In a church, who’s in charge of what decisions? How do such decisions get communicated? And by whom do they get communicated?
Such questions affect every church, regardless of their health. Do the Elders get to pick the children’s ministry curriculum or does the Children’s Ministry Director get to? Does the vestry get to hire the new Operational Director, or is that the role of the Priest? And once the youth volunteer leaders have decided to have a retreat talking about sexuality and Christian identity, how will the Pastor or the Elders find out about it, in order to oversee it well?
Granted, in many denominational structures, certain authority is already spelled out, such as a priest in an Anglican body for sacramental responsibilities. Likewise, certain duties are delineated for a Session (i.e. an Elder Board) in a Presbyterian Church by a constitution like a Book of Order, such as getting to establish the church’s budget. And though much authority is spelled out in polity structures or denominations, many decisions exist in a murky realm with respect to routine church decision-making, communication, and conflict.
As a former Executive Pastor, and then church planter-into-Lead Pastor in an Evangelical Presbyterian Church, I have had to navigate multiple stages in the life of various churches on how decisions are made, and even how we make decisions about who gets to make certain decisions. In what I sketch below, I’ve developed three charts that have helped me as well as the leaders in my congregations know how to proceed in the areas of authority, communication, and conflict.
Admittedly, the advice below is more germane to multi-staff environments, where there is at least one full-time pastor and at least a few other part-time employees. Even still, I think these ideas below are relevant to many churches as well as to Christian nonprofit environments.
Adapt my own polity language and principles to your own context.
In a multi-staff environment, one of the biggest tensions is this question: who has the power to make certain decisions: the board of elders (or, the session, vestry, etc.) or the staff?
A helpful starting place in this question has been to define the board of any church as the body that sets and oversees the vision of the church, subject to discerning the mind of Christ. Alternatively, the staff are put in place to execute that vision, especially when someone’s part- or full-time efforts would exceed that of volunteers who have other responsibilities during the day. I chart this below as follows:
Take note of the shape of the chart. It acts like a funnel from the top to the ‘pinch-point’ of the Lead Pastor, which then acts as an inverse funnel down to the staff. The bottom triangle is more akin to the traditional organizational chart, whereas the top triangle demonstrates that certain kinds of earthly authority reside at least with an entire body of people who participate in specified authority with the Lead Pastor (and sometimes act as the corporate body over the Lead Pastor depending on the denomination). In other words, authority resides with the entire session or elder board, while execution of the vision set by the elders is carried out by the staff. The senior pastor is the linking point between these two groups.
The shape of the two funnels helps underscore two key points. First, no individual elder or vestry member has authority over the Head or Lead Pastor. Rather, as a body they listen to the mind of Christ for the sake of the whole church, of which the Pastor is a part. The Pastor is the bridge between the Elders to the Staff with respect to authority: as the team of elders make decisions that affect the whole church’s vision, the Pastor relays that authority down to the staff. This explanation has a Presbyterian inflection, but there are adaptable principles here for Anglican, Baptist, and other Elder-led contexts.
Second, no individual elder is in authority over an individual staff person either (noted by the red x on the chart). This is often where confusion can lie. Recently, a few elders on our Operations Committee (finance and HR) were frustrated with our church database management system. They wanted to find a new way to manage volunteers other than scheduling through it. I reminded them that execution issues were the purview of the staff, and they were not to interfere with a system that the staff preferred.
I have found such a system clarifying for Elders and Staff alike. It has given everyone a sense of freedom and relaxation. The Pastor acts as the ‘pinch-point’ that communicates relevant decisions down to the staff, who are thus given guardrails of where the vision is and isn’t.
Within those guardrails, they have the freedom to dream and plan and execute underneath the vision. On the issue of authority and decision-making, both staff and elders can ‘stay in their lane’. That said, the issue of authority isn’t the only issue to wade through with a Staff/Elder relationship.
In my life as a pastor, the first chart on authority was the easiest to develop and police. However, because this was the only paradigm I operated under for a while it soon led to problems. I became the pinch-point for everything else as well, including communicating from the Staff to the Elders, and vice versa.
I often would forget to tell the Elders important matters that the Staff were working on, that the Elders would have liked to have known about, especially so they could be praying about it. Alternatively, the Elders would sometimes make important decisions that it would take me months to tell the staff about.
For example, last year the Elders budgeted and made it a priority to hire a new full-time position that would aid the Staff in many ways, and I had developed the job description and started the search without telling the Staff much (mostly out of my own busyness and negligence).
