Too Big to Run on Relationships: Getting Your Structure Right as a Large Church (Part 2)
Most churches build structure without ever naming what they’re structuring around.
Pastors want good structure for really good reasons. They want communication to work. They want to find out about problems before their crisis. They want to know nothing’s falling through the cracks. And honestly, most of them want their people cared for; they don’t want anybody carrying more than they should.
Those are pastoral instincts—great instincts. But here’s where it can go wrong.
A church feels the organizational pain, and they go straight to adjusting the org chart. They restructure without ever answering the question the structure was supposed to serve.
In this episode, Jonathan and I talk about a key part of structuring your church staff: who owns what?
- Getting the SLT Right
- Responsibility vs. Accountability
- Structure to the Strategy, Not to the History
The pressure a staff team feels to add more staff is often the result of running a menu-driven church. [episode 464] #unstuckchurch Share on X As you scale, you want fewer people who need a stage and more who are willing to grab the mop. [episode 464] #unstuckchurch Share on X Don’t structure the church for the church you have today. Structure the church for the church you’re becoming. [episode 464] #unstuckchurch Share on X
This Episode Is Brought to You By Tyndale House.
If Jesus walked into your church right now, would people recognize him? We’ve created a personalized Savior who exists primarily to meet our needs, bless our lives, and guarantee our spots in heaven.
But here’s the problem. That Jesus would be unrecognizable.
In the book The Missing Messiah, bestselling authors Kyle Idleman and Mark More will help your church rediscover the Jesus based on Scripture, not on culture. Plus, check out the six-session companion study guide with free access to streaming videos.
Learn more at missingmessiah.com.
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Transcript
Sean:
Well, welcome to the Unstuck Church Podcast. I’m Sean here again with Jonathan Smith, lead pastor of One Church.to in Toronto, Canada. We are in week two of our series, Too Big to Run on Relationships, and the premise of this whole series is that somewhere north of a thousand in attendance, the way that you’ve led stops kind of scaling. You know, relationships in your church, they still matter, but they can’t be the operating system for your church staff team anymore.
Last week, we started where most churches start. Are we overstaffed or understaffed? That kind of key question we hear a lot of times. And we said the answer is usually both, too many people and typically not enough leaders. We walk through some of the math, your attendance to FTE ratio, your staffing budget percentage, and how your team is actually distributed across ministry areas. So if you missed that one, go back. It’s kind of the foundation for the rest of the series.
But when a church runs those numbers, it naturally leads to the same question. Now, what do we do about it? This is kind of where things get even more confusing for a lot of leaders because you can’t answer how many people until you’ve answered a more basic question. And today’s question we’re gonna talk about is who owns what? So Jonathan, before we get into it, I think this is where the work of staffing gets less fun, but more important. Does that sound fair to you?
Jonathan:
Yes. Yes. Less fun, but more important. I think it’s important to separate two words that we often use interchangeably because the distinction is helpful for us in this conversation. Responsibility is who does the work. Accountability is who answers for the result. Responsibility can be shared, accountability cannot be. The moment two people are accountable for the same outcome, nobody is.
Sean:
Yes.
Jonathan:
I found this out in technicolor. When I first came to One Church.to, we had significantly more staff than we have now, and nobody in our team would argue that we are not more efficient today with a lower headcount and we have greater output. Some of that is exactly what you said last week. We are hiring equippers scales you, hiring doers doesn’t scale, it sprawls. But the headcount was not our only problem. The bigger one was on most projects, events, moments. We couldn’t name who the point leader was. We had teams, often teams working across departments, and when someone did not get something done, everyone pointed at somebody else. Everything was kind of muddy. We lacked clarity or point leadership.
And I think that lack of accountability or ownership is infectious. It produces teams that look busy but aren’t always fruitful. Everybody’s in meetings, but nothing ships. And people in leadership roles without leadership giftings will prefer that culture. Because ambiguity is the one place you can stay busy without ever being measured. Here’s the test I would give a pastor listening today and the one I needed to take is take your next significant initiative and ask one question, who answers for this? If you get two names or a department instead of a person, you don’t have a team, you have a crowd with a calendar invite.
