Ten Best Ways to KEEP Your Church Staff

We conclude the “Ten Best Ways to Ruin Your Church Staff” series with some of the things church staff members say are ways pastors can cultivate and keep a good staff. (For those pastors who want to get rid of troubling church staff, then just do the opposite!). Here is what church staff say pastors need to do to foster a great staff:

• Provide challenge (vision, courage). Develop a staff culture based on shared values of excellence, commitment, responsibility and mutual accountability. Expect and demand evidence of growth, spiritual, personal, and professional, over the course of time together. A pastoral leader without a vision will soon have no followers, and, as usual, the first to leave will be your best staff.
• Be the Resident theologian. Get your theology of church straight, then, cultivate a common, shared theology among all key persons in the congregation
• Be an enabler, which is helping your staff find and work out their calling in your congregation
• Be a Team Leader. You are responsible for the creation and maintenance of an effective team, and, the culture that fosters it
• Be a Servant leader. Be redemptive in your relationship with staff, and, model what it means to be a servant leader.
• Be a Primary Educator. This includes being a learner, investing in regular continuing education, taking your sabbatical, encouraging your staff to do likewise
• Always support your staff. Value their vision and their plans. Allow them to craft and shape the ministry they were called to.
• Have a pastoral spirit toward your staff. They are your colleagues, not your “hires.” Some pastors even avoid using the term “My staff” to clarify that the staff belongs to the church, not to them.
• Protect them from the willful and destructive people in your congregation. In the long run, pastors do well to be less fearful about losing a few troubling church members than about losing good staff.
• Never ask your staff to do things you are not willing to do yourself. And never, ever, take credit for their work.

From, Perspectives on Congregational Leadership: Applying Systems Theory for Effective Leadership, by Israel Galindo.

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