Leadership: How to Handle Staff During Two Services

13 Responses to Leadership: How to Handle Staff During Two Services

1. Dwayne Phillips says:

   February 27, 2012 at 8:27 am

   “…how most churches handle staff attendance and elder attendance when there are multiple services”
   One-word answer: Poorly.
2. Charles McLean says:

   February 27, 2012 at 9:18 am

   I was part of the worship team for a large church with back-to-back Sunday services. We arrived early for the 9:15 AM service, led worship for that service and participated in that entire service. After the shift change, we led worship for the 10:30 service, and when the podium was handed over to the speaker, the worship team was free to go home. Some stayed for the second service, some did not. The staff music minister stayed for both services. We did not generally do “invitation songs” or “recessionals” at service end, so this was not an issue.

   I hear paid staff tell folks that they work on Sundays; for these staffers, I would suggest that they should show up for eight hours like the rest of us working stiffs do on a workday.

   As to shepherds: If an elder is mainly encountering the sheep at services, he needs to be on duty at all services. Really, folks, this is not all that taxing. If, OTOH, an elder is mainly interacting with the sheep outside the services, he should be free to attend services as he sees fit. Simply put, wherever you work, show up there and do your job. If you need a group of elders present to “supervise” every church service, what kind of people are on your podium? And why are they not trusted? If you have a regular role for elders in the service, then have them in attendance. Honestly, people act like this is a double-shift at the factory. It’s more like attending a double-feature at the theater.
3. Doug says:

   February 27, 2012 at 10:32 am

   At the church where we are attending, it appears to me that the entire staff associated with the servce is there for both services and stays through both services. They also meet for prayer in a corner of the room before the service begins. When I say entire staff, I mean anybody associated with the service and that includes musicians, sound people, people doing scripture readings or testimony, and the preacher. The time of prayer that they have means something to me because I know that they are praying for the period of worship to be meaningful to me.
4. theophilus.dr says:

   February 27, 2012 at 1:15 pm

   Perhaps it depends on the purpose for having the “service” which then relates to the “real” question.

   Looking at it from two extremes:

   Is the question, “What is the minimum I have to do?” If the purpose is to perform a dutiful administration of certain actions and spoken words according to a planned and approved protocol within a specifically alloted time frame (the appointed hour) so that people can check it off and get on with their lives, it would seem one should have to only attend one service. An alternative might be to play the mp3 of the service on one’s iPhone while performing real life activities on the golf course (having the contribution on automatic draft).

   Is the question, “What is the maximum that God could do through us?” If the purpose is to build up the body of Christ into the full knowledge of the Lord Jesus, to prepare God’s people for works of service, to pray for one another and to bear one another’s burdens, to encourage and testify of the goodness of God, to proclaim the Lord’s death for the sanctification of His body, to forgive and reconcile with one another for the sake of Christ and our peace with one another and with God, to show the world the love of God by our love for one another, to show the world what it means to be one with God by the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace that we maintain with one another, to experience the presence and power of God by His Holy Spirit indwelling His assembled body, then one would want to attend both services. And then the third service, and the fourth service, and the ……..

   It’s not a requirement, it’s a choice. Which choice is the church making, and what is the outcome?
5. Grizz says:

   February 27, 2012 at 2:41 pm

   The first and foremost consideration is that those who show up are there to worship God and edify one another. They are NOT “putting in their shift at work” or offering “matinee” entertainment values. Everyone is present to worship and edify one another or else they need to leave their gift in front of the altar as Jesus taught/teaches and get things right before returning to participate in the assembly.

   The second consideration is that it is NOT our place to judge one another, period. We cannot ‘require’ anything. We CAN choose to support or not support a minister/ministry. We can choose to listen, respect, be persuaded by, or respond in any other way to those who are leading, teaching, serving, etc., BUT we do not have the right to judge or place requirements on those who are serving the Lord. We CAN offer contracts that promise specific kinds of support in return for performance of assigned activities/responsibilities, and those contracts may be accepted or rejected.

