Source: What Is Bivocational Ministry?

The post What Is Bivocational Ministry? appeared first on Passion for Planting.

by UnSeminary: In a recent survey, 66% of church leaders said they believe that when church returns, there will be many differences. [ref]

It would appear that we’re headed towards the next normal. You and I are leading in a season that has drastically changed in a very short period of time.

Is your staff team designed in such a way that you are ready for the next normal?

While we pivoted to church online just a few months ago and altered the roles on our teams as a result, we should be thinking through whether we have the right people in the right seats on the bus as we attempt to address the culture that’s in front of us now.

Our teams are going to look different in the coming weeks and months. What changes do you need to be making in order to pivot your team for the newly formed culture we find ourselves in?

One of the highlights of my ministry career has been my experiences at the center of the multisite movement over these last two decades. It’s been fascinating to watch roles that didn’t exist 20 years ago become central to so many churches across the country. Twenty years ago, if anyone had asked what a campus pastor was, we would have assumed you meant someone ministering on a university or college campus. Audio, video, and lighting tech roles have also become commonplace in multisite churches as we realized how important it was for us to digitally replicate our content.

Through the multisite church movement, we’ve seen all kinds of new configurations of what it means to be a pastor in the local church. That shift in culture took 20 years to happen, but the shift that’s taking place now only took 20 days! Because of the rapid pace of this shift, your church may be treading water a little bit as you try to keep up with how your team needs to look in the future.

Here are five new roles that I think your church should consider adding now to respond to the future realities that are coming your way. I’d love to hear your thoughts as we wrestle through what we are dealing with in this next normal.

Development Director

Even before we found ourselves in this post-COVID era, there was an increasing trend towards adding senior team leaders who are responsible for developing a generosity culture within the church.

A Development Director would help the church leverage all the tools available to encourage people to give back to the mission of the church. They’d be responsible for managing annual campaigns, weekly offering moments, and even core donor relationships.

This role is going to be incredibly important to our churches in the coming years as we deal with a softening economy and the need to bring additional cash onto our balance sheets to respond to future financial changes that may come our way. Having a team member directly associated with raising generosity is an important role for your church to consider in this moment.

Church Online Pastor

This is probably the one that you thought would be at the top of the list. We’re all convinced that we need to do more digital ministry now than ever before. The reality is, we will likely have to manage a prolonged transition between being fully offline and fully in-person and therefore will need to provide a mixed offering of online and offline experiences.

We all pivoted a few months ago and reassigned people on our team to primarily manage and construct our online experiences. However, as we’re heading into reopening, we will need to move many of those team members back to their previous roles running in-person services.

Having a senior leader who is responsible for your church online or digital experience will provide the leadership required in this transitory period. It will be more difficult to develop a mixed environment than the solely online experiences that we’ve been offering recently. The transition to digital will be simple in comparison to the stage of needing to offer a mix of online experiences, small group meetings in homes, video driven experiences, and live in-person experiences. Having someone positioned to head that area up will be a key piece of the puzzle as we move into another time of shifting ministry strategies.

Senior Communications Leader

The message is loud and clear. We all need more robust communication strategies that get the right message to the right people at the right time. Gone are the days where we can just assume people will show up on the weekend; we need to find ways to consistently reach out to them and keep our church on their list of priorities.

Having a senior communications leader responsible for understanding the latest trends in Facebook ad segmentation, email list building, or text blast best practices (and how those work together in concert to push the mission of the church forward) is a vitally important piece for us to add into our operations.

A communications role needs to have a key place at your senior leadership table, and now would be the time for you to add that person to your team.

If your church has an accountant on your team to help manage your money, why don’t you have a communications professional helping you with the important task of communicating with your people? You could choose to do the “money stuff” on your own, but you know that over time you need someone with expertise in that area. Communications is exactly the same.

Data Scientist

Think about all the data that you have access to as a church. Here are just a few types of data that a church of 1,000 people or more has access to regularly:

Church management systemEmail listsVolunteer listsFacebook analyticsYouTube analyticsWebsite analytics

The reality is, most churches are swimming in data that they’re not leveraging. Hiring a data scientist would give us an opportunity to pull that data together in a coherent manner to help us make decisions. We need to go beyond just counting nickels and noses and really drive towards engagement with the information that is available to us.

For a long time, we’ve been saying that churches need to be looking at engagement, not just attendance, and a core part of understanding engagement is looking at all the ways that people leave a digital footprint as they interact with us. We can leverage that information to make coherent representations or to drive decision making in our churches. A data scientist could help you gain a clear picture of the data you have, and more importantly, would give you an understanding of how to make decisions around that data in the coming years.

Remote Team Members

I get it. We’ve all had enough time on Zoom.

But what if we looked at future hires by deliberately considering remote team members rather than just looking at the pool of those available within our zip code or from across state?

Obvious considerations for this would be admin people, graphic designers, or video editors, but you could also look at hiring part-time specialists in communications, connections, or even service programming who don’t work full-time or in-person at your site but could provide a tremendous amount of value and insight for your team going forward.

Instead of hiring a consultant to address one or two issues in this next phase of your journey, you could look instead at hiring remote team members to actually lead your team in the areas that you need help managing.

This crisis has taught us that remote teams are a valuable way to engage and work together. Now might be the time for you to lean into areas that need leadership and to look at who you might want to add to your leadership team by deliberately searching beyond your immediate community for new team members.

