Growing Church Problems (Part 2)
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As churches grow, one of their biggest challenges is finding the right people to add to their team.
On paper it may look like they have enough staff….but often, they find themselves with a shortage of strategic leaders on their team.
We’re continuing our series on “Growing Church Problems” with an important topic that impacts every expanding ministry: structure and finding the right staff.
In this episode, Sean and I talk about the structural pain points of growing churches, the tensions around staffing, and practical next steps to take to address these challenges.
Plus, I got to sit down with Jonathan Smith, lead pastor of OneChurch.to in Toronto, and one of the newest members of our consulting team. He shares some best practices for hiring and promoting from within the congregation that he and his team have identified.
If people trust you, it's because people who held these keys before you were trustworthy. [episode 422] #unstuckchurch Share on X Use your staff dollars primarily to invest in strategic ministry leaders who are great at engaging the body in ministry. [episode 422] #unstuckchurch Share on X We wanna see if they’re humble learners. They’re always better than flashy doers because they’re committed to long-term growth. [episode 422] #unstuckchurch Share on X We love volunteers being our primary recruiters. [episode 422] #unstuckchurch Share on X
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Transcript
Sean:
Well, welcome to the Unstuck Church podcast. I’m Sean here with Amy Anderson, and today we’re continuing our series on growing church problems with an important topic that impacts every expanding and growing ministry: structure and finding the right staff.
Amy:
Yeah, that’s right, Sean. You know, as churches grow, one of their biggest challenges is finding the right people to add to their team. And on paper it might look like churches have enough staff, but they often find themselves with a shortage of strategic leaders on the team. And with the current landscape, finding the right people for roles like in next gen, worship communications, it can just be particularly challenging right now.
Sean:
Yeah, I hear that every week from churches. Finding staff, finding good leaders is difficult. Well, later in the episode, we’re also excited to have Jonathan Smith, lead pastor of One Church.to in Toronto, join us. He’s one of the members of our consulting team, and he and his team have identified just really some of the best practices for hiring and promoting from within the congregation, and we think you’re gonna find that really helpful.
Before we go there though, let me use this opportunity to remind you church leaders that we are not too far away from Christmas. And as the Christmas season represents so many great things for churches, it is also their biggest fundraising opportunity of the year. Church attendance typically increases and so does people’s generosity. And our friends over at Donorbox Live Kiosk have a solution that makes it easier for people to give. Fewer people are carrying cash nowadays, of course, and that’s no problem for Live Kiosk. People can actually tap, swipe, or use their phone to donate instantly. You can capture their contact information. You can even send tax receipts and set up reoccurring gifts through the live kiosk. You can try live kiosk for free at your church by going to donorbox.org/unstuckpodcast. That’s donorbox.org/unstuckpodcast.
Alright, so let’s get the conversation started. Amy, you’ve worked quite literally with hundreds of churches that are experiencing growth. What are some of the tensions that develop around structure and hiring specifically?
Amy:
Yeah. When it comes to structure, you know, rapid growth creates specific pain points that become very hard to ignore. First just span of care for your leadership team. It gets stretched too thin. You’re seeing leaders drowning with like eight to 10 direct reports when, you know, we would say best practices would keep that under five or six people.
Sean:
Right.
Amy:
So span of care, it’s kind of like the good leaders just get more and more and more. Second, we see a few very talented leaders, often ones who have been on the team for a long time and have developed trust with the lead pastor, they’re just carrying so much of the leadership load. So their ministry lanes are often fuzzy because as each of them is covering what they know how to do best, they’re kind of sharing pieces of different ministry lanes. So the structure gets tangled and a few people are carrying just way too much.
I was talking with a church this week that has been part of the Unstuck tribe for many years now. They’re growing, they have multiple locations, and they jumped on a call with me just to talk through some of the current staffing challenges. And this point was their ongoing challenge. There are three of them in leadership and because of their abilities, their longevity on the team, and just their get it factor when it comes to the culture at the church, they’ve continued to carry more than they can and more than they should.
And lastly, growth-minded lead pastors who know that they should be focusing on what only they can do. I just see this pain point that they are still just stuck in handling day-to-day operations and fires because they haven’t hired the executive leadership around them yet to manage those functions. And let’s face it, when you’re growing and you know, again, every Sunday it’s here, it’s just so hard to get out of that. And so you’re just trying to leverage whatever is near you to keep everything moving, but it’s just a stuck cycle.
