right and the wrong people on your team, maintaining structures that don’t work for today or work for tomorrow.
Amy:
Yeah, that’s right. And we’re wrapping this series up today with that last one. And as you know, I have some passion around these topics. But especially this one, so I can’t wait to get into it.
Sean:
Well, let’s jump right in then. This last oxymoron happens when a church says something like, the structure we have isn’t right for where we’re going, but it also isn’t right for where we are today, it really hasn’t ever worked, but we just kind of keep working it.
Amy:
Oh, I have been part of teams and worked with teams that have been in that situation for a long time. So yeah, the tension we’re talking about today is that the senior leaders are sensing that the church is not staffed for today, right? Something feels off. Workloads are uneven, ever seen that on a team? You’re having lots of meetings after the meeting, but you also don’t feel staffed for tomorrow either, and maybe you’re going multi-site like you just mentioned, or you have no idea how that initiative will impact your staff roles or your staff structure, and then they feel like, how do we fix this? And where do we even begin when you’re in those seasons?
You know, I remember you just mentioned the cohort. And I think this was the one that that XP was in the one we kicked it off the fall of 2023 and we kicked off this year long XP cohort, and one church there sent four of their leaders to that cohort. All super sharp guys, and none of them were actually the xp and in some ways they all had parts of that role. So they all came together. And through our day and a half of content on site together, they were very engaged, asked lots of questions, but when we got to the structure part of our content, that’s where like they all got quiet and just leaned in. This was their source of stuckness. They lacked clarity organizationally around decision-making, who should be leading what. And like Christian, they were in one of these crazy seasons of growth, 35% growth I think at the time. By the way, I just met with this team yesterday. They grew 67% year over year last year. So all that to say, they had all these feelings and I actually did one-on-one interviews with each of them preparing for their staffing structure review. They all felt like so helpless. Like they didn’t know what it was that needed to change.
And when you’re in these seasons when you feel like your structure isn’t right for today or for what’s next, I hear questions like this, like, who gets to make this decision or that decision or in these seasons. Again, we don’t pause, so we’re just like, well, could this person or that role do this or and that, things that shouldn’t be put together, Sean, but they’re just kind of grabbing for capacity and ability. But that’s what we do when we don’t have the right structure. We have people who wear many hats. You’re asking the question we say is backwards. They’re actually going, well, who do we have and what can they do? And that’s how you’re making decisions around people and roles. And I think that’s great when a pandemic hits and we have to figure out who can do what when we can’t gather. But honestly, it’s disastrous. It’s a disastrous MO to stay in.
So another question I hear, do you think we should expand our leadership team or flip it? Should we add an executive layer above the leadership team on top of that leadership team? Does a three person senior leadership team make sense and they’re just trying to fix something that feels broke with a version 2.0 of just kind of tweaking what they currently have. Or it sounds like this, it seems like our structure is way too flat. Span of care is outta control, but how else could we be doing this? We don’t have the leaders. Or if we don’t have the leaders now, what’s gonna happen when we open that expanded auditorium or we launch a new location? So those are the types of things that I hear when I’m like, we’re not good for today or tomorrow.
Sean:
So just kind of jumping off that last one that you just said, it seems like leadership gaps are a big part of what the underlying issue is here, right?
Amy:
Oh, for sure. That is a root cause and you know, when there’s leadership gaps, especially if you marry that with this relentless pace of ministry life, it’s easier to start duct taping the organization together than it is to find and develop more leaders. But these leadership gaps become chasms the longer they get ignored. And here’s a few reasons why I think churches allow these gaps to occur to exist.
The first thing is some, they don’t sense when the cracks start to show. In other words, no one’s really paying attention to the signals that would tell them that they have a leadership gap. You know, some of the metrics that we encourage churches to track would help like percent budget spent on staff. If that’s starting to exceed 55%, you’re probably hiring roles that should be filled by volunteers. Or another metric is the attendee-to-staff ratio, which defines, we hire one full-time person for every blank number of people in attendance. You just take your FTEs, you divide that into your attendance to get it. If that number is trending below the benchmark of 75, you might be hiring too many doers and not enough equipping leaders on your team.
