It’s as old as the first church in Acts but as young as today’s culture. It carries with it the challenges of relationships multiplied by their diversity and divided by leadership you and others in your church bring to it. Great church management depends on what you ask of it and measure it by. Simply put, Church Management is stewarding resources to accomplish a goal or objective of the church.
This online blog is aimed at providing biblically based and real-time relevant church management articles. It is not meant to provide a detailed solution for every situation, but it will not be ambiguous either.
Let’s start off by answering the question…
What is great church management?
For church management to be great:
- It must be in harmony with the heart of God
- It must be in harmony with the mind of God
- It must be in harmony with what matters to God
Having graduated from one of the finest biblically centered universities in the world I learned that “God’s ways are not man’s ways.”
Of course you don’t need to go to college to figure that one out, but a college that is willing to teach it (in my opinion) is one worth going to.
So what does “God’s ways…” have to do with church management?
EVERYTHING!!
- “God’s ways…” doesn’t resemble the cookie cutter management practices that are prevalent in churches today.
- “God’s ways…” seeks to look for what HE is blessing rather than what we want Him to bless.
- “God’s ways…” takes into account the whole of the church rather than the parts that speak the loudest.
The list could go on and on, but let’s start with the first of these three and I am certain you will catch on.
- “God’s ways…” doesn’t resemble the cookie cutter management practices that are prevalent in churches today.
If my church had the same mix and mind of people living in the same type of community with the same history of another church I still would question the sanity of using the same church management practices. The truth is identical twin churches do not exist. There is great diversity between churches today, the sooner we realize that the sooner we progress towards “God’s ways…” of doing church management.
To get a better view of how different your church is, learn who your people are. Start with your leadership, then your congregation. Good management starts with relationships. People are more apt to follow if they know you value who they are. When was the last time you had a retreat with your church leadership?
Knowing and recording important facts about your people (i.e. family, jobs, skills, spiritual gifts, strengths and weaknesses) provides the knowledge base of good church management. Once you gather that information the uniqueness of your church will become much clearer to you. The discovery of that uniqueness will give birth to relationships, ministries and support you would otherwise overlook with your cookie cutter approach.
There are many simple ways you can gather the information. You can use family questionnaires, talent surveys, spiritual gift test and normal conversation to gather the information. There are great tools available to help you keep track of the information you collected, like churchoffstg.wpengine.com which allows you to also print off reports of custom fields you create.
I want to warn you though that a sure way to frustrate your church is to take a survey and not use the info to advance relationships or ministry. - “God’s ways…” seeks to look for what HE is blessing rather than what we want Him to bless.
Our tendency and constant pull is to vest our management in what we want to see God bless rather than looking at what God is Blessing. There are times when it can be both but not to seek and be open to what HE is Blessing is to miss what HE would have us do, “Except Christ build the church we labor in vain…”.
We can start by asking the following questions:
- Who has God brought to us?
- Who has God taken from us?
- What has God given to us?
- What has God taken from us?
The fingerprints of God are all over our lives and church. Our greatest task it to know what He is blessing and to move people and resources to that opportunity of blessing.
- “God’s ways…” takes into account the whole of the church rather than the parts that speak the loudest.
We all know that the scripture speaks to the truth that all parts of the church body are important. If we expect people to take seriously the mission of the church we need to do our part in church management that no person gets “left behind”.
- “Left behind” happens when we lose track of a person. I can’t tell you how many times I have heard people say that: “we were gone for three weeks and nobody called to ask why.”
- “Left behind” happens when a person is good at a specific thing but their name never surfaces when a ministry team or event is formed that requires someone with that skill or experience. (And we wonder why only 10% of the people in church does the work of the church.)
- “Left behind” happens when we plan a ministry or event and then fill it with available bodies rather than start with people and build ministry.
Mike Smith
Church Office Online