   To directly answer the question asked, though, we who are in leadership, whether ministers or elders, paid or unpaid, are ‘expected’ at each assembly just like anyone else. When we have an active or particular part to play and there is some reason we cannot be there, we coordinate coverage for that part and we might also state a reason we will not be attending – IF that reason indicates a need for prayer support or re-scheduling, or whatever. We are quite open and non-judgmental about whether we can attend and why, just like brothers and sisters might do for any family gathering. If there is a chronic or repetitive issue with attendance, one or more of the leaders is likely to inquire how we might help and encourage one another to resolve or at least address the issue(s) causing one to be unavailable so often. Whether the person is paid or unpaid is never the primary issue. Relationship with one another and encouraging one another is always the first and foremost concern.

   Blessings,

   Grizz
6. Adam says:

   February 27, 2012 at 3:30 pm

   I would humbly suggest, though, Grizz, that if a person is paid on staff, then the church can make requirements based on that pay. It doesn’t negate your points about worship and edification – of course they are there for that – or they shouldn’t be on staff 🙂

   Nevertheless, just as I hold a paid carpenter to a higher standard than my buddy who helps me on the weekend, so it is appropriate to hold paid staff to higher requirements.
7. eric says:

   February 27, 2012 at 3:55 pm

   I’ve been a member of a church where there were not only two services there were two Bible study hours as well. The Bible studies occurred during the services so some staff in that case may be needed in different places at different times. It was expected that everyone attend at least one if possible.
8. Charles McLean says:

   February 27, 2012 at 5:34 pm

   Grizz said: “…we do not have the right to judge or place requirements on those who are serving the Lord. We CAN offer contracts that promise specific kinds of support in return for performance of assigned activities/responsibilities, and those contracts may be accepted or rejected. ”
   >>>
   And once that contract is accepted? Can those who “serve the Lord” stop doing it if we stop paying them? Grizz, you are making a statement and then taking it back in the next breath. Even where there is no written contract, the staff is –whether we admit it or not– a group of at-will employees hired, supervised, directed, and fired by the board. I may not like that dollar-driven dynamic, but denying that we have it in place is futile. It is how we generally organize “church work” in this country. We use the hireling method and then hope we get better than hirelings to work for us.

   BTW, I serve the Lord while working for the state of Texas, no less than I served Him while working as a pulpit minister. To say that no human can hold me to account for my work or tell me how to do it is just silly. That’s the old myth of being one’s own boss. There is no such thing in reality, unless you are a subsistence farmer somewhere.
9. Grizz says:

   February 27, 2012 at 6:40 pm

   Charles,

   What’s your beef, brother?

   First, every minister (person who serves – particularly, for our use, in leadership) is accountable to their Lord. You can pretend the church is a business all you want, but it never will be. That is quite a worldly way of looking at it, for sure. Neither you nor anyone else besides Jesus is my Lord. Jesus made it extremely clear that it was NOT godly to try to be lords over your fellow servant(s) (see Matthew 20:25-28). Not even the Jews made that mistake.

   Second, there is a very real and mostly unappreciated difference between being a minister supported by a church or multiple churches – AND – being an employee of a governmental or corporate entity. I worked in the restaurant industry running a franchise operation’s recruiting and training efforts and supervising several ‘store’ locations. I averaged 90 hrs/week over a three year period…with gusts up to 125 hrs/week during the summer months. Most preachers I know put in similar hours…and usually without anyone ever suspecting a thing.

   Being on-call 24/7 (as most preachers are, no matter what they are told when they begin working with a congregation) leaves a mark in most regular jobs. As a minister, it builds a treasure.