Sean:
Interesting. You know, that idea takes me back, Jonathan, to, we’ve said this on the podcast several times, but it’s probably not been for a while. Do you know how you starve a dog?
Jonathan:
Yeah.
Sean:
Yeah. You assign 10 people to feed it. And if you have pets, you don’t like that analogy, but it’s the analogy that supports what you were saying there, Jonathan.
Jonathan:
Well, who owns it, right?
Sean:
Who owns it? Exactly. That’s right. All right. Before we get into the tension today, let me say thanks to this week’s podcast sponsor, Tyndale House. You know, if Jesus walked into your church right now, this weekend, let’s say during services, do you think people would really recognize him? Tyndale House is announcing a brand new book called The Missing Messiah. It’s by bestselling authors Kyle Idleman and Mark Moore. And it helps churches rediscover Jesus really based on scripture, not based on our cultural perceptions of him. So there’s a six-session companion study guide that goes with it and free access to streaming videos that churches can get. And they can learn more at missingmessiah.com.
All right. So let me set up what I often hear from pastors when it comes to structure because I think the motives are right here, but the path to a decision just is where things get really murky. Pastors want good structure for really good reasons. They want communication to work. They wanna find out about problems before they become crises. They wanna know that nothing’s falling through the cracks. And honestly, most of them want their people cared for well. They don’t want anything or anybody carrying more than they actually should. Those are pastoral instincts, and I think they’re great instincts.
But here’s why we end up coming in and helping a lot of churches with structure in particular. A church feels the organizational pain, and they go straight to kind of adjusting the org chart, and they start moving boxes around, kind of drawing new reporting lines, sometimes consolidating a couple of roles. Maybe, and I see this a lot, Jonathan, I’m sure you do too, even flattening the org chart in a way that they feel like fixes problems more easily.
And I think that feels productive because you can see it. You know, we had a problem, we created a solution. And then what happens is typically months later, maybe six months later, you’re feeling the same or at least a very similar frustration because you restructured without ever answering the question, what’s the structure supposed to serve? So Jonathan, again, you sitting in the lead seat at one church, when you know it’s time to restructure, where do you start?
Jonathan:
I think you’re pushing at a real temptation for those of us who either like change or getting things done. We can start just pulling levers. We want some action, and that can feel cathartic in the moment. It feels like we’re doing something before we actually clarify our strategy. And the order I would give is vision, strategy, structure, staffing. In our last podcast, you talked about this. Vision is where we’re going, strategy is how we’re getting there, structure is who owns that part of it, and staffing is how many people it will take, and what will be needed to accomplish the vision. Each one answers a different question. If you skip one, the next one is guesswork. And I think I’ve been in that seat where in my catalytic, energetic, wanting to make things happen, I skip some of those ones, and I end up with guesswork. And sometimes I guessed right, and that gives the illusion I know what I’m doing.
Sean:
I think you probably do, Jonathan.
Jonathan:
Oh, I don’t know, man. So when I feel organizational pain, my first question is not what is wrong with our structure. It is which of these three problems is actually at the heart of this pain I’m feeling? Is it a clarity problem where nobody knows who owns it? Is it a capacity problem where they know and there is just not enough of them to carry that part of the vision? Or is it a strategy problem where we never agreed on what we were doing in the first place? Only the first one gets fixed by structure. Sean, a lot of pain that looks structural to me has turned out to be strategic ambiguity in the end. And one of the reasons to work in that order is that strategy is what gives you language to explain the change to structure. If you restructure first, the best answer you will have when somebody asks is, “Why did you make those changes?” The best answer you’re gonna have is, “I thought it would work better.” But if you can say, “Here’s where we’re going, and here’s what we’re gonna do, and here’s what it’s gonna require of us,” people will move seats for that. They will not move readily for a cleaner diagram. They don’t care.
