Do We Have to Choose?
There are so many different ways to run your church, and likely an equal number of opinions on how to do it from mentors, elders, family members, authors, and church fathers throughout history.
A church leader who desires for their church to glorify God and make disciples is the most important starting point – but that leaves a lot of gray area between the why and how of stewarding the life of your church.
This is particularly relevant if your church is on the smaller side, with a couple hundred congregants or less, because you can create a structure now that will serve your church far into the future.
The bigger a church gets, the more structure and planning is required, simply because of the energy and planning it takes to organize any significant number of people.
It’s a great thing to have your administrative and ministry intentions in place for a church of any size, and even better to have it so that you’re prepared to handle growth when it comes.
Part of what’s required from this type of planning is to think about the business administration side of your church. This can be a tricky area to prioritize, because it doesn’t directly involve the people in your church you’re there to serve, and it’s a lot easier to function with a “we’ll figure that out later” attitude. But there are ways to focus on ministry and have great systems and processes for running a church smoothly.
With that in mind, let’s talk about how to help your church operate efficiently while remaining ministry minded – one of the keys is to expand our view and definition of what counts as ministry.
For example, the growth of Mission Hills’ staff coincided with the construction of our current main campus worship facility. This all happened at once because we needed more structure and expertise than we’d previously had.
This can apply to other areas as well, like administration, accounting and bookkeeping, or creating more staff teams to delegate responsibility more evenly.
There are two “sides” to running a church that leaders come up against:
1. Ministry
This is likely what comes to mind when you think about running a church. Pastoring, leading, and serving at a church is a huge part of what ministry traditionally is, after all! This can be anything from preaching and teaching to leading a small group, discipling new believers, serving on the worship team or being a greeter on Sunday mornings.
2. Business
Administrative tasks like bookkeeping, payroll, taxes, creating processes for communication, paying bills, etc. belong in this category.
These tasks are needed in the church, but aren’t exclusive to the Church – the same tasks can be found in most any small business, although the methods for accomplishing them will vary.
Here’s what we think about these categories: they should go hand in hand in a church.
Here’s What We Mean:
We want the church to be unified in every area, with no department siloed off from another.
It’s crucial and important for a churches ministries to be thriving, and those same people will come to church and need clean toilets, a good system for tithing, and staff who are being led well, so that they can lead in a life-giving way.
That’s where the responsibility falls back on the church’s “administrative” roles. On the flip side, clean bathrooms in a beautiful building and financial and communication systems that run perfectly all exist in vain without a thriving, healthy body of believers behind it.
The point is that every church needs thriving spiritual ministries and resources that are managed well enough for the church to continue to thrive.
Maybe you’re going to hire an admin staff to handle things like building initiatives, finances, and managing other staff teams within the church – this new hire presents a great opportunity for your congregation and leaders to get clear on what you define as ministry and what you don’t.
As you’re making these decisions, here’s our advice: don’t discredit faithful work for the church just because it doesn’t fit into a “traditional” ministry box. It’s likely that your administratively gifted staff member has a heart for ministry and the Gospel just like your pastors and other leaders do – but the way they express that heart is just different because of their particular giftings.
This is a beautiful picture of the body of Christ, where every person gets to use their own gifts for the glory of God. They wouldn’t be able to use their organizational and technical gifts if you weren’t faithful to your ministry responsibilities, and vice versa.
