Even the wisest of churches ends up with ineffective employees, who need supervision, redirection, and perhaps termination. Mastering church management means, then, learning to hire and, yes, fire.
—Arthur DeKruyter
A pastor manages people—some volunteers and some employees. Even the small church usually finds room in its budget to hire a part-time secretary or janitor. These are staff the pastor must oversee. And it doesn’t take long to learn that staff members—even part-time—if ineffectively managed, can undercut a church’s ministry. Effectively managed, they can strengthen a church’s ministry immeasurably.
Effective management of staff begins with the hiring process. A church will not be tripped up as much if this first step is taken well. But even the wisest of churches ends up with ineffective employees, who need supervision, redirection, and perhaps termination. Mastering church management means learning to hire and, yes, fire.
Before Hiring: Some Questions
Before we get to specifics, however, a few preliminary questions must be answered.
• When is it time to replace volunteers with employees? Some believe that the ideal church should manage itself with only volunteers. That would develop lay leadership and be good for the budget besides! Ideal or not, most churches quickly see that lay leadership needs to be supplemented with hired staff. But how do you know when to supplement? When is it time to hire someone to do what has been a volunteer position? We hire when I see one of three situations develop.
First, we hire if the volunteer becomes overworked in his or her job. Early in one of my churches, I discovered that the treasurer of the church, a man at ease with numbers and spreadsheets, had to spend twenty hours a week doing the church’s books. That was unfair to him and unfair to his family. So we brought on a part-time bookkeeper.
Second, we hire when we cannot find in our volunteer pool the skills we need for a job. When skills are inadequate, quality and excellence are sacrificed. That means that people will suffer spiritually in the long run. To be fair to our congregation we hire people with expertise if we cannot find an “expert” volunteer.
We have a retired businessman who has been chairman of our missions committee for six years now. Because he’s retired he is able to put in twenty or more hours a week without burdening himself. He even pays his own way to travel around the mission field. His ministry of missions has grown so much during his tenure that when he “retires” from the missions committee, we will probably hire someone to take his place. His ministry and skills have become so important to the church that we simply will not want that ministry to flounder.
Sometimes we move back and forth between volunteers and employees. For example, teaching adolescents requires specific skills. Sometimes a member of the church will have those skills. If so, that member can teach the high school class. But if no member can do that, we hire a teacher, perhaps a member of a parachurch organization. And if later we gain a member who can teach youth, we go back to a volunteer system.
The point is, if the job requires expertise, we find the “expert” in the church. If we can’t, we consider hiring from outside.
Third, we hire when our volunteer system breaks down. The church, like other volunteer organizations, constantly struggles with this one. We recently had three volunteers who agreed to chaperone a young people’s trip call three days before the trip and say: “Sorry, we can’t go. Something’s come up.” You cannot run a church that way. When our church decides that we need consistent quality in a program, we hire. Because the hired staff person has covenanted with us to be productive, we can demand a greater level of accountability. We cannot do that with volunteers.
• When should we move from lay to ordained staff? This question focuses on the difference between lay and clergy staff. When can a lay person handle a position, and when is it necessary to have a clergy person?
Naturally, this discussion hinges on one’s view of ordination. I believe ordination signals that a person has been called by the Lord through the church to minister to and through the church. Theologically, that may be enough, but administratively we need more criteria. We need to consider the function of the position. Some positions require that the person function as an ordained person, one who can marry and bury, who represents the church, or who can work in an ecumenical capacity. Not all of these functions absolutely require ordination, but given the expectations of people, it may be best to hire a clergy person.
In many situations, of course, ordination doesn’t matter. Take our young-adult ministry, for instance. Twice we’ve put a young lay person in charge of our college and young-singles ministries. In both cases, as time went on, each of the young men desired more training and began attending seminary while he worked here. After seminary both received ordination and stayed on staff as clergy.
• Do we hire within or outside the membership? Our first general principle is this: You don’t pay members of your own family. We expect members of the church to offer themselves freely to serve. And when our board decides, for the reasons stated above, that ifs time to hire, we hire outside the membership.
That principle cannot, of course, be applied across the board. Choir directors and associate ministers, for example, are paid and they are members of the church. But their jobs require them to be intensely involved in the life of the church. Jobs with limited congregational involvement (functional jobs: janitor, secretary) are jobs that should be given to people outside the congregation. If the talent were available, we would rightly expect members to contribute their time in those jobs. Of course, at times the line between these two categories gets fuzzy.
Our second principle: we never hire someone we can’t tire. That’s a crude way of saying that we want to be able to exercise free judgment about an employee’s work and perform our administrative responsibility to the congregation. This rule encourages us to look first outside the church when we need to hire.