   Carrying the emotional burdens and spiritual concerns of others is something every preacher and most elders understand in ways almost nobody else approaches understanding. In a regular job, you just avoid the water cooler when that kind of stuff is going on, or else you quickly offer to pray for someone and quickly excuse yourself. As a minister you seek out the hurting and the wounded and the bruised for an opportunity to pour out Jesus where He is needed most. Few others spend anything like the time a good minister spends at doing this – no matter what other plans his wife wanted to make or what program or game his kids and the other Christian parents with kids will attend. We assure him it is a shared burden, but his phone rings first and when he does not show up for our particular crisis we seem to forget that assurance of respect for his family’s time or for his own need to recuperate physically every 7th day or so. One might think that elders would share this part of the burden – taking some of the low-hanging fruit of broken lives as an easy point of ministry and contact that any shepherd would expect to handle. Too often this is the last thing that happens.

   Charles, there is accountability enough to go around for everyone in the body of Christ. Healthy relationships demand it. Threatening someone else’s livelihood is reserved in business circles for the upper echelons of the business hierarchy. The janitor cannot fire the cook or even expect to be heard at the cook’s annual salary and performance review time. Elders are watchmen – guards and sources of wisdom for the congregation who would care for and feed the congregation. Neither day nor night watchmen sit in on salary and performance reviews. The Lord – the owner, the redeemer, the savior, the sacrifice, the lion and the lamb – HE is the only one with the right of final review of the minister’s service.

   What CAN be reviewed by a select few is a contractual relationship. As far as I can tell Paul never settled down as a paid local preacher. While in Corinth he spent a little more time than he did most other places. While in Ephesus he stayed around for more than two years until they chased him out of town. In both cases his support came from his own work as a tent-maker and from other churches not located in Corinth or Ephesus. Seeing your desire to hold somebody accountable makes it clear to me that Paul’s decision to take no local support financially was a really wise decision.

   What is it that has so scarred you, Charles, that also inspires you to want to repeat those wounds upon another? Were you smothered by supervision when you worked as a preacher? Or were you turned loose and ignored and under-appreciated by the elders and members alike? Both are crimes all too often committed by well-meaning congregations. Neither is treatment worthy of the minister of the Word.

   Like Hosea, I know the wounds that come from being unequally accountable to people who are not much like the Lord they claim to also serve. Ministry, particularly ministry locally supported by a congregation, is NOT for even many of the strongest among us. As Paul noted (and times have not changed all that much) several times, abuse is par for the course if you serve Jesus well. Few ministers who serve any time at all will fail to make a similar observation at one time or another. That we wound and kill our dearest and best willingly is outrageous and will be held to our account when we stand before their Lord and ours.

   Watch the ministers’ doctrine closely. Watch their lives, too. And never imagine that they will face lesser accountability before the Lord who called them to serve. That is God’s domain. And He will be faithful to it. In the end the minister will need His grace as much or more than anyone who does not put themselves at the mercy of a hiring committee or group of business-owner elders.

   Yes, the minister should work regular hours, but he or she should also be paid in accord with anyone who puts in as many quality hours as he or she does. (Women who minister/serve as leaders among their peers should be supported as much as men who so serve.) What else is the support there for but to allow them to devote their time and energy to serving?

   If you work at your non-ministry job 40 hours per week for the same pay and with the same educational background, do you have the right to expect the minister to be on-call 24/7? Most think so and never examine their reasoning one whit. And next time you want to get on the minister’s case for a little ‘accountability time’ for the night when he failed to show up at the hospital at 2:00am or when he failed to call you after your sister’s friend’s cousin’s neighbor fell and bruised a knee and was put on the prayer list or any other real or perceived ‘slight’, try to imagine what it would be like for the preacher to have only your support financially to sustain his family. If you are one of 50 or one of 5,000 working adults in the local congregation imagine how much support that averages out to be for the staff.

   Charles, you kicked over a huge can of worms with your comments … at least for me. Are you ready to deal with it, brother? I hope you are and that you have really good answers to my questions.