Sean:
That’s right. Yeah, you’re back to mentioning Jonathan, talking through what we talk about often. Pastors don’t wanna make structure decisions that affect people with just a gut feeling. And, you know, most churches build structure without really ever calling out what is it that we’re structuring around? And I wanna be careful here about how we talk about this. And I know you sit in the seat and you’re doing this, Jonathan, because this isn’t a competence problem. It’s not that you’re not a great leader. I know you are. It’s not that the pastors out there making these decisions aren’t great, smart, capable leaders. They absolutely are. And the work that I often see get skipped over, I think there are three really understandable reasons why.
First of all, it takes time. This kind of work requires your senior leadership team to set aside a probably a number of days and really think and pray through where are we headed as a church? And the ministry that you’re doing right now doesn’t pause while you do that. Second thing, in a growing church, today always feels more urgent than the future. You know, there’s a service this weekend, there’s a position that’s open right now, and clarity about where you’re going in three years really can’t compete with those types of urgent needs, the fire that needs put out today. And then the third thing that I think of is a lot of pastors just feel genuinely ill-equipped for this work. Nobody trained you for this. Seminary taught you how to exegete a text, care for people, preach a sermon. It did not teach you how to design an organizational structure.
So when the conversation turns to org design or org charts, a lot of leaders feel out of their depth. And I think the natural response then is to reach for what’s the thing we can actually do, which tends to be, well, let’s move some boxes around today. So Jonathan, I’m just curious. I’ve described some lead pastors here. You are one. Does that line up with what you’ve seen?
Jonathan:
It lines up completely. I wanna press on a third and it kinda piggybacks off what you’ve just said, because I’ve used it even as a hiding place at times. The nobody train me is a true sentence. It just has a shelf life. That’s all I qualify it with. I mean, I learned Greek to preach a text a handful of times. I’ve worked through church history, theology, hermeneutics, so I can, I’m clearly capable of learning things.
Sean:
Right.
Jonathan:
The reason I did not learn organizational design wasn’t because of a capacity issue. It was somewhere along the line I had picked up this idea that it wasn’t spiritual work. It was administration. It was part of the job that got in the way of the real job. It took me a while to see that structure has spiritual consequences. It decides who gets reached, who gets cared for, who falls through the cracks. If the structure is poor, real people pay for it. And that makes it pastoral work for me all of a sudden, not just clerical work.
So here’s where I think my training actually failed me. Seminary taught me to disciple a person. I’m using this as an example. It never occurred to anybody to teach me how to disciple a congregation. For years, I assumed those skills were interchangeable. One was just bigger, but they’re not. They’re different skills. Discipling a person is presence. Discipling a congregation is design. It is steps, environments, pathways, somebody owning each stage. The other piece is that most of us are caregivers at heart, and you’ve alluded to that, and I think that’s what I love about pastors. We are caregivers. We love that relational part, and that’s not a flaw. It is why we do this in the first place. I think it’s why we got into pastoral ministry.
Sean:
Yeah, of course.
Jonathan:
The distinction I would probably say is I’ve had to learn the hard way is that organizational leadership requires relational energy, you can’t lose that, but it cannot run on, and you mentioned this in our last podcast, relational reliance. Past a thousand people, relationships still carry the trust, but they can no longer carry the information. I’m shaping lives as part of a strategy, and I’ll never have lunch with half the people that I’m a part of discipling or even maybe even know their names. So I can’t disciple with relational reliance, but relational energy demands that someone knows their names, breaks bread with them and does life with them. You don’t have to be good at this. You have to be responsible for it.
So I don’t think any pastor got equipped or trained to do organizational structure. I just think when you start to see it as pastoral, as spiritual shaping and culture shaping for your organization, it allows you to begin to see that maybe you need help. Nobody on my board expects me to understand fund accounting. But they don’t want me to ignore it. They don’t want me to ignore it. You may need to bring in a group like Unstuck or have a good conversation with one board member that understands organizational structure better because it’s so important for the spiritual health of your church.
Sean:
That’s good. That’s a helpful perspective to hear, Jonathan. I wanna remind our listeners, and back to something we mentioned last week, you know, when you build structure without this kind of clarity that we’re talking about today, you don’t get a neutral result from that. You typically get a structure that’s built around your history, because if you’re not organizing around again, where are we going? You’re organizing around what already exists, the roles that you have today, the people that have been there the longest, the ministries that just sometimes seem to be the most important to the people in the seats. And in a large church and in a growing church, that kind of structure is not gonna hold up for very long.
