staff
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Repost: Try not to confuse your relationship ‘hats’
Some people you know on only one level; the local barista, a taxi driver, the policeman pulling you over for speeding. Its a pretty simple relationship, because you’re the driver and he’s the cop. But what if the cop who… Continue reading
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The people in the meeting define the purpose, not just the person calling the meeting
This may seem the wrong way around, and to some extent, it shouldn’t be this way. However, every time someone new joins a meeting, the purpose of the meeting changes slightly to accommodate their “needs”; whether felt needs or real… Continue reading
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How much should you pay church staff? #3
Looking at Church staff pay over the last few posts… basically a summary of what our Association Committee discussed and decided last year. In the last post we saw that staff salaries should be: Comparable, according to the work they… Continue reading
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How much should you pay church staff? #2
When our Association Committee reviewed our staff salary packages, we asked the question, “How should staff pay compare to other salaries?” When we looked to the Bible, we found a bunch of passages that gave us some good principles which… Continue reading
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How much should you pay church staff? #1
Last year, our Association Committee (of Elders) discussed a concern that we may not be paying our staff sufficiently. In the past we effectively operated like a small business – paying our staff what we could manage, which wasn’t much, but… Continue reading
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How many staff should you have per person?
Israel had about 1 Levite per 11 other Israelites. But that’s not particularly helpful. This is a difficult question to answer because really… Who knows!?! The best you can do is have what you think is an appropriate ratio. But… Continue reading
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How we arrived at the Purposes Model
After recently attending the very encouraging Nexus Conference I thought it’d be helpful to outline how we arrived at the Purposes Model. Back in 2008, we had 3 congregations and 1 more about to kick off. We had a Senior Pastor (Greg… Continue reading
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The Nexus Conf and the “Portfolio Model”
One of the “controversies” (apparently) at the Nexus Conference was comparing the Congregational Model of staffing to the Portfolio Model of staffing. While I was really pleased to see brothers keen to sharpen in their thinking about how to get… Continue reading
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Why staff don’t take gifts
This is just one of the principles we made clear from the start with our staff. Staff don’t take gifts from the congregation. There’s OK gifts like “let me buy you a coffee” or “It’s your birthday”… they are common gifts… Continue reading
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Another attempt to pictorally display church
Recently we had our AGM which gave us another opportunity to try and help our church see itself. That might seem like a strange idea, but for most people, they only see (or even hear) about the aspects of their… Continue reading
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Why would you give a volunteer access to church data?
There’s a few things to think about before you give people access to contact details and other data. You’re not giving them access, you’re appointing them with responsibility. There are certain things people should do, and not do with private… Continue reading
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Church “Org charts” are hard
Recently we thought it would be a good idea to try and visually communicate our church staff “map”. It was an attempt to try and describe how we’ve deployed staff across our 5 passions for our flock, and across our… Continue reading
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The principles that should guide what pastoral staff meetings look like
A Church staff meeting is the opportunity to express and embody the values you want to shape your staff team culture. For our staff team, that means we spend time in the bible and in prayer for our church and… Continue reading
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Ministry Exercise: Imagine doing another staff member’s job
Is very easy to get caught in your own silo as part of a staff team. You’re slogging away at one aspect of church, and you can easily start to feel like others aren’t pulling their weight, or they’re not… Continue reading
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Reblog: Tensions to manage, not solve
If you have portfolio ministries, you have multiple purposes, visions and goals for each portfolio. These are all things that you need to hold in tension with each other. The wrong approach is to try to find a compromise between… Continue reading
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Reblog: Staff should fight and trust
A staff team is made up of different perspectives, strengths and weaknesses. A good team member will be aware of their own weaknesses, and the other’s strengths. And this will lead to good fighting based on strong trust. I will… Continue reading
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Privacy, keeping secrets and keeping confidences in ministry #horstmans-laws.6
(This is a series of reflections on Horstman’s Laws) Sometimes the people of this world truly are better at dealing with their own kind than people in the kingdom (Lk 16). In the secular world, people know they need to… Continue reading
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Become a “ministry in broken play” asset #everythingcomesbacktorugby
There’s two ways of thinking about ministry; One type of ministry work is being the structure asset; the person who makes the structure work, who can gather the people and make the formal, programmed event happen. You can run a… Continue reading
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Debunking the need to preach a book all at once
There seems to be an idea that exegetical preaching means more than simply walking through a book with your congregation. Somewhere along the line, we started to think that you had to do that entire walk in the space of… Continue reading
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Join the team, not the job description
If you’ve got staff who are “church members” first, the next step is not to offer them a job. The next step is to offer them a spot on the staff team. Again this is an important distinction. Team members… Continue reading
MINISTRY PRINCIPLES & PRAGMATICS 