The Ill-Fitting Staff Member: How Does This Happen?

Like an ill-fitting pair of shoes, ill-fitting staff members make for painful experiences for both the staff members themselves as well as the churches they serve.  It’s not easy to address these situations, but it’s important that we face the facts and get these individuals re-trained or re-deployed.

Today’s post will be the first of a series of three on this subject. In the next two weeks we’ll explore some solutions; today we’ll get started by asking and answering two questions: (1st) What does the phenomenon of the ill-fitting staff member look like? and (2nd) How does the phenomenon of the ill-fitting staff member happen?

 We’ll deal with them together in the form of true stories (with details altered to protect the individuals and churches involved).  BTW: I could share many more.

(1) Associate Pastor Susan is a fine Christian. There’s no question about that.  Everyone in the congregation she has served for decades respects her.  She was hired to teach Bible studies, manage ministries and help with pastoral care.

But over the years she’s gotten so good at saying “no” that her job description has morphed into a monstrosity.  She decided that she should strictly limit the hours when she is willing to work and that she doesn’t like to manage ministries.  She does a lot of hands-on work around the church building and makes herself helpful to many, but she does exactly what she wants to do the way she wants to do it. The senior pastor, who enabled this descent from useful servant to willful employee, is now gone.  His successor has inherited the problem known as Susan.

(2) Children’s Ministries Director Bob is as different from Susan as he could be, but just as ill-fitting for his congregation. For a number of years, Bob, who has great gifts and a strong work ethic, worked with a Senior pastor who loved his work and trusted his heart.  The senior pastor loved pastoral care and hated administrative tasks.  Bob, however, found administration to be a “snap.”

Over time, Bob grew into an effective, unofficial, executive pastor (XP), to the delight of his supervisor and the dismay of a number of people in the congregation who neither liked nor trusted him, viewing him as a power-grabbing interloper who controlled the pastor.  Sadly, the church’s new senior leader inherited a staff member with the written job description of a children’s ministries director and an actual job description of an XP – who, incidentally, didn’t think the new pastor should do anything except preach and give pastoral care.

(3) Executive Pastor Kevin is another story altogether. Kevin was hired to preach, teach and manage ministries in a small church with a solo pastor who wanted to give his attention to other pursuits.  It wasn’t long before Kevin was found to be an uninspiring preacher and an ineffective ministry manager.  His people skills were not very good either, which meant that no one really became endeared to him. What he seemed to do really well was to serve as a board member, but, of course, churches can’t pay people to serve as board members.

(4) Linda’s story might be the most unusual of the six I’m sharing. Everyone thought she’d be a wonderful youth director in a church which was dominated by seniors and pretty much bereft of youth.  As it turned out, her youth ministry skills were minimal, while her senior citizen ministry skills were off the charts.  This under-100-in-attendance church ended up with a senior pastor who didn’t need to do much shepherding care among his aging flock because his youth director was doing it all!  When the senior pastor resigned, the church found itself with a highly dysfunctional situation: a part time salary to offer a new senior pastor with a part time youth director caring for seniors.

(5 & 6) Finally, I offer you a compound-story of two staff members in two churches. In both of them the staff members were discovered – over time – to have mental illness challenges which increasingly limited their usefulness to their churches while steadily increasing the pity and loyalty of their fellow church members.  Both situations eventually became nightmare scenarios for the senior pastors and church boards which eventually had to gently bring the employment of these troubled brothers to an end, while enduring the criticism of those who objected that “you can’t kick troubled family members out of the church family.”

Notice a few factors these true stories have in common:

• All of these dysfunctional situations developed over time. None of the six individuals were seen to be ill-fitting initially.  The increase of the dysfunction, in some of these cases, was so gradual as to be almost imperceptible.
• All of these scenarios were – to some extent – the fault of senior pastors who allowed them to develop. In every case, meaningful accountability – with job descriptions, coaching and periodic reviews – were non-existent.
• Each of the situations were complicated by the wonderful family-functioning of small churches: close ties between these staff members and their church families made it excruciatingly difficult for pastors or boards to take the needed corrective actions.
• Each of them resulted in financial waste for their churches. In some of these scenarios, the congregations could have greatly benefited from ministry in truly needful areas.
• All of them eventually became painful dilemmas for leaders who inherited them from others.

I have likened these (usually) dear folks to ill-fitting pairs of shoes, but here’s a second illustration: Ill-fitting staff members are like ill-fitting car parts, gaskets, for instance.  It might look okay when you first open the hood, but in time, there’s leakage, waste, inefficiency, and, in some cases, a large ugly mess.

For everyone’s sake, for the sake of our churches, for the sake of God’s kingdom, we need to deal lovingly and wisely with our ill-fitting staff members.  Next week we’ll dive in.