Two other volunteer metrics would reveal a crack. First, the percentage of adults and students serving, which we know right now is lower since coming out of Covid. I think it’s hovering around 35%. Well, that should be around 50 to 55%. And the second volunteer metric is just how many volunteer leaders you have engaged in the church. And the benchmark there is one volunteer leader for every 10 people that attend your church, the lower that percent serving number is, and the higher your volunteer ratio is, the more likely you have an unhealthy body of Christ at your church. Because believers are not using their gifts to build the body up as it’s described in first Corinthians 12. So those are some, they just, they may have a sense, but they didn’t pay attention to when those cracks started.
The second reason I think they let this occur is because they’re maybe just a little blind to leadership lids on their team, you know, for the senior pastor. The further they get removed from the day-to-day leadership of the team, the more they feel the tension of leadership gaps. But they don’t really have visibility to discern what the source of the tension is. And here’s what I know, many churches are not very disciplined in defining what they expect their leaders to do, or how to evaluate their leaders’ capacity, their leadership capacity. These are people in leadership roles. And honestly, with no definition of what we expect from our leaders and no evaluation, you’re blind to a growing problem that really could be your growth lid soon when we don’t have the adequate leadership gift center team.
And the third reason churches allow these gaps to occur is because usually they’re people people. But when you’re a people person, it’s not comfortable to accept the reality that some people who got you to the place you are now won’t be able to help you to lead you to the next. And the reality again is some of us are leaders of people, some of us are leader of leaders, and some of us are catalytic leaders of thousands. Your leadership though, is whatever God gave you, this is true for all of the leaders that you’ve got on your team too. They have a lid. You can develop it for sure. You can get better at leading, but there are lids. And the reality is being people people, we tend to start moving people around instead of getting some leaders in those positions.
Sean:
Yeah. That’s really good. Amy, I wanna talk just about what you mentioned in the data in some of the metrics for just a second. You know, it’s been interesting for us to kind of follow the growth pattern of churches. And even looking back to, I think it was August of 2022, where we saw churches start to rebound from Covid and growth to start to happen again. And ever since then, in our reporting, we’ve seen double digit percentage growth within churches. Now, at the time churches were overstaffed and coming out of the pandemic, that wasn’t surprising. We had experienced a decrease in attendance. And so that one to 75 attendance to FTE ratio was looking a little bit wonky at the time. Well, what’s happened over the last couple of years is that churches have grown, again, double digit percentage growth in every quarter that we’ve tracked since then.
But that staffing metric has not really improved. And in the most recent data we have some, the unstuck church report coming out here soon again, we found that churches are still staffing at about one full-time equivalency for every 53 attenders in their church. And so growth is happening, but it seems like what we’re seeing in the data is that we’re still continuing to hire to do some of those roles. That, like you mentioned, we’re most likely should be equipping volunteers and leaders for within our church. So Amy, how do churches who have the perfect staff structure for never make the right moves to get the right structure for today? That also puts them kind of on the right trajectory for where they want to go. Where they’re sensing God wants them to go for tomorrow.
Amy:
Yeah. And Sean, sharing that data, again just reminds me that we probably can’t fix this as fast as we want to. Now, you know, our process that we do is 90 days on site, but it’ll typically take a church coming outta the staff and structure anywhere between four and eight months to actually get restructured. So I know for those of you that are in this place, really, my punchline here is gonna be, get comfortable with slower than what you wanna do, but let’s make the right moves.
Sean:
That’s good.
Amy:
I would coach them to start first, if you haven’t done this, look at those key metrics that we just walked through. Before you start planning what your next structure is gonna look like, assess your starting point. Without any assessment, here’s the deal. You just might be working on the wrong problem and you’re already frustrated that you’ve been living in this and don’t have a plan for what’s next.
Next, I actually would assess your leaders and I would assess them against their title and the purpose of their role that you have them in. Meaning are they accomplishing what their role was created for? So start there. Make sure you have a clear win on what they were hiring them to do. And then I want you to assess what level leadership they’re having. So are they primarily a doer? Like where you see them busy and productive is in accomplishing tasks. Okay. That’s kind of the definition of a doer. By the way, we need lots of doers in our church. Those are the primary volunteer roles we have throughout our church where we engage people in the work. But assess their leadership. Look at their span of care, what they’re leading.