So let’s shift to solutions here, Jonathan. And, you know, you talked about already kind of the order and approach that we think about as we plan for structure. It first starts with vision, then strategy, and then structure. How do we structure around our strategies? And then after that, we answer the people question. Where do people fit within that structure? So the questions we need to be asking, where is God calling this church? What has to be true for us to get there? What roles does that require? And then who fills those roles?
Jonathan, if you think about a football team, a football team builds a roster. NFL season has just kicked off. And so this is top of mind for everybody but our friend Jimmy, podcast host, Jonathan, who is a Cleveland Browns fan and is trying to ignore the season. But anyways, that’s my dig at Jimmy. If you think about a football team and how they build their roster, no, there’s no coach that walked into the season and thought, we need four quarterbacks, six defensive linemen and a punter and then said, all right, let’s go figure out how to win this. No, they decide how they’re going to win. They define the positions on the team that it requires, and then they go find the players after that. And what we see a lot of times in churches that get stuck in this structural conversation is that they’re trying to do the opposite. And we do it because it’s church, and these are the people we love, and it feels cold to start anywhere other than with the people. But starting with the people, I don’t think it’s actually kinder. I think it just is less clear, and unclear structure is actually what burns your people out the most.
Jonathan:
Yeah. I think, just piggybacking off that, by the way, go pats go. That’s for you, Jimmy. I think we say to our staff team all the time, we can’t promise you lifelong employment, but we can promise you lifelong employability. Like we do our best to equip our staff and keep our staff healthy that they always have a next step. But, the idea that the players are gonna play indefinitely on your team or that you will be indefinitely on the team, leadership is temporary, and you’re responsible. And I like that football analogy. I would just adjust one thing. I think when I’ve arrived at a church for the first time, and if you’re newer in your ecosystem, I think you do arrive as a bit of like a coach, and you’re taking account of the players that are already on your bench, and you find a way to run with a hand that you’ve been dealt. That’s legitimate, and that’s what year one looks like.
But I do think your thinking needs to change, especially when you’re talking a thousand plus church staff, is you gotta think less like a coach, more like a general manager at some point. The coach is judged on Sunday, that’s game day. And I do think you can’t get away from that as a lead pastor, but a general manager is judged on what the roster looks like in two to three years. You have to do both jobs. And the failure I see most often, including myself, is doing the coaching job because Sundays come with incredible regularity and letting the GM job just happen.
And when I came to One Church.to, I had a lot of players on the bench and not enough of them sitting in strategic roles. We were staffed to do ministry, rather than to equip people to do ministry. And again, as I mentioned earlier, that doesn’t scale, but it does sprawl. So as I looked at the roles we actually needed, I looked at our bench first because I love hiring from within, and you wanna develop the people that God has kind of placed in your ecosystem. And I had to accept something uncomfortable. Just because someone was on the staff team does not make them the right person for the seat that might be strategically needed next for the church.
Sean:
Right.
Jonathan:
For some of those roles, we’re gonna have to go outside the organization because the role mattered too much to just fill it with whoever was in proximity. I wanna be careful here because patience is not in action. We talked about that, but it’s paced action. You cannot change everyone at once. And nor should you or want to. You identify the two to three roles that have greatest strategic impact, and you make sure that those seats have the right gifting in them.
And it creates a bit of a flywheel on your team. When you get people really firing, everybody kind of raises their game. Having a plan makes it easier to be patient because I know I’ve got a plan. And pastor, remember that every time somebody leaves your organization, you get an opening. That’s an opportunity, not just as a refill or backfill that role, it’s an opportunity to restructure or redeploy those dollars. As painful as it is to lose a person, every hole is an opportunity. But only if you’ve got a strategy. If you got a strategy, because I, I’ve noticed this, resignations do not arrive as scheduled. I don’t have a schedule for resignations. I’ve had people resign and the pressure to fill that role comes immediately, almost like that peer pressure you feel in a junior high group. Like it just comes from the staff and everyone else, “When are you gonna fill this role?” When you have a plan, you don’t feel that pressure because you have a plan, and all of a sudden you’ve got a next step, and it can reshape your team; it can reshape the next chapter of your church. So that’s why that strategic plan is so important.