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Source: 5 Staff Roles Churches of Over 1,000 Should Add Now

The post 5 Staff Roles Churches of Over 1,000 Should Add Now appeared first on Passion for Planting.

by unSeminary: Thanks for joining us for this episode of the unSeminary podcast. This week we’re talking with Rick Raiford, the executive pastor at Daystar Church in North Carolina.

Daystar started as a small country church in Greensboro, North Carolina and over the past twenty years has grown to become one of the fastest growing churches in the country. They have two campuses and a very contemporary and casual environment.

After twenty years, a lot of churches have peaked and may start to plateau or decline unless they reinvent themselves. Today Rick is talking with us about how Daystar has accelerated to continue reaching people by bringing clarity to the vision and systems in the church.

Let them know how to connect. // One of the things Daystar has learned is that at the end of the day a large number of people would love to connect to the church. But they will only do it if they know who you are, it’s clear how to connect, and what they can expect. Bring clarity in your organization. // Daystar began to evaluate where they had an opportunity to bring clarity, both within the organization, and externally with the visitors to the church. With the staff it’s important to be clear with everyone about expectations in their roles and what it looks like for them to win in their area of expertise. For the visitors, clarity is important in helping them understand the church and how it will partner with them to grow their faith and connect them with the community. Visitors come away with one clear next step and Daystar does whatever it can to help visitors take it.Welcome and evaluate. // A way to move forward is to know whether or not people are engaging in the church. Daystar uses a simple process called Growth Track to welcome visitors and connect them within church. Tracking the numbers of first time guests who enter Growth Track and the percentage of people who take their next step helps the staff to understand where the system is failing and if an area needs corrective action.Clarify for staff and volunteers. // Daystar set time aside to dialog with staff and volunteers about their roles, asking them questions such as what they enjoyed most about their jobs, what they enjoyed least, what they envision their roles and responsibilities to look like over the next few years, and what their perception is of what they should accomplish and how do they know they are doing well hitting their goals. The leadership team discovered it was harder for people to answer these questions than they had expected. The answers that staff gave highlighted just how much clarity is needed, even for people who have worked deep in the organization for several years. Clarify your vision. // Much of the confusion in certain areas really boiled down to Daystar needing to clarify their vision for their people. How can you say in a more clear, impactful, succinct fashion what’s most critical to your organization? How does it influence everything in the church, from the language used in communications to the leadership descriptions for different roles?

You can learn more about Daystar Church at their website daystargso.com.

Thank You for Tuning In!

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Thank You to This Episode’s Sponsor: INJOY Stewardship Solutions

Craft customized church capital campaigns to fund new facilities, up-fit existing facilities, buy land, and pay off debt.

Find out how much your church could raise in a capital campaign led by INJOY Stewardship Solutions.

Source: Help Gaining Clarity in a 20 Year Old Church with Rick Raiford

The post Help Gaining Clarity in a 20 Year Old Church with Rick Raiford appeared first on Passion for Planting.

Source: 7 Little-Known Advantages of Multisite Churches

The post 7 Little-Known Advantages of Multisite Churches appeared first on Passion for Planting.

by Patrick Bradley: Should you give your church plant staff fundraising requirements? You could have a bigger staff if they could offset some or all of their own salaries.

Every full-time, vocational church planter should raise funds for their plant. It’s as least as much for the vision casting practice as for the resources. But you can certainly get more ministry and community service done with more resources.

Which could include having more staff. More staff means more volunteer leaders recruited and equipped. Many hands make light work, right? But more staff comes with a price tag.

What to Consider

So you’ve decided to give your church plant staff fundraising requirements. If they’re self-funding their position (you can’t otherwise afford them), then it starts to look like “we’ll pay you what you raise.” There are different ways to structure it, but whatever you do should take into consideration:

what to do if they come up seriously short: you may not be able to make up the shortfall
what to do if they raise more than expected: they shouldn’t be able to double their salary on their own effort

Common Fundraising Requirements

Here are some of the setups I’ve seen over the years:

Staff raise a certain goal as a matter of job performance; if they under-perform, their hours or even their position can get cut
Staff raise the equivalent of half their salary and the church plant pays the other half (which usually means the church planter is raising it); sometimes it’s understood that ‘their half’ is correlated to their performance, so if they under-perform, they take a pay cut by as much as their half
Staff raise the equivalent of their entire salary and with that same performance correlation; anything extra raised over and above that amount in a month gets banked for the next month like rollover minutes

Strictly speaking, I’m not sure that’s it really fundraising in the IRS sense; your staff are really just inviting people to give to your church for intangible religious benefit. They’re not out selling cookies or asking for junker cars.

But you still want to avoid the inference or appearance that they’re getting paid a commission or bonus for raising funds. I hope for obvious reasons. So don’t say (or put in writing) that they’ll get paid what they raise. Figure out how to tie it to job performance and job requirements.

If that seems too complicated, at least don’t take the cheater way out and pay them by stipend.

You’ll have to decide for yourself whether to give your church plant staff fundraising requirements. If you do, it doesn’t have to be too complicated, and there are growth opportunities for your staff built in.

The post How to Give Your Church Plant Staff Fundraising Requirements appeared first on Church Planting Tactics.

Source: How to Give Your Church Plant Staff Fundraising Requirements

The post How to Give Your Church Plant Staff Fundraising Requirements appeared first on Passion for Planting.

Source: Why There Should Never Be Another Bored Christian

The post Why There Should Never Be Another Bored Christian appeared first on Passion for Planting.