Our third principle: Don’t hire within the congregation if it’s going to hamper effective ministry. This applies particularly to the position of church secretary. Church members, especially those coming to a pastor for counseling, are less inhibited about doing so if they don’t know the secretary socially. They don’t want to walk out of my office in tears when a member whom they’ll see in worship or at a picnic on Saturday sits at the front desk. Naturally, this is a tension when you’re first starting a church and must use volunteers as secretaries. Then you have to live with the tension.
• Who should do the hiring? In our church polity, the formal hiring is done by the board of trustees or delegated to a person or group. But as important as this structure is, it is vital to allow the staff member who will supervise the new position to define the position and do the initial screening. He reports, in turn, to his supervisor, usually me. But since he will have the primary relationship with the person hired, it’s important he have the first say about who gets hired.
So, if the Christian education pastor needs an associate in children’s ministries, he personally will select that person before bringing him or her to me. He has the opportunity to find someone compatible. Furthermore, as the education expert, he has more competence to judge the person’s abilities. I do, however, keep in touch through the entire process; I look at the job description, suggest changes, and offer cautions here and there. Then, when he comes to me with a candidate, I interview the person, as does the board upon my recommendation. For people such as interns and assistants to pastors, those serving between the staff and congregation, the board interview is more of a review. The critical interview has already been done by the staff member and me. But I have found that even these candidates need to meet the board to get an idea of what the board expects of them. It’s a good introduction and reminder of accountability.
• Whom do you hire first? My guiding principle is that an organization ought to invest in that part of the organization that will immediately affect the community it seeks to reach.
In our approach, we bring people together primarily through worship. Consequently, the first person we hired was a part-time organist and choir director. I was convinced that if the worship service on Sunday were to be done with excellence, our church could make it in this community. Worship was our showpiece, the community’s introduction to Christ Church of Oak Brook. So as soon as we were able, we hired someone who could help us worship with excellence.
Some believe a church should hire a secretary first to free up the pastor’s time. In my experience, however, there are always people in the congregation who will give a few hours for secretarial work and do a fine job. But finding someone to lead music with excellence is something else. If I have the money, I’d rather spend it to hire those who will impact the community.
• What benefits should we offer full-time, nonordained staff? Since most ministers are offered a variety of benefits, and since many denominations require them, I will focus my thoughts on the part of the staff that may get overlooked.
We believe it is an absolute requisite these days to offer all fulltime staff adequate health care. The church cannot expect devotion from its staff if it is not willing to care for them when they fall ill. The first benefit we offer, then, is health care for the staff members and their families. We consider it a moral obligation.
We once sponsored an overseas missionary who contracted Hodgkin’s Disease. We found out that the parachurch organization for which he worked had no health care for him or his family. Fortunately, a doctor from our congregation took him into his home, and we took care of him. But we also suggested to the para-church organization that their policies were irresponsible.
Second, we insist that our heads of households participate in a retirement program. We don’t want our people to reach retirement age and suddenly realize they haven’t laid anything away. If they don’t know anything about it, we’ll offer them counsel and set up a program for them. If the staff person pleads, “I need my money this year; don’t put it in a pension fund,” we politely refuse.
Those are the minimum benefits we think every full-time employee of the church should have. We will not support even missionaries unless the organization for which they work has that same commitment.
• What are the legal ramifications of hiring—and firing? A lot of legal issues arise today that we never used to have to think about. Our board recently was discussing, for example, whether it would be possible to have a mandatory retirement age of 65 years. We found out, however, that such a policy would be illegal. If we want to do that, the church has to get an agreement from the person at the time of hiring. On top of that, there are matters like liability and severance pay—so many matters that I could not begin to discuss them here.
Suffice it to say, we have an attorney on our board who helps us in this respect. I believe it would be wise for even a small church to have access to an attorney whom it could consult from time to time. In today’s world it’s a must.
Hiring: What to Look For
When hiring, whether for a ministry or support position, we look for three things: Christian commitment, compatibility, and a combination of competence-dedication-vision.
• Christian commitment. Deep Christian commitment is a given, of course, with full-time ministry staff. But how much Christian commitment should we expect of people in support positions—secretaries and janitors?
I think it’s highly important, for theological but also practical reasons. Christian commitment makes people better workers. They’re more likely to see their job as a vocation, a calling. The church usually cannot offer salary and benefits that secular institutions can—especially for people of talent, the type of people we want. So skilled people who are looking for work in the church are likely to have a significant level of Christian commitment to begin with. After all, they are willing to sacrifice financially in order to work in a place that seeks to serve and glorify Christ.
• Compatibility. Another characteristic I look for during the hiring process is compatibility, both doctrinal and personal. Of course, the more ministry oriented the position, the more compatibility we expect.
Doctrinal compatibility is especially important with ministerial staff. But personal compatibility is just as important for us. We could not have, for example, an independent, strong-headed person working in the education department here who expressed publicly his disagreements with the music program. We’re looking for team players, people who can do their job with excellence, trust others to do theirs, and work with them cooperatively.