Sean:
Yeah, that’s good. That’s good. All right. So let’s talk about what clarity actually looks like. There’s a couple things that come to mind for me, Jonathan. Number one, your senior leadership team has to own the goals and the strategy for the church. And here’s why. Let’s just take the budget season, for example. Let’s say the leadership team goes to each ministry and says, “Tell us what results you’re shooting for next year in kids’ ministry. Tell us what programs you’re running in kids’ ministry, and then tell us what budget you need in kids’ ministry.” That wouldn’t make sense, right? If you do that, goals come up from the ministries, and you don’t get any of the benefit of organizational alignment. You just get a collection of departments each kind of optimizing their own thing, which turns into silos in your ministry. Goals have to be defined from the top.
Your senior leadership decides what success looks like for the church in the next 12 months. How many people are we reaching? How many baptisms will we see? Where do we want engagement and serving and giving to land in our church? And then you cascade it from there. If the church is going to baptize 100 people, how many of those are adults? How many of those are students? How many are kids? If we’re moving to a healthy volunteer leader ratio, what does that mean for each of our ministry areas in terms of volunteer leaders? Now every leader knows what their win is, and every win rolls up to the same place.
The second thing that comes to mind for me, Jonathan, you have to name your core ministry strategies, not your programs, your strategies. At Unstuck, we talk a lot about the strategic alignment pyramid. The foundation of that pyramid is why we exist. It’s our mission. Most churches already have clarity around that. You know, we go back to the great commission, but the next level above that is the directional level. And we’re talking about things like where are we going? How are we gonna get there? And that’s the level that’s almost always underdeveloped at churches. That’s your direction. For the next three to five years, it’s really your core ministry strategies, how you reach your mission field, how you disciple your people, how you develop your leaders.
And here’s why it matters for structure. Those strategies are your ministry lanes. They’re the actual boxes on your org chart. If reaching your mission field is a core strategy, somebody owns it. If your discipleship pathway is a core strategy, somebody has to own it, not a team. Back to what we talked about earlier, Jonathan, a person and an individual. Because if you’re gonna accomplish anything significant, somebody has to own it and somebody has to build a team around it.
And you already know the alternative to this, and we’ve said it on the podcast before. If everybody owns it, nobody does. So, Jonathan, again, question for you at One Church, you know, you’ve done work on ownership. I love, we talked about this before, you even call them responsibility descriptions rather than job descriptions. I’m kinda stealing that, by the way. I’ve been using that with churches. So I just wonder from your perspective, how do you get ownership clear enough that nothing gets missed and, really on your team, everything has an owner?
Jonathan:
Yeah. Our responsibility descriptions make it clear what each staff member is accountable for. It’s not a list. It’s not an exhaustive list of tasks or their day-to-day. There are some outliers in that. There’s like a bookkeeper role that’s more descriptive in nature because that’s, is genuinely task-driven. But for our ministry roles, we’re not telling people how to do their work. We’re telling them what we’re gonna hold them accountable for. Making sure everything has an owner is the easy half. The half we still work at is the overlap. We’re a connected ecosystem, right, in church ministry, guest service on a weekend is a great example. It’s tied to our gatherings team. It’s tied to our next gen team. It’s tied to our care ministry team. The communications team touches every other part of the church. And those intersections are where conflicts live and where ambiguity can live. Not because anyone’s difficult on our team, but because two good leaders, both having a real stake and nobody ever said which one of them decides is a problem. So here’s how we hold it.
