Re-Engineering Your Staff For The NEW Church

Churches tend to be highly resistant to change. We tend to gravitate toward staff positions and organizational structures that reflect the church of the past rather than the church of the future.

This backward-facing mentality doesn’t do us any favors. On the contrary, it makes it harder to function.

Look around your church. Are your positions designed to maintain past expectations or to adapt to the new normal? If your team is struggling to meet the current needs of your attendees, here are seven tips to help you re-engineer your staff to accommodate the NEW church.

1. Revisit Your Vision

Vision is interesting in the sense that it provides parameters, guidelines, and end goals — but it doesn’t necessarily function as a road map. On the contrary, you have to adapt a vision to your circumstances if you want to find a clear path forward.

As the structure and format of church continues to change rapidly, revisit your vision. What kind of church is God calling you to be? What does that look like right now? This is ground zero for effectively re-engineering your staff.

2. Prioritize Discipleship, Not Broadcasting

Another high-level consideration is tailoring your staffing and related tools to your congregation’s needs. As you consider new tools and staff positions in areas like IT, ask yourself: what is right for your congregation? Prioritize this over what other leaders or staff desire. 

For example, at Ministry Solutions, we often see churches pay for church apps designed to stream sermons or receive donations. If your attendees don’t use these tools, the obvious conclusion is that your church doesn’t want an app. Seriously, they don’t want that particular app. Don’t force it! 

People will always utilize tools that make their lives better. The best way to accommodate this is to adopt a discipleship mindset rather than broadcasting generic solutions. Do your staffing and support tools align with your congregational needs?

3. Consider Your Staff’s Weight

No, we’re not talking about getting a scale for your church offices. We’re talking about financial weight. Full and part-time church staff members can be expensive. 

Vanderbloemen says a good rule of thumb is not to spend more than 50% of your total operating budget on staff. Larger multi-site churches can even reduce that number to 35% of the budget. Are you operating within those margins? If your staff is bloated, it can restrict your resources and make it harder to invest in other areas of need in your church and the communities you serve.

The church is built to serve. Make sure the weight of your ministry staff enables rather than detracts from your ability to meet current needs. Stay lean and purposeful with every hire to maintain important ministry flexibility as you adapt to the new and changing needs of your church.

4. Delegate to Volunteers

As you adjust your staff structure, responsibilities, size, and expectations, remember volunteers. Volunteers make healthy churches run. They may not be as trained or invested as a paid member of your staff, but they can play a crucial role in allowing your staff to focus on the most important areas of running your church.

You probably already know that if you have someone on your staff who can do a task 80 percent as well as you can, you should delegate it. The same logic applies to volunteers. 

This isn’t new advice, but it’s hyper-relevant in a changing church environment. Leaning on volunteers frees you up to get more accomplished with less staff. It also encourages engagement from your congregation and is a great way to keep your finger on the pulse of current needs.

5. Focus on Effectiveness Over Efficiency

Church isn’t a formula. It’s a relationship-driven experience centered on God and his children. With that in mind, we don’t want to over-prioritize ministry efficiency. Micromanaging Kingdom work rarely pays off.

We should value effectiveness. Rather than being hyper-efficient in impacting a few people, I’d rather work harder to reach and develop more people into the likeness of Christ. 

There is nothing wrong with efficiency. It’s important. However, as you consider the capabilities of your staff, make sure you’re not hindering effectiveness by investing too much in systems.

6. Empower and Hold Accountable

Ministries, technical factors, counseling, outreach—the average church staff member could be involved in any number of areas. The decentralized (and often disconnected) nature of modern church activity means you need to empower your staff to act effectively.

We already touched on the idea of delegating. Along with that responsibility, make sure that you give individuals the authority and accountability to be effective. It is highly discouraging to be accountable for results when you don’t have the authority to make an impact. At the same time, unbridled authority without accountability can lead to trouble.

Responsibility, authority, and accountability. These three elements must go together for any role. 

7. Change Strategy, Maintain Mission

Missions rarely change. We started this article by revisiting your church’s vision. This applies to old and new church organizations alike. However, strategies change all the time—and they should. 

For instance, we used to record sermons on cassette tapes in real time with “Please Reproduce” printed on the label. We would hand out the tapes as people left the church and encourage people to give them away. 

As technology changed, we shifted to CDs and then digital and streaming, and in doing so, we lost that hand-to-hand transaction. The mission to spread the word remains the same, but now we need to be more creative in how we encourage our people to share resources with their friends and family. Don’t be afraid to shift your strategy, even in an area like church staff, especially when it helps maintain your mission.

Re-Engineering Your Church Staff for the Future

Most churches need staff members, but the way you structure your staff, the people you hire, and the tasks you delegate to them change with the seasons. As a new era of the church dawns, leaders must recognize the need to re-engineer ministry staffing solutions for the here and now. 

If you see the need, give our team at Ministry Solutions a call. We can help you find clarity and plot a path forward. Together, we can rework your ministry’s personnel to meet the demands of God’s people in a 21st-century environment.