Who is the second non-apprentice staff member you should employ in a church plant or other ministry?
- Not a women’s worker or youth worker or other specialist worker. They won’t be able to expand the whole ministry as effectively.
- Not an over-dependent person who can’t build their own ministry, but needs jobs handed to them here or there.
- Perhaps a competent administrative assistant (common USA church approach). I think there’s a lot of sense in this, it frees up the pastor to do more and more and more of what they do best. I’m a bit annoyed that AFES won’t allow campus ministries to appoint admin staff locally, actually. They’d prefer us to waste the time on admin ourseves 😛
- Perhaps a straight up and down assistant minister, someone who can functionally double the entire ministry’s workload.
- PErhaps someone with powerful evangelistic ability and capacity. Not an eccentric who can only do crazy solo projects, but someone who can establish evangelistic ministries, gather unbelievers, disciple them, the whole bit.
- Perhaps someone with great leadership development ability. Not someone who just runs lots of training courses and makes people feel guilty for not coming. But someone who truly builds the understanding, character and skills of individuals in the church to further the ministry of the church.
- Those who are in ‘Five Ms’ churches (following the Purpose Driven Church model) – which is the first ‘M’ you’d employ? Mission?
I was dreaming the other day of who the next senior staff appointment at Uni Fellowship and I was thinking that the two that would be most effective are:
- A medical school/health sciences evangelist. Someone who can concentrate on reaching out to the med school and recruiting med students for ministry. I deliberately made changes to our ministry this year to involve the med students more this year – holding a monthly evening meeting, closer to the med campus, for example. And I’ve been astonished this year just whole eager and capable the med students have been. Been one of the highlights of the year.
- A residential colleges evangelist. These are the captive audience, with low commitment to local churches/local family members and many many deep evangelistic contacts. Someone to really dig deep into the three residential colleges in Hobart would be well worthwhile.