For example, Jenna. She’s a fantastic member of our team. She leads our guest service experience. She owns it. If the guest experience is not working on the weekend, the conversation is with Jenna. We do not route around her, and we do not put it on the gatherings team because they happen to be closer to the problem. The accountability does not move. But again, we’re a connected ecosystem, not a collection of silos. And this is where we have a word, and you’ve probably heard me use it before, Sean: stackable. Everything is stackable. Gatherings can stack on guest services, Next Gen can stack and does stack on guest services, and they can voice back to Jenna. They can help shape that experience so it serves the whole ecosystem, not just one department or team.
So we very much encourage people to speak into each sides of our ministries. That’s how we gather collaborative energy from that while maintaining individual responsibilities. So I wanna be clear about what stacking is not, though. It’s not a vote. Jenna can hear from three teams and land somewhere different, and that’s hers to decide. Input, though, is always open. The decision belongs to the person who answers for the outcome. Blurring those two lines have not built collaboration. What that does is build committees and committees are really, they don’t, they don’t lead very well.
So the reason we do it this way is so that guests do not experience our org chart. We don’t want them to experience our org chart. A family pulls into the lot, gets greeted, kids get checked in, they find seats in the main gathering, they get an email on Monday. To them, it’s one experience. To us, it’s four teams. Somebody has to be accountable for what that family actually felt, and everyone who touches it has to be able to speak into it. So it’s individual ownership and accountability with this collective, collaborative stackability that helps us to maintain this ecosystem.
Sean:
Love it. That is a great real-world example. Appreciate you talking us through that. All right. Let’s continue with kind of the practical thoughts here. And let me just encourage churches, if you’ve done the clarity work or if you’re committed to doing it, here’s the order that I’d encourage you to build in. Step one, start with your senior leadership team structure. Get this team structure right before you touch anything else. Every single person on your staff eventually connects back to the senior leadership team. So if that team’s wrong, nothing below it can be right. And what we generally are looking for is four to six leaders who together own the key ministries and operations of the church, enough to cover the whole scope of the ministry, but a small enough team that they can actually still make decisions. And that can force more strategic decisions even beyond that. If you’ve got four to six seats and eight ministry areas, well, now you have to consolidate. You have to decide what belongs together. And I don’t think that’s a limitation. That’s actually the exercise of structure helping you as a team get more clarity. Now, one caution I’d throw into this is a lot of churches can actually respond to senior leadership team pain by adding a layer above the leadership team or trying to expand it to kind of nine or 10 people. Both are usually kind of version 2.0 of a structure that’s already wrong. There’s already problems with it. So, don’t do that. No layers above the SLT.
Step two, I’d say structure to your strategies, not to your history. We’ve talked about this already, but take the core strategies that you’ve named as a church, reaching your mission field, your discipleship pathway, next gen, whatever your church is defined, and then build lanes around those. And for each one of those, ask what’s the scope of this lane? What outcomes does it own? Who’s accountable in this lane? And here’s what I’d encourage you to remember as you do this work. What gets leadership and resources gets done. Look at your current structure and ask: what is it actually resourced to accomplish? Because that’s what your church will actually accomplish. Regardless of what your ministry plan document says, that’s what’s gonna get done. If your next gen is a stated priority and next gen doesn’t have a leader at the table with real ownership and a real budget, then next gen is not a priority.
Jonathan:
I know the first time I went through the staffing and structure with Tony Morgan, the Unstuck Group, what came out of that is what we call a directional leadership team, a senior leadership team, executive leadership team, whatever you wanna call it. And their job is direction, not supervision. Like, they oversee our team leads. Underneath them, we have a layer of team leads and the team leads lead the staff. The directional leads lead the team leads. Now, you caution about adding a layer above, and I just wanna double down on that to say it will not only be unhelpful, but it is gonna slow everything down.
But adding a layer below your leadership team moves decisions. And this is powerful. A layer below moves them down into the organization. The other is the pipeline for them. It creates a pipeline for your staff to continue to grow and level up and then be your future directional leaders or executive leadership team. So we’ve added below, and it’s done more to energize the organization than almost anything that we had done structurally before this because it finally gave us somewhere to push decision-making.
