Pastor John Jenkins - First Baptist of Glenarden – Landover, MD

Pastor Larry Adams – Golden Hills CC – Brentwood, CA

Pastor Linn Winters – Cornerstone Christian Fellowship – Chandler, AR

Pastor Bill Ankerberg – Whittier Area Community Church – Whittier, CA

 

Hiring and Staff

Build the job into the budget ahead of time think 1 – 2 years out.

  • What roles need to be filled and when
  • How much do you need to budget

Staff is the key to growth

PT is extremely advantageous in the short term (in particular at the level we are at)

  • You can try them out with less risk
  • You get them w/o benefits
  • You get more people passionate about more areas
  • You develop your leadership gifts with less risk to the church

Hire from within first

  • There is already vision alignment
  • They aren’t likely looking to change you as a leader
  • Give titles with positional authority to part-timers

Winters said:

  • Bad churches lose staff
  • Good churches lose staff
  • Stagnant churches keep staff

Keep the right staff – lose the wrong ones.

If I find an exceptional staff, I hire them. We can build roles around awesome staff. Don’t worry as much about finding a role and then a staff as you grow…find great people and build a job for them.

Keep congregations out of the hiring role…they can’t be informed enough to make good decision. Let’s stop pretending they can. It has never worked, it won’t work and it isn’t biblical.

Boards are better than Congregations but most large churches at some point will give that role over to the Sr. Leader(s).

  • One of the fastest growing arenas of church lawsuits has to do with publicly firing staff (required by many older constitutions).

More staff isn’t better than good staff

Unity and vision alignment are incredible important within a staff. It falls apart fast…all it takes is neglect from the Sr. Leader. To keep these two critical core traits of healthy staff a leader must be intentional.

Hiring Generalists, Specialists and L2s

  • From 700 to 1000 hire generalists (i.e. he can preach but also does windows)
  • From 1000 to 3000 hire specialists (i.e. he can preach but little else)
  • From 3000+ primarily hire Leaders of Leaders

No matter how careful and strategic you are you will make hiring mistakes.

The staff you hire now that “personally” do good ministry may never learn to hand off the ministry. If they can’t you will likely need to let them go as you grow. You need people who can give away ministry.

OVER NIGHT OUT OF TOWN SHARED EXPERENCES (wow did the coaches hammer the importance of this. All of them do this and are adamant that we do it).

J.J.’s How to have hard conversations with Staff:

S – Situations (Identify Situations)

B – Behavior (Focus on Behaviors)

I – Impact (How did the Behavior in the midst of the Situation effect things)

 

Classic Winters

1st Our job is to create discontent within the staff…pointing out the problems early. Let the people ach for “it”. Ex. “I don’t think we are reaching lost people like God wants us to. I don’t even think we have been as effective as we were last year.”

Don’t try to solve it just create pain around it by focusing some “truth light” onto it.