Sean:
Yeah. That’s the trend I’ve seen too. A lot of pastors just kind of holding onto things. I think because the ministry is moving so quickly. And they haven’t, and sometimes some of those pastors are actually good at some of those organizational type leadership and they enjoy doing that, but by not giving that away, it doesn’t allow them to fully be the lead pastor. And that’s the challenge with it.
Amy:
And they know where they wanna go. They know what they should be working on. Again, it’s just we’re all like going arm in arm trying to keep things moving.
Sean:
Right. Right. What about the people side? What growth related tensions typically emerge just around staffing?
Amy:
Yeah. Well, I’d say on the staffing side, growing churches face, again, several distinct challenges. First, everyone wants more staff. As the church grows, it begins to expose the lack of leadership capacity with staff ministry leaders. So as these teams are serving larger ministries, the first instinct is just to wanna hire more people. And it’s not always the case, but often what I see is the staff just have too many people doing ministry instead of leading it. So that gets exposed in these high growth times. Now, I will say sometimes you do need more staff. It’s important though, as we say here all the time on the podcast, that you use your staff dollars primarily to invest in strategic ministry leaders who are great at engaging the body and ministry. This type of leader is an investment. You probably have to pay a little bit more for them, but they know how to multiply themselves.
So that’s a key thing there. The second staffing challenge is that hiring is reactionary. We are plugging holes and sort of Lego-ing positions onto our team. We’re hiring under this banner of urgent instead of strategic. And when we finally get our heads above the waterline, we have an organization that is very unorganized. Another challenge and one not talked about as much, but teams can begin playing musical chairs with underperforming staff during these seasons, you know, instead of having the necessary performance conversations we’re just moving them around. It’s like, we’re just too busy to deal with underperforming team members, so we move them around in these seasons or just kind of look the other way. And Sean, just one more that I’ve been seeing with some of the churches I’m serving because the candidate landscape is fairly dry right now. Growing churches start exploring hiring the talented spouses of current staff. And while it can work, it also has some significant downsides. So those are the things that come to mind.
Sean:
A lot of pastors listening are nodding along in their cars and at their desks right now as they listen to all of that. And you have to keep reminding yourself that growth is good. These are good problems to be solving. So let’s shift over to some of the solutions. What are a few practical steps that church leaders can take just to address the structural and staffing challenges?
Amy:
Yeah. Well, one exercise we often walk growing churches through is what we call doubling the size and rebuilding your structure. We ask them to imagine their church twice its current size, and design the ideal structure for that future reality. So in essence, now you gotta carve out some time to do this. We have to carve out some time to think about this ministry. And that’s one of the exercises I would put your energy on. In essence, this gives them a roadmap as they make decisions today related to staffing. How does this position align with our destination as people are making staffing requests. It also gives them like a heads up on what leadership roles they need in 18 to 24 months, you know, that they could be praying about now and beginning to identify people who have potential to fill them. It just gives them a radar up to kind of proactively prepare for the needed roles in their future. In other words, building out the future structure now helps leaders identify the gaps between their current structure and what they’re gonna need as they grow, allowing them to be much more strategic about which roles to prioritize. Another practical step is the discipline to look within our congregation for future staff leaders. There are often talented people in our worship centers who would love to be a part of the mission in a vocational capacity. I think too often we say no for people thinking we can’t pay them enough. But don’t say no for them. Don’t say no for them. Instead, ask the question regularly, like, around your senior leadership table, who are the potential future staff leaders in our church? Make a list, revisit it regularly.
Pray over that list, and then consider inviting those people. This is just an example, but to be on the advisory teams for their respective senior leadership team members. So, you know, in my case for the weekend, I’d get an advisory team around me for the discipleship pastor, get an advisory team around, just a place to get up close with these potential future leaders. So with these advisory teams, I think they attract the right kind of people because remember, people with a leadership gifting want to help pastors and ministry leaders solve problems. So invite them around the table to do just that. It might become your internal pathway to a staff leadership role. So having said all that, the key is having an intentional strategy for relational development and fishing in your own congregation, but doing it the right way, which is exactly what our guest today, Jonathan, will help us understand.