   Blessings,

   Grizz
10. Charles McLean says:

    February 28, 2012 at 10:09 am

    Grizz, I was a full-time senior minister in the CoC for seven years. I was raised since the age of four as a preacher’s kid there–my father has been a career CoC minister and missionary for nearly fifty years now. My brother spent near thirty years in full-time ministry in the CoC, and still fills a pulpit part-time. I know full well and first-hand what preachers do for a living, having lived it myself, so please forgive me if I don’t sit down and take copious notes when someone with less experience on the inside offers to inform me on the subject. You can try to bury the realities under the implication that I have been sadly twisted by evil forces, but that’s just shooting the messenger with ersatz concern.

    The current hyperbole does not serve the clergy well, either. I often hear a preacher talking about being on call 24/7 as though he were the town’s only obstetrician. The reality is that he DID leave his bed in the middle of the night three times last year to serve a parishioner in trouble. My friends who are auto mechanics and plumbers get more late-night calls than my friends who are preachers. It is unwise to exaggerate; the unintended consequence is to create scorn where none existed before. And as to the lament that clergymen have to set aside time for their work which they would rather spend with their families… please. Take that up with a company commander in Afghanistan, or a medical resident at your local hospital… or even a truck driver or traveling salesman.

    As to bearing the cares of others, that is nothing more nor less than what a true friend does. Without compensation.

    I know this sounds cynical, and it does not reflect the real hearts of most clergymen, but ask most professional preachers just how long it would take them to move on to another sheepfold if their current paychecks were cut off. How long would your preacher stay here uncompensated and continue to bear the burdens of the flock after some nice people fifty miles away offer him a paying gig? I will not say that such men are hirelings by inclination, but sadly most have been pressed into that mold by the institutional system we have created within which they must serve. I have long advocated that instead of recruiting professionally-trained shepherd/managers from out of town, we should give financial support to those who were already caring for the sheep at their own expense, thus giving “double honor to those who serve well”. For a clear New Testament priniciple, it is one rarely enough embraced by those who would “speak where the bible speaks”.

    Keep telling me that a registered corporation with by-laws and a governing board and corporate assets and hired professional staff, which consistently hopes to grow its income and share of the market is not REALLY a business. Perhaps it’s not. But if it walks like a duck… If this entity’s income stream were to stop entirely, it would have to lay off its employees, divest itself of its assets and close its doors. (I’ve seen it happen.) It would cease to exist, and its remaining customers would find other vendors. Just how does that differ from a business? Perhaps it would be more accurate to describe this local entity as an organized religion club, but I’m sure that would offend certain sensibilities just as much.

    The intent here is not to offend, but to challenge the thinking which keeps the status quo in place. Unfortunately, offense is a common result of such an attempt. (Don Marquis said, “If you make people think they are thinking, they will love you. If you really make them think, they will hate you.”) People continue to conflate the church with these individual religious institutions. Certainly, these individual institutions/businesses/clubs are peopled with the sons of God. Certainly the church can be reflected wonderfully there, and very often is. But that local operation you attend is NOT the church, any more than the flagpole in front of the post office is America. The church is MUCH more.

    And people continue to conflate serving God with serving a religion club. A person who earns his bread as a high school English teacher may be serving God just as well and faithfully as the person who earns his bread by offering his lectures on the Bible from a pulpit. One servant is not somehow of a different nature than the other– but we call only one of the two a “man of God”. We fail to appreciate this error because we have returned to a de facto Levitical priesthood, except nowadays anyone with good presentation skills can apply to be a Levite, especially if he gets an education which will encourage his admittance to that exclusive tribe. The rest of us are called to pay up to support these new Levites. For a denomination which generally dismisses the Old Testament as “the old Law”, we have managed to hang on to this particular aspect of the Law with surprising tenacity.

    I love the bride of Christ, and I respect those who lay down their lives to present her to Christ. But much of our understanding of both of those things is just so distorted by what we have built in our own wisdom that it does not really do what we hope to see done in the world around us. Sorry to have taken this thread so far afield. I’ll let someone else have the last word.
11. Grizz says:

    February 28, 2012 at 7:48 pm

    Charles,

    Sounds like we have similar backgrounds. I was a full-time for 10 years. My brother has been at the same church for 29 years this month as their FT preacher. My best friends growing up have all spent at least 15 years in FT ministry from Kenya to Uganda and in more than half the states of the USA. My best friend of over 40 years (we were kids back when we met – both not yet 10) has been preaching for more than 25 years.

