The people who make up your team are the most important part of your church after sensitivity to the Holy Spirit and obedience to God’s Word. Your leadership team molds the culture of your church and guides them for better or worse. And it is for this reason that you must create a great team before trying to create a great church.
Leaders of [organizations] that go from good to great start not with “where” but with “who.” They start by getting the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats. And they stick with that discipline.
- Jim Collins
But we can’t look at filling church jobs with a strict corporate HR mindset. The right people for a church can often look quite different from the right people for a business.
Quality church leadership takes more than professional skills. According to 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1, a church elder should also be spiritually sound, a defender of the faith, wise, fair, reverent, well-thought-of, hospitable, accessible, gentle, not thin-skinned, not money-hungry, committed to his wife, a good father, and more. So staffing your church requires looking at the spiritual and personal conditions of a job candidate and not just the professional skill set.
And because heart attitude is far more important than brain power, sometimes God chooses unimpressive people to do great things. So we must be sensitive to the Holy Spirit in order to recognize the occasions when the right person may also be the unlikely one.
1 Corinthians 1:26-29 (MSG)
Take a good look, friends, at who you were when you got called into this life. I don’t see many of “the brightest and the best” among you, not many influential, not many from high-society families. Isn’t it obvious that God deliberately chose men and women that the culture overlooks and exploits and abuses, chose these “nobodies” to expose the hollow pretensions of the “somebodies”? That makes it quite clear that none of you can get by with blowing your own horn before God.
It is better to be patient when hiring and get the right people than to quickly add manpower that leads your church in the wrong direction or slows it down as dead weight.
For extra help, there are church staffing organizations that can guide you through the process and scout out people who would be a good fit for your church’s job. Recently, Vanderbloemen Search Group (specializing in large church executive searches) partnered with Help Staff Me (specializing in mid-level staff) to combine resources and expand their networks of relationships. The partnership will likely boost the growing trend of more churches turning to staffing specialists to get the right people on the bus.
Of course, this only scratches the surface of how to fill church jobs with quality leadership. If you have some tips of your own, please share in the comments.
BONUS: Check out LifeChurch.tv’s rigorous interview process including testing, interview questions, and general philosophies from Craig Groechel and Jerry Hurley.
Great post Kent. Appreciate the mention.
I agree with you post. But often times, many times GREAT churches make great teams. I’ve seen it happen many times. A Leader comes to serve in a position at a Church who really is not ready for such a posistion but because he was given a great church they teach him to be a great leader! He then builds a great team!
@Just Brackett
Very true! I like that.
Finding quality leadership is hard because leaders don’t do a good job of reproducing and we’ve professionalized church leadership to such an extent that it takes 7 years of school and business savvy and previous success to be hirable. The disciples wouldn’t have been hired in our churches.
Great stuff Kent. After many years of helping find, develop and release great leaders at Saddleback it is fun now to partner with churches truly looking to put the right person in the right place. We all have a great opportunity to help equip church leaders to embrace their own S.H.A.P.E & calling and help them find freedom in hiring stronger leaders to accomplish the vision God has given them. The sad part is, most church leaders don’t have the training of “people development”….seminaries and schools need to step it up and give leaders training that will help them in the trenches.
I don’t think we take enough from the buisness side when it comes to hiring. In my experience churches are to quick to discount any business tactics on the defense that “church is not buisness” and so I’ve seen person after person unqualified yet hired because they were “good person ” or “have a heart for it ” or purly because there family was friends with the pastor.
I also dis agree that the church makes the leader or pastor better. But I also believe that there is a disconnect between what true leadership really is.
Leadership is people following you regardless of the possibility of reward or advancement
John Maxwell has a several great examples. And so often churches hire “great leader and team builder” or “does great building volunteer teams” But that doesnt make the person a great leader. Look at the persons life outside the church bubble… Who is following them. That’s the real test
If the intial leader isn’t a strong one he will not hire well because of his own insecurities and/or wrong motives. Witnessed this first hand when a pastor hired a worship leader from out of town to “bring in the crowds”. The man was a former lead singer of a local rock/funk band who had recently gotten saved (3 months earlier). Pastor was wanting the church to grow (or should I say, the numbers to go up) and thought this man would bring in the followers of his former band. The man was, indeed, a phenomenal musician. However, he possessed no maturity, no leadership skills, and was a brand new Christian. Thus, as a musician he was great. As a worship leader, an epic failure.
Following, the pastor hired a very capable worship leader, who had years of experience in ministry, and was proven in their spiritual character. However, the pastor then became jealous of this woman’s talents and abilities – and angry when she would receive a compliment on her teachings (she taught when he was out of town at times). His wife also became jealous of the other woman’s “popularity” and strength and treated her very rudely in staff meetings and behind closed doors. The couple essentially drove the woman out of the church (and almost out of ministry all-together) because of their insecurities and poor leadership.
There are times when the mistake is not in the hiring. An insecure, controlling leader can hire the best of the best and ultimately things will still be disastrous because of his/her failure to let strong leaders lead, for fear that they may do so better. And if he has surrounded himself with others like him from the beginning, no amount of “hiring well” will succeed.
PS – I’m sure this will beg the question of who hired him to begin with? This pastor started the church. But as it began to grow beyond his own initial reach he often declared that he had a vision for growth and reaching people outside of his own personal “circle of influence”, yet his actions spoke otherwise. His insecurities in his own leadership began to be apparent when he began to, outside of his own family/friends, people who believed in the vision that he spoke. However, his words were eventually belied by his actions. The church remains… but that is all. It remains. Without much growth, with turnover, and with family/friends again in leadership.