Sean:
Yeah. As I mentioned a few minutes ago, Amy sat down with one of our ministry consultants, Jonathan Smith, to talk about some of the best practices for hiring from within your church. Jonathan is the lead pastor of One Church in Toronto, Ontario, up in the great country of Canada. And he has some great perspectives when it comes to hiring internally. So here’s Amy’s conversation with Jonathan.
Amy:
Well, Jonathan, thank you so much for joining us all the way from Canada this morning. Nice to talk with you.
Jonathan:
Glad to be here, Amy.
Amy:
Well, first, just tell our listeners a little bit about yourself, about your church, and then how you came to serve on the Unstuck team.
Jonathan:
Yeah. Well, I’ve been pastoring for 33 years, all in Canada, Halifax, Montreal, now Toronto. One Church.to is the church I lead, 75 nationalities, five generations. Fantastic community of people. And actually, I came to work with the Unstuck Group because I was a client first at the Unstuck Group, and I experienced their processes and structure, and it led to such health in our community and ongoing conversations. Lo and behold, I have the opportunity now to serve churches to help them get unstuck. And I believe in what The Unstuck Group is doing, happy to serve larger communities and churches in both the US and Canada.
Amy:
Well, and as you’ve been onboarding, we’ve been able to spend some time together out in the field. And I’ve learned a couple of language differences between us. See if this is right. So the last letter of my alphabet is Z, but the last letter of your alphabet is zed, is that correct?
Jonathan:
Zed, yeah. Yeah. So Gen zed, not Gen Z.
Amy:
And I call it the Unstuck process. And you call it the unstuck process.
Jonathan:
Process. Yeah. Yeah, it’s true. Feel free to correct me at any point in time.
Amy:
Well, I get teased all the time when I’m out and about because apparently I have a Minnesota accent. Yeah, you betcha. But you definitely have a Canadian one, which I love to listen to.
Jonathan:
It’s so funny. Geographically, you’re north of me. Toronto is south of you. It’s wild how Canada dips down into the US.
Amy:
Yeah. You’re kind of by Niagara Falls if I know geography.
Jonathan:
Yeah. Just north of there. That’s right.
Amy:
Well, you shared a fantastic article with us that you wrote about the best practices that you’ve identified for hiring from within your own congregation. And I’d love to just explore a few of those. In the article you advise pastors to quote, “Start with the end in mind.” What do you mean by that in the context of hiring from within? And maybe how should church leaders frame conversations with internal candidates to set, I guess, proper expectations from the beginning?
Jonathan:
Yeah. I think we just start by acknowledging that every role has an ending. And I think we forget that leadership is temporary. And we act and think as if this is gonna go on forever. And we just kind of acknowledge, we say to our staff all the time, we can’t promise you lifelong employment. But we can promise you lifelong employability because we are committed to developing you so you don’t get stunted that you always have a next, but we know that it’s better to have an awkward conversation now than a painful one later. So we’re really committed to talking about that upfront.
So from the get go, we say to anyone we’re hiring from within, what happens when this inevitably will happen? How are we gonna handle it when you decide, maybe there’s another chapter for you elsewhere. Or what if we are the initiators of that conversation and we feel there’s another opportunity, or maybe this has run its course. So we think having that conversation upfront, making a plan upfront, because talking about endings before beginnings actually helps you. It’s not insurance against something going sideways, but it gives you a conversation you can point back to. And even some shared things we agreed to upfront.
And part of that conversation is, I have with every new employee, external or internal, I call it the key conversation. And I take the keys of the church and they represent power and authority and position, and I literally place it in their hands. And I tell them, listen, if people trust you, it’s because people who held these keys before you were trustworthy. So make sure whatever your tenure is gonna be here, that you contribute, that when these keys go to somebody else, they get, they garner all that trust too. And then I let them know that it’s natural. The longer we’re in a role, the more we begin to hold on to those keys tightly. And it’s really painful when God taps you on the shoulder and says no and has to force them out. But if you leave your hand open when God taps you on the shoulder, whether it’s of your initiative or the organizations and your keys are removed, your hands wide open for whatever’s next. And I’ve seen God faithfully fill those hands with opportunities when people handle themselves well, both at beginnings and endings.
So we’d rather talk about exits before entrances because it leads to less disappointments over time. And like I said, no guarantees that things are, everyone’s gonna handle everything well, but it certainly has given us conversations we can reach back to and point to.