    Then again, we aren’t so similar in experience. My Dad was a pilot and a musician, not a preacher. The preachers I have served with (as an volunteer with an expense account) over the last ten years have been preaching for the assembly I now attend for more than 20 years with NO financial support beyond a few dollars for gas and printing expenses. Only one of our ministers has less than 10 years experience and he and his wife are supported by her work and we provide them with an apartment to live in. He is full-time reaching out to unchurched youth in our community. So the idea of being able to find men who would work for practically nothing or actually nothing is my everyday life … and I am one of that number. We are very different that way, Charles.

    The only thing handled like a business here is the ownership of our assembly hall, office building/apartment, and a small parsonage owned by the congregation. And we are about to divest ourselves of that ownership. It is not at all as hard as some might imagine.

    Would I leave here for a paying gig as a preacher? Probably … but only to allow my wife to stop working as a Registered Nurse. It is just getting to be too much for her.

    If you still think you are chatting with someone with less experience on the inside, then it is clear you have no idea with whom you come to these forums. Still, so what? Who really cares about all of this bragging rights garbage? I don’t. In fact I am ashamed of this whole mess. I get where Paul was coming from a whole lot more now than I used to. Still, as did Paul, I can see where it might help some to know the facts of the matter.

    Every church for whom I have labored has at least doubled in size and depth, both numerically and in demonstrable ways spiritually. Can you say the same? If we are going to compare experience, let’s compare effectiveness as Paul also did with those who compared themselves to him. My first six months in a small town of 2500 citizens I was called out after midnight an average of 4 times per week. During that same period I was called out before 6am an average of 9 times per week – occasionally on mornings that followed those late-night calls. My first six months with a city congregation I was called out after midnight an average of 12 times per week. Nobody in the city ever called for anything before 7am. City and country congregations and communities have different schedules. I know the numbers, Charles, because I tracked them and kept a diary of sorts just to see if what I was told in preaching school actually held true. It did. Maybe not for you … but it did for me. Maybe I was just too easygoing and didn’t fuss enough to get out of those calls. Truly, in ten years I can only remember fussing once about any of the calls I received. That was when I was called out while running a 102 degree fever and my wife was exhausted. It did not seem fair to leave her at home alone with our two children … especially since the youngest was only two weeks old and did not sleep more than two hours at a time. Paul was right again. Having a wife along changes priorities.

    We are brothers in Christ, Charles. I honor you for your service. And yet I also disagree sometimes with your perspectives as you present them. (Of course, that means I also sometimes agree.)

    To those who have been offended by this exchange – grow up! We are not cookie-cutter Christians any more than the original 12 were. And get real! Diversity is a glory to God, not a burden to bear.

    Perhaps I should now be still. Reading my own writing is reminding of the wife of a man who once said, “After 25 years of marriage I love my wife still … better than any other way.”

    Blessings,

    Grizz
12. Kent Gatewood says:

    March 4, 2012 at 1:36 am

    I think it is beyond the call to expect people to sit through two sermons.

    The families of the ministers all go to the instrumental service.

    The staff are half and half.
13. Charles McLean says:

    March 4, 2012 at 7:28 pm

    Grizz wrote: “Who really cares about all of this bragging rights garbage? I don’t. In fact I am ashamed of this whole mess….

    Every church for whom I have labored has at least doubled in size and depth, both numerically and in demonstrable ways spiritually. Can you say the same?”
    >>>
    Okay… can’t say I can add anything to that.

    But yes, Grizz, of course we are brothers. And I take no offense at being disagreed with. Heaven knows that at times it has been the right thing to do. And it is our capacity to disagree, and even to reject a serious idea or viewpoint offered by one another, AND TO REMAIN CONNECTED, that speaks to the nature of our kinship.

    My peace on your house, amigo.

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