And I don’t wanna say the numbers because this is defined, we often call this a leader of tens, but sometimes we have people who have, are leading 60 people, but you know, are on their teams, but they’re still a leader of tens in how they behave. So I’m talking primarily about behaviors here. Or if I go to the next level, are they effectively leading other people? Meaning, do they recruit and build teams of volunteers? It’s no longer what they’re doing, but it’s what the team is doing. That’s someone who is really good at leading other people. Do they delegate tasks? Do they share workloads? Do they set expectations for team members? Are they managing conflict really well? Are they communicating well? Then the next level would be people who are leading other leaders. So not leading people, but leading leaders. Meaning these folks are really concerned about leading, caring for and raising up leaders. They manage the budget. They steward time, they steward money. They measure and evaluate for results. They deal with under performance. So I would just put them in one of those three categories, a doer, a leader of people or leaders of leaders. And then just step back. And I would take a look at that landscape. This is where you can probably discover, do we have enough of those higher level leader of leaders? That is often the leadership that’s missing at churches that I work with.
So that’s part of the assessment. And then from there, then I, that exercise, it’s funny you mentioned it cause it was on my mind for this podcast, but like with Christian, what we did with all of those XPs is the homework was create an org, double your attendance and now create an org chart. And how would you structure to lead a church that size? And Christian was great. I remember when he presented and then we worked through it and gave him some ideas about maybe what he was missing or what he needed.
So that’s probably in that process, I would draw it out. I would get some input from some of the people that are in your inner circle and that you would trust. But going through that exercise, it gives you just some guardrails isn’t the right thing, but handles to hold onto as you’re starting to create a new current version of your org chart. Because you’re gonna do it with that double the size of the org chart in mind because this next restructure should be pointing towards that so that we are building towards something now.
And then as you create those roles in that double size org chart, you have to think about what roles do we need that would really multiply our ministry. And we provide some data out there on how average churches spend their full-time equivalents. This would be a good time to pull that chart out, that resource out from our Unstuck Church Report because it’ll start to help you understand where are we overstaffed, where are we understaffed? We talked about that a few weeks ago. But this was really helpful for a church I worked with recently, just this fall. They had, they were overstaffed in their ministry area by four people, and they were understaffed by three and a half people in their weekend team. So it gives you a chance to start to rightsize this. And of course, we’ve said this for four weeks now you have to do this objectively. You have to do this without names of people in mind. But that would be kind of assess and plan before we actually start getting to the steps of how do we now build this out. But you need your plan before you start putting people into roles.
Sean:
That’s really good. Before we move on, I wanna take just a moment and think, this week’s podcast sponsor planning center Planning Center is an all-in-one software that helps you organize your ministries and care for your church. It has easy to use, efficient platforms of products where you can organize event details, create signup forms, schedule volunteers automatically and much more. You can actually get started for free today at planningcenter.com. That’s planningcenter.com.
Just to jump back to what you said, Amy, about kind of those levels of leadership. I really like some of the language you’ve used in the past, and this has helped me a lot. You said doers, do people who lead other people direct and then people who lead, other leaders develop. So that may help you even identify is this a doer? Is it a director or is it a developer? And I think that language just brings clarification to those levels of leadership that we see in people.
Amy, practically speaking, as leaders approach this, as pastors approach this process, is there a best order to go in? Do you need to go through the whole process of getting structure right for today and then work out the structure for where you’re going? Or are there ways you that you’d recommend getting to kind of version one and a half or version 2.0 all at once?
Amy:
Well I think if you’ve got the capacity, double your org chart first, get that destination one kind of drawn out so you’ve got an idea of where you’re heading. You don’t have to get every position correct. But you should get the top level of leadership correct. That’s the most important level. Because you have to have the leader first and then the leader, you’ll want their input, how they build out their team. So I think that’s best practice to do that first. That way you can figure out what phases you’re gonna work through next with the appropriate love and care built into the timeframe.
So I’m working with the church right now in the Atlanta area and they were very under, they are very understaffed and they’re growing quite fast. And this is a stressor for the lead pastor because he’s got three really good leaders, but he probably needs six really good leaders. But I started working with him several months ago and he is still here, what, four months later. He’s still in the hiring process, but he’s taken his time once he figured out what leaders are we heading towards, you know, tied in with their multiplication or their, how they’re growing, how they plan to address the growth at their church. So this is the slow time. If you are short on leaders, taking the time to find the right leaders to get on the team is where you should focus your efforts once you get that destination kind of figured out. And then how I’m coaching him is as we get these leaders on board, then we can have the next conversations about those downlines and the things that need to happen. And so I don’t know how he’s doing it, but you know, we’ve been working together for several months. I’ve been coaching him to set aside that time to work on this piece. And to be prayerful about it and to start fishing and to look into his congregation and people who have really, I’m having him just look for people who have leadership gifts. Not necessarily ministry experience because those are some of the things that we can train on, we can go back to school on. But when you’re shy of leadership gifts, sometimes you need to infuse them into your team.
