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Planning a staff retreat (sans strategy)

This week our church’s ministerial staff will be on retreat. Once a year we take two and half days away. While we’re there on this annual outing, here’s what we don’t do:

  • Plot the next year’s activity calendar
  • Wordsmith our church’s mission statement
  • Review ministry opportunities and determine the wins/losses of our efforts

Instead, we strive to: Connect to God and each other.

That’s it. It’s a simple purpose, and it’s easy to plan. When I am planning each time-slot, all I ask is – will this time help our staff connect to God and each other?

I’ve written before about why strategy conversations are critical to church staffs. I also do my share of calendar planning, wordsmithing strategies, and reviewing a lot of our staff’s activities. But at this retreat, I think it’s best to pull away from that, both literally and figuratively.

Here’s what we do include in the retreat:

  • Teaching from our pastor
  • An outside guest who can bless and encourage our souls through teaching
  • Worship led by an outside leader, so every staff member can engage as a worshipper (and not a leader of worship)
  • Solitude
  • Suggested soul-care exercises
  • Late-night World Series watching. Due to the time of year, usually a whole bunch of people gather around the common room’s TV to watch a game.
  • Recreation (Wiffle ball tends to be our favorite) I highly encourage everyone to participate in recreation time… even if they don’t play, I want them there to laugh and encourage people (or make fun of others’ lack of athleticism).
  • A whole lot of eating…the best fellowship usually occurs during our meals together.

The pace is slow. I want to suspend our rushed lives, even for two days. There’s margin left in the agenda so our staff have more time to get to know each other deeper, and so they have adequate times to take their spiritual disciplines to a deeper level.

Does your staff have time to pull away and just be? A time when your focus is about relationships with God and each other?

Whether a retreat or half day away from the office, you’ll find significant value in unplugging from the ministry work routine, and retreating.

When you have a large group, it’s hard to satisfy everyone’s desire. You’ll hear lots of opinions about what should and shouldn’t have been included in a retreat. But here’s what I’ve determined about this retreat… they may not love everything that’s planned, but it’s going to be hard for them to not have connected with God and others while away. And that makes it worth it.

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Working with Visionaries Effectively

Visionary leaders are awesome.

They’re even awesome-er if they’ve surrounded themselves with others who can help ensure that their visions get realized – or pushed back if they don’t add up.

Some of you are equipped to work alongside visionary leaders – but sometimes, it can be difficult. Whether the visionary leader is awesome or not-so-awesome, working with them does require a “very particular set of skills” (said best in a Liam Neeson voice).

The person who has this set of skills can 1) work alongside a visionary, 2) bring their vision to fruition, and 3) speak up when the vision has no real fruit.

This person who is doing this is likely a leader themselves, but not a visionary one. Is that you? If so, you must be able to do two things:

  1. Know when to align with and put action to their vision
  2. Know how much horsepower to put toward a vision before realizing it’s not best for your church. (We typically avoid ditching visions, because we avoid sunk costs, but I’ve blogged before about the embracing of sunk costs within the church).

Ways to embrace and leverage the vision of the visionary, without it hurting your church, them, or you —

  1. Don’t rain on their parade

Don’t be “that guy” who kills every idea – and for sure don’t make it personal. Listen well to the full idea before weighing in on its viability. After you’ve listened, if you do have push-back, they’ll receive it better if you’ve taken the time to carefully consider their visionary idea.

  1. At the right moment, provide a reality-check to the vision

If you’re drowning in debt and the vision not only doesn’t eliminate debt, but furthers your indebtedness, that needs to be pointed out. You need to establish unbiased realities – and when possible, offer solutions how the vision could be managed around current and future realities.

  1. Make progress on fulfilling their vision, but do it incrementally (sometimes you’ll be a speed governor)

A gifted visionary may be frustrated when they deliver a vision, get the needed buy-in, and then see little to no progress on it. Assuming it’s a viable vision, begin work, but recognize it may not be at the pace they’d like. If you’ve done step #2 correctly, they’ll know that the vision will take time to be realized. Many times their vision may have come to them over night or on a prayer retreat, but it takes time to bring to fruition.

  1. Embrace their ability for visioneering and sometimes, just align on faith

A lot of the best visions are audacious. They don’t always align with predetermined plans. Some don’t make sense in our natural economy, but might in God’s economy. While I don’t think you should further visions that aren’t healthy or are even detrimental to your church, there will be times visions don’t add up but they’re still right. When those times happen, they’ll be times to step out in faith. Don’t limit visions to things you can figure out and seek God’s sense of calling to the vision.