Naturally, it is difficult to discern compatibility in the all-too-brief interview process. But there are signals that tip us off regarding the person’s ability to get along with other people.
For example, we look at the candidate’s length of stay in other positions. If a person moves every three or four years, I want to know why. It takes one to two years to find out someone isn’t doing well and another year or two to help him relocate. So a three- or four-year stint at a job may not indicate a good working relationship.
If this is someone I’m hiring, I’ll ask my staff to meet with the person. I urge the candidate to probe each of my other staff members about me, this organization, and our style of management. I think it’s important for the candidate to talk confidentially with the people with whom he or she will be working. And I’ll want the staff’s impressions of the person’s compatibility.
In addition, appearance can tell me a great deal. The candidate must be able to read the culture to which he or she will be ministering. If we discover that we’ve got a child of the sixties, who doesn’t like organizations and institutions. Oak Brook is no place for that person. Our congregation consists of institutional people. We want our staff to love these people, not condemn them. So we feel the candidate must tit the church’s culture, and that includes the way he or she dresses.
In addition, particularly when it comes to ministerial staff, we also look for compatibility of competence. We don’t like to have a Ph.D. in one department and a Bible school graduate in another. We strive for a match in quality and maturity across the board.
In short, compatibility means more than just being able to get along.
• Competence-dedication-vision. After compatibility, we aim to hire people who combine these three qualities. We once interviewed a man who had a good track record. Everything went tine through the interview process, so we brought him on. For the first few months he worked hard and did well.
In six months, however, we began to notice a trend. He seemed to have decided that this was a nice place to retire at an early age. He would arrive at nine o’clock in the morning with his newspaper, shut his door, and read it. He began his appointments about ten o’clock and made a few calls. But every afternoon at four-thirty, he walked out his door. And if he possibly could avoid coming back at night, he’d avoid it. He would tell people, “I’m sorry, but I don’t work after four-thirty.” If he had to attend a meeting at night, he would leave the office at noon.
He wasn’t putting in the time and energy the job demanded. The rest of the staff started to come to me and say, “Hey, this fellow isn’t pulling his load.” You can’t hook up a team of horses and have one of them dragging behind.
We want our ministerial staff to be leaders who develop a vision for their departments. Then we can turn them loose.
I’ve noticed that compatibility and competence make an outstanding combination. Not only are staff members doing great things in their departments, but when we get together, that energy and creativity tends to sharpen each of us. In addition, that combination seems to encourage longevity on my staff. Nobody wants to leave a place where team play and individual excellence are encouraged.
We also look for a high level of competence with our support staff. Of course, when I hire a secretary, I look for more than mere secretarial skills. I learn a great deal about my staff and congregation through my secretary. The church office is a hub of church life. An alert secretary can pick up a lot. So I often will ask her opinion about things that effect the congregation. My secretary needs to type, but she also needs wisdom.
How to Get an Honest Reference
In looking for Christian commitment, compatibility, and competence, the church often has to rely on evaluations of those who have worked with the candidate. But evaluations can be notoriously deceptive. First, the candidate is going to list only references who will evaluate him positively. In addition, most who write evaluations hesitate to speak negatively about the person they evaluate. Yet, in spite of these handicaps, I think it’s possible to get an honest evaluation. It’s not only possible; it’s vital.
To begin with, we don’t just read the references’ letters; we interview them. I can catch things on the telephone—hesitancy or enthusiasm. I also try to find a friend or acquaintance who knows somebody where this person has been. Often I find such people, especially if I dig a little. This person can give me insights the references won’t give. Trying to locate someone for whom the candidate worked two or three situations ago also helps. Their superiors tend to be far more honest with the passing of time.
All this may seem like a lot of trouble. But it saves our church much grief down the road if I will take the time at the beginning.
When the Job Isn’t Getting Done
From time to time I suspect a staff member may be malfunctioning. This hardly constitutes evidence for firing, although it may eventually lead to it. What are the steps to take before that drastic measure is called for?
• Quietly investigate. As soon as I suspect trouble, I begin keeping my ear to the ground. I ask questions of secretaries or other staff. But I do so quietly, subtly, in a casual manner: What’s going on with So-and-so? How are his groups doing? Anything new coming on line? What’s happening in the department? How many people were in his last class?
• Meet with staff. If two or three staff members suggest there are problems with the person in question, I call a meeting of the entire staff, not including the person in question. I’ll ask how serious the problem is. Is it worth looking into, or should I just forget about it? If something should come out, that’s when it does.
• Encourage staff to be honest with the person. Next I encourage the rest of the staff to tell the person, in a tactful way, the problems he’s causing them—when he didn’t come to a meeting, or when he stood somebody up, or when he avoided a job that they got stuck with. They shouldn’t sit around trying to be nice. In the long run, it’s better to talk with the person. And often honesty from peers will solve the problem.