Sean:
That’s good. Well, let’s kind of just leave our listeners today with a clear next step to take. What would you say is top priority for church leaders that find themselves in this situation with their structure?
Amy:
The first is that just honest assessment of the leadership capacity on your team and identifying where you have some key leadership gaps. That’s going to be your friend. Facts are your friends. We need to understand those top issues so we solve the right problem. And then second, I would just say consider hiring someone from outside your team to help you and guide you through this process. Again, I’d say the church all the time, this relentless pace and it’s really relentless when you’re understaffed or you’re under led, people that you can delegate responsibilities too. So on the other side of this, once you have the right leaders, where you’ll see it start to flourish is you can actually get that flywheel of leadership development starting to hum, which is what you need for the long term. You can’t, there’s no silver bullet for it. Finding great leaders who love Jesus, that’s a little bit of the silver bullet to build your team in these times of panic. But then I would consider outside help to guide you through a process like this so that someone else can help do the thinking for you so you can really maximize the little bit of time you do have to invest in this process.
Sean:
That’s good. And I would say for the pastors that we’ve worked with, you know, and especially for churches in this season of growth, these people problems can be the thing that gets you stuck. They can be so frustrating. And for the pastors we’ve worked with, when they get on the other side of some of these people challenges, they feel such a weight lifted. And that then they can really focus on ministry strategy on the other side of that. So don’t wait too long to navigate through and find solutions to some of these structure and people challenges within your church.
Amy, before we wrap up too, I did wanna mention that churches can actually go through and do the full data analysis with some of the data that you’re talking about, through our learning hub. And if you just navigate to our website, theunstuckgroup.com, our learning hub, there’s a small fee associated with it, but you can go there and enter in your own data and get a report on what some of those key metrics are telling you about your church as well.
Alright. Amy, before we wrap up, do you have any final thoughts for today and for this series as a whole?
Amy:
I think my final thought, if you really feel like you don’t have the right structure for today, nor do you have the right structure for tomorrow, make it an initiative to work through this season. Don’t live in it anymore. I’ve been close to some of these churches that have just kept adding leadership team levels, but they were, it was just like, they didn’t wanna remove anyone from any meeting. They didn’t want them to feel devalued. Or they’ve kept legacy staff in roles that they weren’t really fulfilling anymore and they never really found true traction until they addressed the structure challenges that they had. So as hard as it is to navigate through some of this, I would just encourage you to make it a top initiative for you this year to work through, set some goals, give it some energy, because like you were just saying, Sean, when you get the people side of this fixed ministry gets fun again and results start to trend where you need them to trend.
And going back to first Corinthians 12, you get a body that really gets engaged in their church. And we know this when people are engaged in their church, they’re owners in it, they invite people. And so all of these things just start to align and they start to move forward. So if this is your challenge, you can do this. We do this all the time. We can even connect you with some churches who have made progress if you need to hear their stories. But this is a game changer in ministry life. So if it’s the problem that you’ve been really leaning in on, take some of these next steps we’ve been talking about.
Sean:
That’s good. Well, we hope you’ve enjoyed this series on staffing oxymorons as much as we have. We’ve enjoyed it. Amy, we’ve had two great series to kick off the year, The ‘90s Called and now Staffing Oxymorons. At least you and I have enjoyed it. And then next week, we have our episode on the first quarter’s Unstuck Church Report. We’re looking forward to that as well. We actually went even deeper in our recent Building a Staffing Master Plan webinar that we did last week. So, if you missed it, you can still catch a replay of that in the next few weeks on our YouTube channel. You can sign up to subscribe for our weekly show notes as well in an email that comes out every Wednesday. Sign up for that; you’ll be on the list. We’ll share the staffing master plan replay with our podcast subscribers in the coming weeks too. You can sign up for that list specifically at theunstuckgroup.com/podcast. And if after listening to the series you’re thinking that you could use some outside support, we’d love to help position your team to do ministry at its highest potential. And you can learn more about our staffing and structure review process at theunstuckgroup.com. Next week, we’re back with another episode. So until then, have a great week.