So here’s an exercise I went through that was very painful, because I feel useful when I’m making decisions. And I think I’d just challenge lead pastors as you’re, you know, kinda deliberating about what your structure can look like and how do you empower others and maybe how do you drive decisions further down in the organization? Just take for two weeks, and I did this. Write down every decision that lands on your desk. Just keep a list, then go back and mark how many of them were urgent or organizationally critical. Urgent means something like something’s gonna shut down if you don’t make a call today. Well, then senior leadership should be on it. Organizational/critical means if we get this wrong, a lot of things go wrong. Those things I’m on the hook for.
But when I did it, the majority of what was landing on my desk was decisions that other people in our organizations were equally or better equipped to make. And I wanna be honest, about why they were still coming to me. I think I liked it at one level as much as I begrudged it. I almost, you can almost get addicted to decision-making because you feel useful in those moments. I would say decisions coming through us feel like evidence we’re doing the job. But I’ve learned to reframe that: the less decisions I’m actually making is evidence that I’m building a team.
So when you lay out leadership team structure, I do not think it’s really about adding layers of leadership. It’s about shifting the weight of responsibility, the weight of empowerment at the same time. And you have to shift both. If you push the decision down without pushing the authority down, you’ve not empowered anybody. You’ve just given them more homework to do. And empowerment on its own is abandonment. People making decisions further down in the org have to be coached inside of a system.
And we do this by a biweekly rhythm. We have check-ins with our staff team. I’m sure everyone listening to this does something similar. We do their welfare. We talk about where they’re at, their family. We do a monthly kind of health check-in with them. But every second week, we check in about how they’re doing against their goals, what they’re accountable for. And we often always lead with this question, how can we help you? How can I help you? Because we wanna come alongside them that they’re making better and better decisions.
The other thing I would underline is in your line about what gets leadership and resources gets done. That is the sentence I would want pastors to sit on. Your ministry plan is a document. Your budget is a decision. If next gen is a state of priority, but next gen does not have somebody at the directional table or a real ownership or real budget line, then next gen is a value, not a priority. Your church will accomplish what you resource, not what you wrote down.
Sean:
Oh, I love that.
Jonathan:
And I’m guilty of this. I think I’m so aspirational in my heart and in my verbiage, but really you have to get practical. Follow the money. Where’s it going? Where’s the staffing structure? Where’s the empowerment? And you’ll see what you value.
Sean:
I love what you just said right there, Jonathan. Values and strategies are actually two different things. I see a lot of churches get that confused. I think that’s an important thought to sit with. The other thing I’m thinking of, Jonathan, a lot of churches, when they look at their structure, they need to check their span of care. As they’re drawing their structure out, I think they need to be asking how many staff each leader is carrying right now. Our guidance to the team is that nobody should be leading more than six other staff members. In a lot of cases, fewer than that is actually better. And I think this is probably one of the more common breakdowns we see in structure. And when I talk to lead pastors, probably kind of the chief complaint is I just have too many people reporting to me.
We’ll work with the church and find that there’s a leader who’s carrying eight or nine or 10 direct reports. And what happens there is actually a leadership failure. At 10 direct reports, you can manage people, you can’t actually develop them. There aren’t enough hours in the day to really develop that many people. So if you end up with a team full of good leaders who feel like bad leaders because they have never had time to actually invest anyone, it could be because your span of care and the people under them, underneath them, they feel unseen, which is exactly the outcome you were trying to prevent when you started this whole conversation about structure. Wide span of care doesn’t just slow a pastor down. It really kills leadership development in the church.
And then, and then one more just real quickly. Once you’ve drawn the structure for where you are, draw a second one for a church twice your size. This is the same exact exercise you’ve just done, but you’re gonna draw two structures, one for where you are, one for twice your size. You don’t have to get every position right in that structure, but get the top level right because it forces you to think about consolidation of span of care in a way that incremental growth really never does. And we’re gonna spend more time on this next week when we talk about people, but it’s worth mentioning here, I think. The structure you build today should be pointing towards the one you’ll need in three years. Otherwise, you’re always gonna feel like you’re chasing the people and structural issues in your church. And they usually aren’t apparent. Those issues aren’t obvious until they become real problems. So getting in front of it can be really helpful. Jonathan, before we wrap up, anything you’d add to that?