• Probation. If that doesn’t work, I will have an interview with the person, and I will ask for his or her perspective regarding the problem.
Unless something unexpected comes to light, I will explain to the person that without a change in the next six months, he will be dismissed. I list the specific things that trouble me and the ways those things can be cleared up. I explain that we will have regular meetings to evaluate his work along the way.
One former staff member didn’t realize that we expected creative leadership from him. He thought he was to follow the pattern of a predecessor and merely maintain the status quo. When his creativity and aggressiveness began to lag, I called him in and said, “I think things could be going better.” He listened intently. He wanted to know what he should do differently.
When I told him, he said, “You give me three or four months, and I’ll turn this thing around.” I asked for some goals and objectives, which he had for me within a week. I said, “Okay. You meet those goals, and you’re back in business.”
He came back in four months and had met every one of them. He hadn’t realized it was his prerogative to be aggressive. All he needed was honest feedback.
• Bring in the board. By this time, I have informed the trustee board of what I’m doing. If they have any questions, they talk to the person. And before I decide on a course of action, I will ask the board for advice. Those men, gifted in management and administration, often counsel me wisely on how to handle malfunctioning people.
On one occasion I asked a staff member, who used his time poorly, to keep a log of his next thirty days. I wanted to know when he came to work, how many hours he put in, whether he studied at home, where he went. I wanted to know everything he did from the time he got out of bed until the time he went back to bed. My board encouraged me to do that. It turned out to be an excellent approach.
Naturally, they are pledged to confidentiality. Nothing of this sort gets out of the board, not even to their families.
• Get the person to tell you what you said. When I talk with someone about job performance or about an unpleasant decision, I ask the person to repeat what I said. Because they are caught emotionally off balance in this situation, people may hear things differently than I say them.
Once, because of her poor performance with a particular age level, I had to ask a church school teacher to teach a different class. She left the office and immediately called a friend and said, “Can you imagine! After fourteen years of teaching Sunday school, I got fired.” Word got back to me, “Why did you fire So-and-so?” I hadn’t fired her, I’d merely told her she was being moved to a different class. Letting people summarize what I’ve said during the interview eliminates needless misunderstandings.
Dismissing a Staff Member
What happens at the end of six months when things have not unproved? What are the next steps?
• Give time to find new work. First, we tell the person he will no longer work here after a certain date, but we let him stay on staff three to nine months at full salary and with freedom to interview. During that time, he maintains his responsibilities in the church.
The only people who know he’s been terminated are those who have agreed that he ought to be fired: the board and staff. If he makes trouble in the congregation or lets it out that he’s being terminated, he is asked immediately to clean out his desk. In that case, he is given only an abbreviated period of full pay.
On those occasions when our congregation has learned of a firing, it hasn’t caused a problem. The congregation has enough confidence in the board to know that if someone has been fired, it was probably best. The few people who have questions will ask a staff member what’s going on. When we explain the steps we took and the offers we made, they end up agreeing with our decision. Because we have a defensible process, we’re not as vulnerable.
• Give a gracious farewell. When the person finds another position, we announce to the congregation that he has received a call to another place. We publicly wish him well, although we won’t necessarily praise him for all he did here.
• Give fair references. As this staff person interviews elsewhere, his potential employers may phone me for a reference. What am I supposed to say?
I put the ball in their court. I ask, “What exactly do you want to know about this person?” I make them ask specific questions. I do not volunteer any information. And then I answer honestly.
For example, if the employer asks if the staff member is a competent youth minister, I ask, “What are you expecting of your youth minister?” If he says, “Well, I’m expecting him to visit with kids and lead singing during the meetings,” I might respond, “I think he could lead singing successfully, but he tried visiting kids and it didn’t work. I can’t tell you if he could do that for you successfully or not, but it wasn’t very successful here.”
So I try to be honest and yet give the staff member all the opportunity I can. Sometimes other organizations aren’t looking for the same things we are, and a person who failed here can succeed elsewhere.
Even Good Administrators Sometimes Lose
In spite of thoughtful procedure and compassionate management, things sometimes go wrong. Even if I do everything right, I sometimes lose, or the church may suffer a setback. I may wind up with an angry member who leaves the church over a personnel decision I’ve made. We may end up hiring a staff member who turns out to be incompetent. Sometimes the problem is the hardheaded-ness of a board member or my inability to predict the future, not a lack of administrative competence.
So in the midst of these tough personnel decisions, I try to do what is best for all concerned, not simply what will make me look successful. My job is not to guarantee success or boast a flawlessly run organization. My job is to make the best decisions I can, and trust that God, in the long run, will use them to build his kingdom.
Copyright © 1990 by Christianity Today