I realized that when it comes to communication, I shouldn’t be the pinch-point anymore. That’s why the chart below expands beyond me at the funnel.
There are many matters where the Elders need to inform the Staff: budgetary decisions, new church vision or values, expansion projects, the occasional disciplinary matter, etc. There are also many matters where the Staff need to inform the Elders: curriculum chosen, people who’ve come to Christ, compassion needs in the congregation, etc.
I’ve found that the way for me not to be the lousy pinch-point person I am is to invite our Staff to a Session (i.e. Elder Board) meeting twice a year. Many other churches have Staff inform Elders by writing monthly reports for the Elders’ information. Either way, I’ve found it’s vital to get me out of the sole center, even though sometimes I still will be, and that’s okay too.
One final note about communication: the chart above still has a red X, because there are some things that don’t, or shouldn’t, be communicated either way. For instance, the Elders shouldn’t communicate to the whole staff about tricky personnel issues, and the Staff shouldn’t tell the Elders every single person they’ve been to lunch with.
So, as long as we are in the realm of simply informing each other about important matters, the Lead Pastor shouldn’t be the pinch-point. But this chart doesn’t resolve all subsequent Elder/Staff issues, and that’s why I offer one final chart.
One of the wonderful and messy realities of healthy churches is that individual elders are often volunteers in staff person's ministries. And when people care about the outcome of what we’re doing, like a volunteer elder who plays guitar in the worship band under the Worship Director, people can often be confused about how to handle the matter. Should the staff person defer to the elder’s preferred song choices because he is an elder? Or should the elder defer because he’s merely a volunteer?
That’s why this final chart is so necessary, because many of the messes we endure in church actually belong here, in the realm of Matthew 18:15-17. If an Elder sins against a Staff person, or vice versa, my expectation is for them to work it out with each other first, confessing to and forgiving one another. (There is one caveat here, which I thankfully haven’t dealt with: issues of illegality and mandatory reporting when it comes to Elders or Staff.)
I’d also add that Matthew 18 works well simply as a conflict resolution process even when there isn’t sin explicitly involved, but just mere differences of opinion. That said, if you are a Pastor reading this, has it been your experience that people ordinarily follow the steps of Matthew 18? Because in my experience, it has not.
What usually happens in healthy churches is that, especially when it is a sin issue, the aggrieved party tells the Pastor, and it’s the Pastor who is supposed to sort out the mess. Scenarios such as: the Elder was rude to a Staff person in the meeting; the Staff person was anxious and didn’t lead well in front of an Elder; the Elder didn’t get done what the Staff person asked them to do; I could go on.
Often, the Pastor is asked to intervene to solve the problem for one party or another. Notice I said this was characteristic of a ‘healthy church.’ In unhealthy churches, the aggrieved party just gossips and tells everybody, and creates factions. This happens in larger denominational structures too.
So, I developed this third chart to help my leaders:
In normal human conflict, Jesus instructs us to work with one another first, and not triangulate the Pastor in the issue. A Pastor’s wise de-triangulation, staying in a committed relationship with both the Elder and Staff person without taking a side and pushing them toward each other (instead of his own self-important wisdom), is key to helping the other individuals grow in their sanctification, following Jesus in one of the ways we prefer to ignore him the most in churches: how we handle conflict with one another.
I wish having these three charts solved all the church issues, but they don’t. Even if Elders and Staff are all on the same page regarding how to handle issues of authority, communication, and conflict. I’ve found that where the rubber really meets the road is coaching Elders and Staff on what kind of issue we’re actually dealing with.
Which chart do we use in the following scenario?
An Elder has some operational responsibilities to steward budgetary preparation, and needs projected numbers from the Children’s Ministry Director, but the Director is swamped in other responsibilities and doesn’t respond quickly to the Elder who feels a time crunch to get the budget done for the Board. Is that an issue of authority, communication, or conflict?
If the Elder gives the Director a deadline, then we’ve crossed a boundary into authority, and the pastor should be involved.
If the Director is rude about the pressure she is feeling from the Elder, we are in an area of conflict.
If the Director just hasn’t gotten around to the email yet, and the Elder follows up, we are merely in the communication realm, and the pastor doesn’t have to be involved yet.
Of course, you can see how many of these issues could be involved simultaneously. Wisdom is needed to parse these issues in each individual context, as there is no one size fits all to an individual church’s leadership authority matrix.
In other words, these charts won’t solve every issue. But I’ve found that the shared language of the charts at least gives us more clarity with which to operate, such that when conflict does arise, it’s more quickly and easily dealt with.