Jonathan:
I think I’d answer that by actually telling you where we’re at presently. Our directional leadership team is four people. And genuinely, cautious about our span of care across the organization and staff, but we’re in a season where some of the directional leads have too many. And I notice exactly what you’re saying. It’s not that they don’t care. It’s not that they’re not managing them really well, but they have no bandwidth to actually develop them. And actually develop where the ministry’s going. So this is a very live question for us. We haven’t solved it. You guys are coming back in to help us, that’s gonna be helpful. But here’s what I’ve learned watching it happen. Nobody decides to overload a leader. Span of care is one of those things on your org chart that gets worse when you do nothing at all.
Sean:
Yeah.
Jonathan:
You hire, the church grows, a lane gets heavier because it needs to be, and the number of lanes stays exactly the same. You don’t wanna create too many lanes, you’re creating that menu, but you wanna make sure that you have the proper span of care and the levels of leadership that are able to develop people under you.
The other thing I would say is that you rarely see it in the leader. You see it one layer down. And I think this is what you’re pushing at here because, I’ve hired great directional leaders, so they can cover a multitude of sins, so to speak. What does stop is that development aspect. And that’s how sometimes we bleed people, because people that are hungry for growth, hungry for a next step, what’s the old adage? People don’t leave organizations, they leave managers. I don’t think it’s always that the manager’s toxic or anything, but maybe in the present pace of ministry and the span of care, they aren’t seen. They don’t have an opportunity to grow into their next. And I can’t blame the leader in that seat if we have done nothing to address the span of care, which is the honest reason why, again, we’re bringing you in.
So I’d like to say to the pastor’s listening, we are years into this work, and we are not done. You do not complete this. You get the structure right for the size you are, then you grow, and guess what? It’s wrong again. And that’s not a failure of leadership. I think that’s just evidence of growth. And that’s why it’s a constant cycle. That’s why we’re bringing you in preemptively before we get stuck, but we can already feel the rumblings.
Sean:
Yeah. That’s good. Well, Jonathan, we’re gonna wrap up. And my final question for you is gonna be, what’s the big takeaway for pastors this week? You might’ve just answered it, but anything else you’d add to that?
Jonathan:
All I’d say is to lead pastors. Before the word action, think margin, bandwidth, and reflection. I think sometimes we are so consumed with weekends and running organizations that I think a lot of these things require margin and, you know, all of your staff actually need that, bandwidth and reflection time and then action. So I just encourage you, you know, you might not want to take action on the other side of this podcast. You might wanna take some reflection time. You might wanna take some next steps that require less movement of furniture or people or org chart and maybe more strategic thought about where you’re headed.
Sean:
Yeah. My reminder would be, you know, structure is not a chart that you create. Structure is actually a decision about where, what your church is going to be in the future. And every box that you draw is actually a statement about what gets leadership and what doesn’t. And your church will become whatever you actually resource, not whatever you say that you value. So before you draw any lines on an org chart, get that senior leadership team in the room and answer the harder question. Where are we going and how do we get there? And getting that right, makes the structure conversation a whole lot easier. If you skip those questions, you’ll spend probably the next five years kind of rearranging boxes on the chart, but feeling like nothing’s really changing.
So next week, we’re finally gonna get to kind of the people side of this conversation, really answering who goes in what box, how do you assess the people’s leadership, on the leadership capacity on your team, and then what do we do when a role outgrows a person sitting in it? So that, that’ll be a really fun conversation.
And if you’re listening to this episode and you feel like this has surfaced more questions than answers for you, I think that can be normal. And it’s usually the point in which churches bring us in and get some outside help, to create more clarity. Just getting objective eyes on your strategy and structure is most of what our staffing and structure work does. And you can learn more about that if you’re interested if you go to theunstuckgroup.com/structure. If you want the benchmarks that we’ve referenced in the last two episodes, you can find all of those in our latest Unstuck Church Report at the unstuckgroup.com/trends. Next week, Jonathan and I are talking about getting the right people in the right seats. Make sure you subscribe so you don’t miss it, and we’ll see you next week.
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