Amy:
Yeah. And so good, especially with the internal hires, it kind of reminded me when I used to lead the artists at our church, I would tell people who were joining the worship team, I would say at some point, this will come to an end. And I say, unfortunately, those of us on the platform from a worship perspective have a shorter lifecycle than say some really gifted teachers. And I always tell them, it’s so much more fun for you to figure out when your season’s coming to an end than for me to have to tell you or somebody else. So just pay attention to it. Pay attention to when God’s growing something new in you. And I tell my story, I just saw leadership growing, so I kind of, you know, made my exit before anyone had to tap me on the shoulder. So just, it’s a good concept to lead with. Let me ask you another question. What’s your process for identifying potential staff members within your congregation when you don’t have like a ready bench of volunteers?
Jonathan:
Well, my process is that if you don’t have a bench, you need to build one. And I think this requires discipline. This is really hard to do because you’re looking for staff when you don’t need staff. So when you need staff, you already have eyes on the staff. And so whether it’s external candidates or certainly internal ones, we create pools or lists, a bench list. And we’ve taught our team keep your eyes open. And we are looking for certain things from those, especially as we’re hiring from within because I think we can miss it more often from hiring from within, because I think we can confuse faithfulness, who doesn’t love faithfulness in church world, with leadership capacity. And they’re just not always the same factor.
I’d love to say, I wanna see faithfulness in everyone, but we often have found that we’ve made mistakes. We’ve hired doers. We’ve hired doers that as the organization, this is what caused staff sprawl in our budget sprawl. Even in our organization, that becomes very difficult as you move forward. So now we’re really focused on hiring recruiters or equippers. And when we identify them, whether we’ve put them through the working genius, make sure they’re in the right seat, we always give them trial projects, things that can begin to help. We wanna see if they’re humble. We wanna see if they’re humble learners. They’re always better than flashy doers because they’re committed to long-term growth.
And one of the secrets, I think the way we develop, why we’ve been successful at it, I think is our volunteer and serve processes. They reveal a lot of data on potential internal hires. Like you bring up the music teams, that’s a great example. It’s really hard to get on a stage at One Church.ro. So we have lots of vocalists and musicians that join the church, and they wanna go through our process. Well, there’s typical things that a lot of churches do auditions, but our team has built a whole process that if you’re gonna be on a stage, you gotta first be a stage hand. And so there you have vocalists moving chairs, and you have musicians on cameras or advancing the lyrics on our screens.
And sometimes that goes for weeks. That’s part of training. You’re learning our culture, you’re learning our community, you’re learning our teams. But what it does is eliminate all the divas, anyone who needs a mic before. So we elevate the faithfulness and the humility that we’re ready. No divas, no stars on our stage. And we can automatically see those people that have that potential, not just for faithfulness and character that helps us. We get those data points from it, but often they have a halo effect. These people that are key to hiring, they drag in other people into the areas that they’re serving, and we notice that. We love volunteers being our primary recruiters, and it gives us a little eyes on whether or not they’re gonna do that as a staff member. So build the bench first.
Amy:
That’s really good. You emphasize not hiring volunteers, but hiring equippers. Jonathan, how do you assess whether someone has the capacity to multiply themselves versus just being good at doing a task? How do you process that?
Jonathan:
Yeah. I think influence is a big thing. I think we get a chance to see them in operation often, and equippers build people who do the work, volunteers do the work. So we’re looking for people that are really looking to help other people be the stars. Other people do the work. And so on our staff team, all of our, we call them responsibility descriptions at our church. All of them have, as on their first line, is an equip first mentality. We wanna signal at every level in our organization. I think I’ve stolen this from you, Amy, I don’t know who said it originally, but this idea, we don’t reward you for what you do. We reward you for what you give away. I think I heard you share that at one of the sites we’re at.
Amy:
Yeah. It’s actually from our founder Tony Morgan, when he was working at Granger Church, and he hired my good friend Kim Meyer, and those were his words to her. Like, you’re amazing. That’s why we hired you. You have done so many amazing things, but just know going forward, we will praise you for what you give away now, not what you do. Which is just really clear, isn’t it?
