This series of posts is to suggest some ideas for how a church might be organized to do ministry. The fact is that as churches grow, they have to reorganize. Structures that work in a church of 200 likely won’t work in a church of 500.
Many churches have struggled to grow because they’ve failed to match their organizational structure to their size. As a result, members’ gifts have been under-utilized and needs haven’t been met. Members get frustrated and go somewhere else.
For example, a church of 100 likely has quarterly business meetings where many decisions are made. Members feel a sense of ownership and appreciate getting to have input. But a church of 1,000 will likely never have a business meeting. You can’t expect 1,000 to sit in a room and debate and make decisions. It just won’t happen. In such a large crowd, only those with an agenda–or the neurotic–will speak up. Therefore, as churches grow, business meetings become less frequent and decisions get made by the elders or by the elders and deacons.
While the church was smaller, the deacons handled fairly minor tasks–counting the money, locking the doors, cutting the grass. But as the church grows, the deacons become program heads. A deacon may be appointed over the teen, children’s, or benevolence program. The deacons thus become the church’s cabinet. And the deacons gives the elders a way to hear from younger families, which helps broaden the decision-making base.
But as the church grows even more, perhaps around 400 members, the church realizes that many of its programs are run by non-deacons. The youth ministry is run by the youth minister. The children’s program is run by a retired, female school teacher. The benevolence program is run by a single man with a passion for benevolence.
Most churches will go through a phase where they place a deacon over the person who actually runs the program, so that the deacon becomes a liaison to the elders. This structure preserves our expectation that deacons will oversee programs, but it’s a clumsy, inefficient system.
The woman running the children’s program gets frustrated because she can’t speak directly to the elders. Rather, her deacon meets and makes decisions about things he really doesn’t understand. It’s not his fault. He’s been put in a position he’s not really qualified for. It’s a plainly awkward, artificial structure.
As the church grows, this structure becomes more and more unmanageable, and so the elders decide to take some ministries out from under deacons. But in a large church, the ministries require some level of coordination. If not, they wind up having events competing for volunteers, money, and space. Somehow or other, the church has to make sure that small groups aren’t meeting during the missions team meeting and that the fundraiser for the teen mission trip isn’t the same night as the men’s retreat.
And budgeting is hard, even in a small church. Somehow or other, a finite pot of money has to be divided among dozens of ministries, all of which would like more.
As a result, some churches establish what might be called a “ministries team.” This team is made up of the actual program heads–male and female, married and single. They meet periodically to coordinate activities and set budgets. However, in this structure, the deacons are no longer necessarily program heads. In fact, some churches struggle finding a place for the office of deacon. Rather, they build their ministries based on the doctrine of gifts and talents. But what of the deacons?
Meanwhile, the elders find that they have only so much time and can’t run a large church the way they ran the church when it was smaller. The budget has more line items and the elders have less personal knowledge of the ministries in a big church. Plus the elders feel the need to spend more time in pastoral care (shepherding) and so want to be relieved of administrative burdens.
As the church grows even larger, say, 750 or more, more and more of the church’s ministries have been turned over to full-time staff. And yet, in the Churches of Christ, we believe that elders are called to oversee and shepherd the church. They can’t be limited solely to pastoral care. But the limit on church growth we face is–so long as the elders insist on overseeing the church on a day to day basis, the church can grow no larger than a organization that can be overseen by part-time volunteers. And that’s about 750. Maybe 1,000.
At this point the elders have to let the staff do more and more of the day-to-day management. Of course, pulpit preachers aren’t necessarily gifted to run a church. Often the congregation hires an administrative minister to handle the day-to-day management of the church.
At the same time, as the church grows, it will have more and more elders. An eldership of 12 or 15 can’t sit around a table and make administrative decisions. It takes too long. Most of the elders aren’t gifted for administration. Those who are are frustrated by how long it takes to make a decision. Those that aren’t would rather be visiting the sick and shut ins.
Larger elderships therefore specialize, creating an administrative committee to work with the administrative minister to keep the programs running while the other elders spend their time with the flock, caring for the sick and bereaved. Of course, major decisions, such as the hiring of a pulpit minister or a change in worship practice, are taken up by the entire eldership, but these are infrequent events.
Each organization change comes with difficulty. The role of deacons constantly shifts. The elders’ relationship with the ministry leaders, deacons, and ministers changes. The gifts the church needs from its ministers shift over time. Some ministers just don’t work well in a given structure.
And the gifts elders need to have change, too. The man who became an elder of a 100-member church may find himself overwhelmed trying to shepherd a church of 500. Where was he supposed to learn how to “vision” or how to manage a staff of 5 preachers? Why does he have to learn about child abuse policies?
And these are the problems of healthy churches! I mean, these are the problems elders pray for–how to cope with growth.
In the next posting, we’ll consider the theological question of the role of deacons. We’ll then share some ideas about ministries teams and such.
