On Thursday night and all day Friday I had a unique opportunity to join 14 senior pastors being mentored by Craig Groeschel. I took 7 pages of notes, but what I wanted to highlight in this post was the things that were said that pertain to staffing.
1. Your can know your potential of your church by looking at your #2, #3, and #4 staff member.
Lots of churches have great senior pastors but your churches potential is in the next three leaders
2. Every staff member when hired is on a 1 year probation period.
This keeps the staff person more teachable for longer
3. During the interview process each candidate has to pick a topic out of a hat to preach on in front of the other staff members. They then get 10 minutes to prepare a 10 minute sermon to preach.
Craig said that it is amazing how much you can learn about a persons theology and how graceful they are in that little 10
minute message
4. New hires go on a 5 week track to make sure they have the values of the church
This includes books to read regular meetings with other staff to hear the vision, core values and behavioral values
5. Ideally you staffing budget would be 30-40% of your overall budget or 1 to every 120 attendees
6. Salaries for staff are middle of the road with good bonus structures set up for performance
They give up to 10% bonuses for meeting goals
They do an in-depth annual review and a lighter quarterly review of every staff member
That is just a few of the bullet points from the staffing at Lifechurch.tv I learned while there. There will probably be another post soon since I have a meeting on Monday with Jerry their executive pastor over staffing. I’m looking forward to learning more about what they do.
I would love to hear any unique things your church does regarding pastoral staffing.
For over 15 years Master’s Commission of Dallas has been discipling young adults and helping them move into full devotion in Christ. Under the direction of Mark Brewer, MCD had become one of the most well known Master’s Commission programs in the world.
In the fall of 2007 MCD entered into a unique partnership with Southwestern Assemblies of God University where MCD students lived on campus and received accredited courses through the school. As that partnership has progressed it became more and more obvious that we were on the brink of something new. Out of that realization The Oaks School of Leadership was born.
Under the direction of Chris RaileyThe Oaks School of Leadership is a premiere leadership training school for tomorrows leaders of the church. I have never been more excited about the opportunity we are giving for young adults to be discipled, educated and trained all in on place.
If you are looking to become a pastor or know a young adult looking please pass along this this info to them.
The new brochure for OSL is beautiful and will do a better job of describing the new program to you than I could in this blog. Take a look and let me know what you think.
Click Here to view the School of Leadership Brochure
I was 23 years old and recently moved to Dallas to become a young adult pastor. Because I was new there was a strong desire in me to make a good impression at my new church. This particular Sunday morning this was not going to happen. We had an incredible morning service and at the end of it Pastor Scott called people forward to get prayer from the pastors. The altars were packed with people.
I started to walk back and forth asking God who he wanted me to pray for and what he wanted to say to them. I was drawn to a girl kneeling in the center of the altar area. I knelt down in front of her and began to share with her what I felt God wanted to say to her. She starts crying. (I can only assume because it spoke to her) As I ended my prayer time with her I pulled away from her and she immediately started to yell. The first thought that went through my mind was “she is demon possessed.” The further I pulled away from her the louder she was screaming.
It was only a few seconds for me to notice that somehow this girls hair had gotten wrapped up in the lowest button on my sport coat. As soon as I notice I immediately freaked out and was trying to untie her hair from my sport coat to get out of what could be an extremely humiliating experience. Well, I couldn’t get it untangled from me and it wasnt long for this little escapade to be noticed by others in the crowd. The first person that I saw take note of what was going on was Dallas Wilson. It did not take him long to gather himself a following of onlookers. The problem was that I wasnt getting any closer to getting this poor victims hair out of my coat and the harder I tried the more it was hurting her. It was soon that I realized that the only way for me to really loose myself from it was to bring her head closer into my torso (there is another word for where her head had to be that I won’t use do to the mixed readers of this blog) So that is what I did. I put her head as close to me as I possibly could so there would be enough slack in the hair to be able to untangle it. Finally I was able to cut myself loose from what was going on and without talking to anyone I walked out the door got in my car and drove home.
I was hoping that this story would be nothing other than urban legend until I got to the office on Monday morning and the wonderful media department of our church had a picture on my desk with a note written on top of it, Welcome Home Pastor Justin.
Girls hair caught in an awkward place
In case you were wondering, I have never seen that girl in the church again.
Please submit your most embarrassing church staff story as a comment. They never get old.
It probably stemed from how many friends I have that are planting churches combined with the launching of HELPSTAFF.me last week, but I can’t stop thinking about casting the vision to college and ministry training school grads to dedicate the first two years of their ministry to bi-vocational ministry.
A bi-vocational pastor is one that gets a portion of his/her income from the marketplace and a portion from the church. Many people look at the bi-vocational option as a “last resort” option or a, “I couldn’t make it in the full-time pastor world.”
I do not see it that way. I believe it allows a pastor to have a true understanding and connection to the people they serve as well as the often forgotten opportunity to connect with unbelievers. So rather than a last resort option I believe bi-vocational pastoring could be looked at as an incredible opportunity for a young pastor to join a staff of a great church plant and really see what it means to pastor.
