Monthly Archives: February 2016

The Twilight Zone Revisited: From Medium to Large

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by Carol

It’s interesting being in a medium-sized church that has a high proportion of members who have come from much larger churches.  I didn’t realize what was driving my expectations and those of other folks in the church until I started writing this post.

A Different Transition
A while back (see 10-30-2015 post, The Twilight Zone of Transition), we noted that volunteers make the difference going from small-sized church to medium. The transition from medium to large, though, can be uniquely difficult to maneuver. Members of the congregation, including volunteers, struggle to adjust their relationship to the lead pastor.  While members of the small church expect direct access to the pastor, members in the larger church understand that the pastor can’t do everything.  As the church adds paid pastoral staff, members look to the staff for matters within their areas of responsibility.

Half & Half in Medium
In our medium-sized church, I get the best (and worst) of both worlds!  Folks who have been with the church since it was small go directly to the pastor with their questions and concerns.  Folks who came from larger churches come to me, expecting me to know everything and expecting me to have the ability to make adjustments.  They are familiar with going to the staff member instead of the pastor.

As a volunteer myself, though, I am frequently out of the “staff” loop and can’t make the adjustments.  We are a medium church — so I got the title, but no office or day-to-day communication with the pastor.  (Let’s just say that I like the ministry, and I knew what I was getting into.)  Nevertheless, the expectation is there.

Armed with this new insight, I can revise my expectations.  We live in a fuzzy area, where some members will go to the pastor and some will go to the pastoral staff responsible for the program.  Neither way is wrong in the medium church.  But what about the large church?

Transition to Large
As the church continues to grow, members need to learn to look to the staff members instead of going to the lead pastor.  It is becoming an Acts 6 situation, protecting his time to lead the church and prepare sermons.  And, of course, the church will probably hire a paid staff member to take my position to the next level (1 Timothy 5:18).

Take-aways
We could say that communication becomes critical during this transition — which is true.  But even more, leaders and other volunteers need to be flexible and tolerant.  Medium churches can do things that won’t fly in the large church.  Until it is a large church (and everyone in the church thinks like large-church members), there will be differences of opinion of how things ought to be done.

If you want the medium church to become a large church, let people learn and grow into the structure.  If you want to be sure that your medium church will never become a large church, be rigid and intolerant, insisting that everything be done the way that the large churches do it.

Middling, but Not Mediocre, Part 2

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by Carol

Be careful when you describe something as “medium.”  The Big Thompson River in Colorado is sort of a medium river.  It flows steadily throughout the year, swollen with mountain runoff in the spring and showing its rocky foundations in the summer heat.  I remember the canyon as a tourist attraction, with its old-fashioned motels and comfortable little cabins along the banks.

But one Saturday evening in 1976, the river turned into the most deadly flood in Colorado history, killing 143 people and injuring 150 more.   (See http://content-static.coloradoan.com/news/thompson/)

We’ve said that volunteers in the medium church (101-350 attendance in worship) tend to be steady, tolerant, numerically challenged, good (or great), contented volunteers who make competent leaders.  Like the Big Thompson River, the medium church can be a peaceful destination for fishermen or unimaginable power (destructive or positive) ready to be unleashed.  What makes the difference?

Think about the relationship between volunteers and the church staff (the paid kind).  Two words come immediately to mind:  vision and equipping.

Vision
In Part 1, we mentioned that volunteers need to be challenged.  Volunteers can keep on doing whatever they’ve been doing, whether it’s good for the church or not.  The paid staff needs to have the time and theological training to explore what the congregation ought to be doing.  Then the pastor and staff need to communicate these things to the members.  It’s called vision casting, and it should happen in any size church.

Equipping
The other important thing that the pastor and staff need to do is to equip volunteers. This includes spiritual growth, training, and managing “stuff” for them.

In the medium-sized church, “stuff” is where it gets tricky.  As soon as you start adding staff members, the pastor and staff have the opportunity to communicate on a day to day basis and get things done while the volunteers are not around.  Some things that volunteers were doing (or not doing) are done by staff without the input or participation of volunteers.

Let’s give a simplistic example:

The pastor sees a certain staff member every day, so the pastor asks the staff member to check the supplies in the children’s area.  The staff member sees a large tub of broken crayons.  The staff member assumes that the volunteers are not making good use of their limited storage space, so she throws them away. The volunteers come in the next Sunday night to find that the crayons they had expected to melt down for an art project are gone.  Ouch.

“Stuff” can also be dates on the calendar, equipment in the rooms, decorations on the walls, and on and on.  In the small church, the pastor doesn’t have time to look at crayons.  In the large, staff-driven church, the staff manages the materials and a whole lot of other stuff.  Between the two extremes, though, the staff and volunteers have differing expectations.  Let’s just say that, without really good communication, volunteers can be blindsided and caught off-guard — with very unhappy results.  It’s just human.

The Big Thompson flood was caused by an unusual weather pattern over the canyon.  The flash flood caught up trees and boulders.  But it was much more deadly because the rising waters also picked up cars, propane tanks, cabins, and even entire bridges along the way as the water came down the narrow canyon.  Human stuff.

Bottom line:  Don’t let human “stuff” destroy the dedication of volunteers in the medium church.  Clear the debris and keep the channels of communication flowing freely.