We are looking at adjusting our church structure to more fully allow the volunteers involved to concentrate on what they do best. The idea is that we don’t want to overload them with unnecessary meetings as they all have very full lives outside of the actual running of the church.
Below you’ll find a diagram I’ve put together explaining one of the suggested structures. I’ve changed the Salvation Army lingo for church lingo so as to make it more easily understandable by readers of this blog.
Comments…
Questions…
2 comments
I'm not a support of the proposed structure, as you have a group responsible for coming up with the strategy, who then need to "sell" this to a second group to implement. I believe you'll get a lot more buy-in to important decisions if you provide an opportunity for all your "senior leaders" to be part of the decision, rather than rubber-stamping.
I'd change the structure slightly. Combine the strategists and ministry leaders into one "leadership group" (i.e. your ministry leaders, plus a couple of other hand picked extras without responsibility, who are there for their thinking). Have this group of people meet regularly to discuss the effectiveness of the Church and any matters at hand, but make sure these meetings are well-facilitated. When the topic is becoming too detailed, assign it to the relevant parties to work on and report back. For issues of strategy, it is likely this will be assigned to the strategists and any other affected leaders. If it is "tactical", it will be assigned to the affected ministry leaders. This way you keep the ownership of the "leadership team", not the individual groups.
One of the reasons given for the split is to reduce the time leaders need to spend in meetings. But if your strategists have to come and sell to your ministry leaders, I don't believe you're saving them any time.
Another is that the big picture people get bored with the mundane details. Most people get bored with mundane details, and these shouldn't be discussed as leaders. Assign these to the people who need to talk about it outside the meeting.
Your leadership team should consist of people passionate about making your Church as good as it can be. They all need to be free to discuss anything they feel they need to - not shut down because they aren't the ministry "manager" of that area and so have nothing to contribute.
I also wonder if the ministry leaders will end up disempowered second-class citizens. Any time they try to raise an issue it will be deferred to the "experts".
Personally, I'd be gathering around me a single team of "leaders" who were going to help me take my Church somewhere.
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