Jonathan:
It is. And so we share that at every level of our lead on our staff team. I grabbed that from you and it just reinforces what we’re trying to say. But in our interviewing process, whether we’re checking out references, or we’re interviewing the candidates, we ask them, who have you developed? We don’t ask them, what have you done? Because we’re even signaling in the recruitment process what we value most. And we wanna make sure that we don’t just fill out task driven roles, but we’re really attracting equippers and recruiters.
Amy:
That’s great. How do you maintain this like, rigorous hiring process for internal candidates without, I guess, making them feel like their years of faithful service aren’t valued?
Jonathan:
Yeah. We treat all internal hires like external ones. We don’t take any shortcuts around them. We want to treat them with the same dignity, and we want to court them the same way we would someone on the outside. I think the danger, anyone hiring from the inside has a leg up because we have familiarity. And that’s precisely also the danger is that we have familiarity, and we’ve determined that familiarity doesn’t determine fit. It certainly does help us understand who we’re dealing with. And so what we do is we try to take pressure off, and especially anyone from the church family. We want this to be a healthy process. Even if we don’t land on them, we want them to still love us.
And so we call them, even external candidates. We always say, are you open to some exploratory conversations? No decisions being made. We just trying to see if there’s enough alignment, enough nodding in the same direction that we wanna honor them in this process, but we wanna honor the church. So there’s an aspect of us just exploring. There’s no pressure, and we make it very clear. So there’s a lot of initial conversations that look nothing like an interview. But they’re just exploring and testing, I guess it’s a little bit like dating. You’re just putting yourself out there a little bit to see if there’s enough alignment that we could maybe take this to a next step that we could actually proceed with that.
Amy:
It feels a little safer, doesn’t it? It doesn’t feel like you’re losing as much if it doesn’t continue, if you don’t continue down the path together.
Jonathan:
And I think the staff, we have to remind, because I don’t do all the hiring, our staff hire at different levels, is that the process protects everyone. And so when we make sure that internal and external candidates go through the same process, it just protects everyone. It protects the person in the process, but it protects the church. I think familiarity certainly is so tempting to take shortcuts. And I think we wanna honor them because rigor is respect. And we wanna respect them by making sure our process is rigorous as it should be. It provides clarity to them.
Amy:
Yeah. And when it doesn’t go well, I mean, you’re kicking yourself like, why didn’t we spend more time in the getting to know one another? You know, there’s another quote from Tony and his books, Simply Strategic Stuff. He said, you need to hire slow and fire fast. And I think that’s because when it doesn’t work out, it can be so painful, especially in a church setting. Well, we are in this series where we’re talking about some of the pain points when you’re growing fast, when a church is growing fast. And I was talking earlier in the podcast, like, when a church is growing quickly, there’s often this pressure to fill positions immediately. So I’m curious, what advice would you give pastors who just feel rushed to make staffing decisions?
Jonathan:
I feel you. I feel like this is the number one conversation lead pastors often have is it’s always around staffing. And in an era where denominational schools and stuff, there’s just not a plethora out there. And the need just keeps growing. Especially if you’re a growing church. If you’re an Unstuck church, you probably are looking always for talent to add. And so all I’d say is hire for mission, never for relief. If when you take that shortcut to just jump in and the temptation’s so great, especially if you feel like your team is drowning and you want to jump in and have a quick fix, but pressure is not permission to skip the process for us.
So if we need to stop doing some things to reallocate staff to create space, if we need to do a temporary hire, and we’ve done this many times knowing this person is not the permanent fit, communicating it clearly, we have one caveat with that. We don’t do temporary hires of galvanizers because in our ecosystem, I’m a galvanizer, so I’m speaking to me, you do a temporary hire and before you know it, they’re there for two, three months and they know all the staff and families and everyone. And then when we have to say, hey, we now we’re looking to fill you with a permanent person. Well, there’s this grief that happens with galvanizers.
So we’re careful when we do the temporary positioning of people, but we will often create space that we don’t feel under the gun. And part of our process is that even in the hiring process, if it’s on my team, on my staff, I’m not the principal hirer, then I’m the chemistry check for sure. But like, I want it too desperately and often pastors aren’t great hires because we get redemptive in the hiring process. And I think it was Andy Stanley or someone who said, hire a minister, not a ministry. And I’ve hired some ministries along the way, people that I felt like, I can redeem this, I can turn this around. Having some good voices that won’t benefit from them adding the team, really helps you to discern that process. So I think slowing things down, just reminding yourself, you’re not hiring, don’t under pressure. Don’t cut any circles or cut the process short, but hire for mission, not relief.
