How to Determine Your Church Staff Size

How do you determine your church staff size?

This staffing complication has only gotten more complicated in the past few years. How you determine your staff size may determine more about your church’s future than you think.

When I first began leading in the church, we thought about staff size as a ratio of physical attendance. That was the predominant approach, and for the most part, it worked.

Enter the pandemic and the accelerated trends every church has experienced! No church leader can use this antiquated staffing solution in isolation.

In this NEW POST, I outline a better approach to determine the size of your staff.

If you know any church leader who needs to read this, please pass it along. Also, I’m going to spend some more time this month talking about staffing in the church, so be sure you and your friends subscribe to stay connected to this conversation.

Because Hiring Diverse Strengths Is Not Enough

Every leader knows that a well-rounded staff makes for a better organization. As a leader, you desire to have a diversity of skills, capabilities, and even personalities on the team. You want a leadership team to provide different perspectives. You want a leadership team to contain unique individual abilities. You want an overall staff built upon a healthy diversity of talent.

You want people with financial strengths, administrative strengths, people strengths, and creative strengths. You want leaders around you who are feelers, doers, thinkers, strategist, contemplative, and decisive. You need this as a leader. And your organization needs this to be successful.

That should be easy to accomplish, right? I mean, all you really need to do is hire for strength and personality diversity. Not diversity of chemistry — we all need to love the people we work along side — but diversity of talent. Diversity of abilities. Diversity of personality.

Filling Seats on Your Bus

If you lead any type of organization — company, church, or department — you probably have an organizational chart of some sort. It’s one of those necessary structures that help delineate chain of command and channels of communication, among others.

When I first began leading a church (a typical organization in many ways), I was encouraged to envision the org chart 5 – 10 years down the road. What departments would be necessary? What divisions? How many layers? How many staff? I even went as far as putting my name in most of the “open” positions in this hypothetical org chart. Visually, it looked impressive and strategic. Personally, it just looked like I had too much to do!

I think this is a valuable exercise for every leader. If you’ve never done it, you should. But a few years into leading at Woodstock City Church, this exercise created quite the conundrum.

Here’s the dilemma I began to ponder: Is it better to start with the org chart in place so you can then find the right people for each box, or is it better to find the right people and build the organization around them?

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