  1. When you can’t make all of it happen, give them options

Let them prioritize which of their visionary ideas is most important. Sometimes visionary leaders have multiple visions, and your hesitancy is simply a capacity issue. Get their input about which one is most important or time-sensitive. In other cases, maybe you can’t fulfill the entire vision, but you can fulfill part of it. Don’t throw away the whole vision just because one portion isn’t viable. If there are parts of the vision that would stand alone, pursue those.

  1. Bring focus to any part lacking clarity

A visionary I worked would often say, “I can see A, and I can see Z. What I can’t see is what’s in-between.” He’s not focused on B through Y. Therefore, those parts are unclear. They lack focus. That’s where you come in. You can determine the importance of B through Y. Most great visions will lack clarity at some level, and that’s okay. It allows others to speak into the vision.

Some visions never come to fruition because they were simply not good. Or they were more about the visionary than the vision. But I wonder how many visions from God were given to gifted leaders, but never happened because the visionary didn’t have capable people to come alongside them?

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The Pitfalls of Hiring Church Members on Staff

It can be a mistake for your church.

Or it could be a win.

Sometimes it’s the path of least resistance.

And sometimes it’s exactly the right decision.

Hiring church members onto your church staff can cause problems. Not unlike hiring family members (previous post on nepotism on church staffs), there are benefits for doing this as well as drawbacks. In both cases, the drawbacks often have more wide-ranging impact.

An unwise hire can not only affect the work done at the church, but also potentially the individual’s relationships with the church or with God. Most problems can be minimized by good communication during the hiring process (previous post on our hiring process). As church leaders, we need to communicate with our staff early, often, and thoughtfully regarding what they can expect in their role, what our expectations of them are, and what the implications are if these don’t match.

But, before you begin communicating what it means for a church member to take a position on your church staff, you first need to deal with it philosophically. While not comprehensive, here are a few questions to help you do that.

  • What’s your church’s track record? If you’ve hired church members onto your staff before, have they succeeded? If not, was the work the only thing impacted, or did it leak into their church membership (i.e. the way they felt about the church)?
  • How important is it that the individual in that specific role knows the DNA of your church? (This answer will vary based on type of position: custodial, administrative, minister, director, etc.)
  • Do you believe the person is capable of keeping the confidentialities of the work?
  • Are they mature enough in their Christian walk to appropriately separate their role on staff from their role as a church member?

If you decide that you’re open to hiring existing church members onto your staff, then you need to practice problem avoidance (a previous post’s topic).

Make sure your church and prospective staff members have clarity on the following issues:

Being on staff is not like volunteering. Many prospective employees might think being on church staff is like being a volunteer, but with pay. There are a lot of differences, and you need to let them know what they are.

Being employed by a church doesn’t mean everything is “ministry” in nature. Many church members don’t realize how much business and “corporate” work happens behind the scenes. They have high hopes of their work directly being tied to benevolence or baptisms, and may become disenfranchised quickly when they don’t see their output tied to actual ministry.

Working in a faith- and grace-based environment doesn’t mean you get a pass on performing well. Many think because it’s a church, there won’t be standards, reviews or improvement plans. But the church is God’s choice of institutions to bring people to Him — we should set the bar for excellence.

Their experience in their work environment can (and likely will) affect their spiritual experience. Many church members who want to be on staff think there will be no conflict when their work and their church membership intersect. And certainly, there can be a positive benefit of working where you worship. However, there can also be a negative result from mixing these two worlds.

For example, an employee’s work as an assistant to their pastor may make them appreciate all that’s involved in the role of the pastor. They may see the dedication involved in preparing a sermon or they’ll get a glimpse of the kind of care a pastor provides to people in need. Then again, the pastor may have a bad day on Thursday, be unkind or impatient with the assistant, and suddenly, it’s three days later, and their pastor is leading communion and the only thing the employee can think is, “He treated me a like a jerk last week!” Now their work environment has suddenly negatively impacted their spiritual environment.

When church members consider joining your staff, it presupposes that your specific church was first their place of worship, discipleship, and community. Likely, this is paramount to them – and as a church leader, I hope it’s also paramount to you.

So when I’m meeting with a church member who’s applied for a staff position, I try to communicate that by taking this job, they’re jeopardizing their current relationship with the church.

It seems negative to put it that way – and of course I hope it doesn’t come to that. But the truth is, they’re putting that possibility on the table by being employed by their church. I hope their employment furthers their love and commitment to the church – but if it doesn’t, they need to be aware of the wide-ranging impact on other areas of their life.

It’s important that you as a church leader and employer have clarity about these potential risks. My experience is that we’ve been able to successfully employ many church members who’ve thrived in both worlds. These church members and staff are productive in their work, and also growing in Christ-likeness. That being said, it’s still a risk. And because we as leaders should care most about the church being a place of discipleship for them, we need to assess the inherent risks, lead conversations about them, and choose wisely.

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