Amy:
Yeah. You know, as you were talking about this, I really appreciated your vantage point about slow down and maybe you have to stop doing a few things for a season. I remember when I first heard Dave Ramsey’s teaching in finance, Financial Peace University, and you know, so much of the emphasis when you’re in debt is to pay down debt, get rid of expenses, all this stuff, it’s all tightening the belt, tightening the belt, and then he throws out, or make some more money.
And I thought, what a great option for people that are heavy in debt. Like, instead of just feeling like you have to cut everything out, what if you actually earned more? And you kind of did the flip of that, like if we are understaffed, if we are growing fast, we just might need to get more focused and prune a few things for a season so that we don’t burn out the staff we have and give ourself a little bit of capacity to do the hiring. So that was a good perspective. Last one of our team, oh, go ahead. You go ahead.
Jonathan:
I was just gonna say, one of our teams is short staffed right now, and we just had a long series of conversations of stuff we were gonna stop doing in the short term and how we’re gonna borrow staff for certain moments to help create space. So we don’t get ourselves in a place where we have to hire critically fast. We want to be so intentional because every new hire sets culture. And we wanna make sure that we are helping disciple culture.
Amy:
Yeah. One of the things that I’ve seen with churches, and I’m sure you’ve seen this too, is that they’re starting to hire family members. And, you know, some churches just have a few spouses, like maybe the lead pastor’s spouse is on the team, or you’ve got, I’m working with one church now, and they’ve got someone kind of in a ministry role and one in a communications role. And it’s funny when people ask me like, how much nepotism is healthy? And I said, not more than what you have right now, but I think it’s because I see the outcomes when things go south. So what specific safeguards do you recommend Jonathan, when hiring family members of existing staff? And then how do you mitigate like the inherent challenges that can come with that?
Jonathan:
Yeah, I think acknowledging it, the fact that you voice that and that this is a question is powerful. I would never say that you shouldn’t hire family members, but I think you need to be very cognizant of the fact that you are putting a weight on your team, even if these are wonderful people that know how to keep the lines clean and the boundaries clean. It is a weight on your team. And I think if you are hiring family members, you need to be completely out of the process. You need to discover when they discover whether they’re hired or you’ve moved in a different direction. And I think some of that comes from the fact that there’s silent dynamics at work, even with the very best people. And I think about a couple that I hired years ago, and they were the best people. And I remember I had to deal with a performance issue with one of them, and I was the whole time thinking of both of them.
Amy:
Of course you were.
Jonathan:
And the impact and what this would do, and true to form, they handled themselves fantastically, but here’s the thing, I carried extra, extra weight because of that. And not every family member is capable of handling it as well as they did. I think it’s being aware that this does come with extra weight. So I think it’s those advanced conversations. Again, what if this doesn’t work out? What if your direct management, like we have some protocols around our place. If you’re related, you can’t be on the same team. You can’t be in the Next Gen area. If your families in the next gen area, you can’t be. So we move them apart and then there’s no conversations with their direct leads about them, their performance or their job.
And I think anytime a spouse gets involved or a parent gets involved with a child that’s been hired, they’re crossing a line that’s very hard to retreat back from. Because you’re telling your staff that you’re willing to breach these lines on certain occasions. That creates a lack of safety for a team. I think it’s just calling out what it is. Having those conversations, how are we gonna handle feedback and acknowledging that, you know, there’s some awkward moments with this and there’s additional weight that comes.
I think too, I don’t think there’d be anyone in the Unstuck podcast listening to this would be like this, but I have seen people who’ve hired family to develop their family. You don’t hire people onto a team to develop them, not your family. You hire them to bring value to this organization, to bring value to this church, and they may be the right person, but if you’re trying to develop your kid to be mature or you’re trying to help your spouse get a career start, that’s a wrong catalyst or wrong motivation. And I think that’s when nepotism really becomes something that gets fueled even at the congregation level, because people know when someone’s getting hired that really, they didn’t have the chops for the role.
Amy:
Yeah. I often used to talk about our platform, like the platform is a place to use your gifts, not develop them. Now development will happen, but I think that’s true in a lot of our larger ministry roles. It’s not primarily a place to be developed. It’s a place to hire someone very competent. And then of course development will happen. And I get this whole hiring family members, I mean, good people are usually married to really good people.
