First, their heads would be spinning with instructions to remember and old habits to unlearn.
Second, not a whole lot would change.
The issue isn’t the competency and performance of the highest paid church employee. The issue is leadership. More specifically, the issue is the context in which leadership is allowed to occur and the strength and kind of leadership encouraged.
Pastors cannot go it alone, though many try. Nor can congregations succeed by reining in their pastors. Ministers should be part of a leadership system, in which best practices of leadership guide the recruiting, training, and supporting of leaders.
Pastors have a role to play — chief executive officer comes to mind — but others have roles, too. Someone needs to express the entrepreneurial spirit, someone needs to manage finances, someone needs to manage staff, someone needs to manage communications, someone needs to guide programs. It is highly unlikely that any one person has all of those skills.
Assigning roles is a critical leadership task. So is holding every role-holder accountable. Not only ministers, who cash paychecks, but every leader needs to honor deadlines, plan effectively, measure outcomes, and submit to evaluation.
The leadership circle needs to be relatively small. In even the largest corporation, a small group has overall responsibility — not to be elitist, but to assure trust, accountability, and consistency. Every church member might have a ministry, but only a few at a time are entrusted with leadership.
In very large congregations, key leaders probably will be staff, with lay leaders serving as a board of directors. In smaller congregations, where paid staff members are few, paid and volunteer workers will form the leadership circle.
In both formats, the job of leaders isn’t to manage the pastor(s), but to provide solid, mutually accountable leadership of the sort that any healthy enterprise needs, namely, entrepreneurial attitude, outcome-based decision-making, accountability, follow-through, strategic thinking, transparency.
Tom Ehrich is a writer, church consultant, and Episcopal priest based in New York. He is the publisher of On a Journey, and the founder of the Church Wellness Project www.churchwellness.com.