Here is what I am proposing:
My goal is to place 50 bi-vocational pastors by the end of this summer
I will…
Pre-qualify 50 upcoming graduates for bi-vocational staff pastors
Connect with 50 church plants and create a staff profile for a bi-vocational position
Work on a set of guidelines for hiring and utilizing a bi-vocational pastor
I need…
Your prayers
Church planters out there to connect with me on what staffing needs they have
Tell anyone that is looking to pastor to contact me to build a profile
I would love to hear everyone’s thoughts/ideas/concerns/excitement on this vision I have. Please comment or email me so we can continue the dream of resourcing the pioneers we call church planters.
I spent a little time this morning with JT Wray at Gospel Publishing House. When I sat down at his table in his office I notice a light switch sitting on top of the table. It begged the question, “why?”
He stated in his job there are many tough decisions to make that have lots of different kinds of consequences. When he is having trouble making one of those decisions he looks at the light switch and says if there was a way to flip this switch and the decision I make won’t have any of those consequences would I flip it. If the answer is yes, he realizes that may be the right decision and he can’t let his emotions get in the way of it.
I thought it was an interesting way of making tough decisions. What do you think?
Many of you know that my Pastor, Scott Wilson, has written a book about navigating through times of transition. Shortly after finishing the book, through the course of several great connections, Zondervan Publishing asked to publish the book early next year.
One of the things they asked for to add to the book was to put in some stories of other pastors and the kinds of transitions they have led their church through. That task was handed to me. So I have search and talked with many pastors and I have ALMOST completed the project.
Here is the list of people I have received great transitional stories from so far:
This morning the website for my new company went live. I would love it if you check it out at www.helpstaff.me.
For years I have been the one primarily responsible for finding new pastoral staff members for the church I serve at, The Oaks. In addition to that I have had the opportunity to help many friends and acquaintances find staff members for their churches as well. It kind of became a hobby of mine. I enjoyed the challenge of finding the right fit for the right church.
The more I got into it the more I saw the incredible need for churches and pastors to have outside help to bring the connections together. I also began to notice that to do it right it would take more than me making a couple of phone calls. I would need a staff to come on my team to collect resumes, do professional assessments, and conduct qualifying interviews. I have spent the last two months putting together the team that has now become, HelpStaff.me
I would love the opportunity to serve you and/or your church and their staffing needs. If not you, then surely you know a church looking for a pastor or a pastor looking for a church. Take a look at the website and let me know how we can serve you. I look forward to many years of resourcing the church for the purpose of advancing the Kingdom of God!
I don’t know where I heard it, but I have never forgotten the saying, “If you aim for nothing, you will hit it every time.”
I love goal-setting. I love setting out to do something and then seeing it accomplished. Over the past several years I have seen myself really grow in my ability to set a goal and see it through. Don’t get me wrong, there were many a goals that I have set that I have never done anything with, nevertheless, I have reached many of them as well.
The best goal-setting exercise I have ever learned I got from Jason Nordlund. To this day I don’t know anyone better at this than him. He may not of made it up but since he taught it to me, he gets the credit.
1) Write down your top ten goals using the positive present tense.
2) If you could only achieve one goal, which would it be?
3) Write down ten ways to accomplish your #1 goal.
4) Prioritize the ten ways and from this create an action item list.
5) Write twenty ideas of how to perform your #1 priority to aid you in achieving your #1 goal. Then repeat for #2 priority, etc.
I know this can get exhausting, but push yourself to put as much on paper without thinking too much about whether it makes sense or not. When you are done with this exercise you will have 200 potential action items for your number 1 goal you want to accomplish. No more sitting at your desk wondering what to do next! You may want to utilize mind-mapping for this exercise as well. You can read about that in a previous blog.
I believe tomorrow is one of the greatest days in the history of The Oaks.
1. Over 80 people are being baptized at our Red Oak Campus.
2. Shane and Shane have their first day with us on our worship staff.
3. We open our Mesquite Campus–I can’t tell you how excited/nervous I am about this. It is going to be incredible. Richard Miller and his team have done such a great job of getting this building and area ready for what God wants to do in Mesquite.
I will update everyone tomorrow on the results.
Oh yeah, an honorable mention goes to McKenna who has her fourth birthday party tomorrow night.
Most people that know me know that I love connecting with people. Not just anyone, but people that have either a) similar interests as me or b) are an expert in something I want to know about. Well I’ve learned a new way to do this through the twitter search function. It is really cool.
Step 2: Type in a word or phrase that interests you. (i.e. I am learning quite a bit about multi-site churches right now. So I searched “multi-site”)
Step 3: Click on the tab in the upper right corner that RSS Feed for this query.
Now you can with just a quick glance see what other people are writing about multi-site churches. I have already made three friends just today that have helped me with resources because of this search function.
It also is fun to type in your friends names and see if anyone is talking about them.