Jonathan:
It’s true.
Amy:
And there can be such an upside to that. But again, the caution would be when things get messy, if things get messy, you often will lose both of them. And there’s more strings attached to that. And just one add—not just family members, like of the staff, but I worked with one church where they had board members who had family on staff. And in some ways that was even a little messier.
Jonathan:
Yeah. You can’t serve on our board level and have family on staff being compensated in our ecosystem. And that’s purely for conflict of interest. And I think that’s the challenge around it is, it’s fraught with problems, but it can be good. Like, my wife has the same theological training I do, but we made a decision a long time ago, and this was her conclusion, not mine, but she just felt like we shouldn’t work on the same team. I know that’s not for everyone that’s listening, but we felt like it would be a burden for the people that we worked alongside of. And so she found a different path. Now that’s not for everybody, but that was for us.
Amy:
Yeah. Well, Jonathan, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom and experience with our listeners today. Really appreciate it.
Jonathan:
Thanks, Amy. Glad to be with you.
Sean:
Amy, I love Jonathan’s perspective and just his leadership knowledge. This is such a great conversation that you had with him. And I can see why this topic of hiring from within is so critical for growing churches.
Amy:
Yeah. I love that Jonathan shared what he shared about starting with the end in mind and having those upfront conversations about what happens if the role doesn’t work out. That’s just smart, wise stewardship and setting everything up well. And I loved his point that we can’t promise lifelong employment, but we can commit to lifelong employability. That’s just such a standout quote. I think that balances both care for the person and stewardship of the mission. I think it’s why there’s so much church hurt out there is because we get in a role and we actually think we’re gonna be there forever. And so I just think, again, it’s a good thing to get in people’s mind that we’re gonna develop you, we’re committed to lifelong employability, but we’re all kind of in temporary positions.
The third thing that stood out to me, Sean, was that churches can immediately apply, I think his advice to treat internal hires like external ones. Going through the full process, using assessments and having those key conversations about trust and expectations. You know, after we stop recording, Sean, just one thing that he said off recording was that for internal hires, people from their congregation, he points out in the position that they would be moving from a family structure to an accountability structure. Again, these are people in our church who now would become a part of the staff. You’re gonna be moving from a family structure to an accountability structure. When you go to the church service, you’re in the family structure. But when you work at the church, you have a list to do. There’s accountability, there’s performance reviews. By the way, conflict is normal. Pastors are human. And again, I think that’s just some great language to set up people for the right expectations as they come onto the team at their church.
Sean:
I love that. Yeah. That’s some good wisdom. All right, Amy. As we wrap up today, anything else you wanna leave listeners with?
Amy:
Yeah, I would just remember that the goal isn’t just to fill positions, it’s to build a team that can multiply your impact. And I think if we get too focused on just solving immediate challenges, the ones that are right in front of us, we make moves that we have to undo later. And multiple restructures, for example, in a short period of time, can just have some downsides on the people you’re leading and on the church.
And lastly, for those of you listening, if this is a key challenge for you, I would just encourage you to visit theunstuckgroup.com and learn how our staffing and structure review works. You know, just a quick drive by, we typically are working with a senior leadership team, senior pastor, executive pastor for, I don’t know, 60 to 90 days. And when we come on site, we’re gonna be evaluating staff; we’re gonna be evaluating the leadership capacity on your team. We’re gonna build out that future structure and then step it back so you can have clarity on what your next steps would be.
I think a lot of pastors, the reason they really enjoy the experience is, number one, just there’s experience on our team. We’ve worked with a lot of churches, but it’s also, it brings clarity on the people side because we’re just so close to our teams. And so having an external perspective, someone to weigh in on the team, on the roles, on the future structure, just shortcuts and maximizes their time by bringing someone in to help. So if that’s you, just consider it. We do this all the time and we’d love to help your church if you’re feeling stuck on the staffing side due to growth.
Sean:
That’s good. That’s a great synopsis, Amy. I hear from pastors all the time who have been through that already, that it was so helpful to make people decisions, not just based on gut level information but to have an outsider, well-informed, we even have data to look at. So that’s very helpful for them. Well, thanks for tuning in today and next week we’re gonna be back with episode three of this series. So we hope you’ll join us again. And until then, have a great week.
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