The Healthy Church Staff Podcast
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The Healthy Church Staff Podcast
The Spiritual Mismatch on Your Church Staff
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It doesn't always start with a glow. In fact, most spiritual misalignment on a church staff is really pretty subtle at first. A little phrasing here, a value conflict there. But if you leave these little things unchecked, it becomes one of the most corrosive forces in your ministry. And today on the Healthy Church Staff Podcast, we're going to dig into the signs of spiritual misalignment on a staff, how to bring clarity without crushing the nuance that always exists, and how to cultivate deeper unity without demanding uniformity. That's really important. Hi there, my name's Todd Rhodes, and I'm your host here on the Healthy Church Staff Podcast every Monday through Friday. I'm also one of the co-founders over at chemistrystaffing.com. Your team gets along just fine. For the most part, nobody's arguing. Everybody seems aligned on the mission. But yet, something just feels a little bit off. You feel it in the language that people use. You hear it in how maybe scripture is quoted or maybe scripture is avoided. And you see it sometimes in what gets prioritized and what does it, what quietly gets ignored. Today we're going to be talking about spiritual misalignment that you might be sensing, but you just you can't quite name it yet. You can't quite put words to it. All right. Misalignment is subtle until it's not, right? Especially the spiritual misalignment that we're talking about today here on the podcast. It rarely starts with heresy. You don't ever like pull out anything and say you're a heretic. It starts a lot quieter, a lot subtler. Maybe a staff member dodging some discussions around uh a controversial core doctrine. Maybe there's a subtle shift in language around sin or how you preach from the pulpit about uh scripture or the gospel. Maybe there's a growing discomfort around some spiritual conversations in meetings. And you start to hear things like, hold on there. Let's not over-spiritualize this. Or on the other side, that feels too black and white. Or let's keep it practical. Let's not talk theology right now. Let's talk practicality. Okay. Now, these aren't always red flags, but they are yellow ones, and they can signal deeper drift theologically in your church or in your staff, or in your leadership, even. And there are some real costs to doctrinal drift when it comes to your staff. What starts as this small almost a dissonance or a little bit of an annoyance can really over time become some full-blown disharmony that can actually split a church. Team trust erodes when core beliefs aren't shared and your vision gets blurry because theological clarity isn't shared. Over time, your ministry is going to lose power when leaders aren't praying or teaching or leading from the same foundation if they're not headed in the same direction. Now, all of us tend to have a little bit of an ability over the years to drift. You probably don't believe everything exactly the way you did five years ago, ten years ago, or especially 20 or 30 years ago in my instance here. But drift usually doesn't drift toward clarity. Okay? It always drifts sometimes towards confusion. And I always I tell my kids, man, they're 20, 26, 28. I always tell them I feel like I knew more when I was 28 than I do when I'm 61. Sometimes I'm just confused, and that's what drift does. If you avoid talking about it, talking about this drift too long, you don't just lose alignment, you lose culture. Some of that drift is natural, but it just has to be discussed, it has to be talked about. And here's why it needs to be talked about, because you need to continue to build unity without demanding uniformity. Okay. Hear me here. The answer isn't a staff-wide theology quiz. Okay? It's not saying, hey, get on board or get out. But it is a clear conversation about theological non-negotiables. Here's some things you can try. Okay? Define the core theological convictions that your staff must share. You gotta do this when you hire, right? Once you hire, this is a conversation that may be too l too much, too little, too late for some people if you find that they don't match your core your core theological convictions. Identify areas where diversity is acceptable. We call these kind of secondary issues, okay? Not closed fist issues, but open-handed issues. Clarity is needed, but it's okay to have a little bit of different ideas on these kind of secondary theological issues. You can create space for honest dialogue, not just doctrinal checkboxing, okay? Church coach team members, they need alignment. They may need alignment, not just compliance, okay? And this is where the unity comes in because unity thrives where truth is spoken in love and love is grounded in truth. Some churches, man, are everything is a close-fisted issue. And if everything is a close-fisted issue, you're going to have trouble finding unity. Okay? Unity thrives where truth is spoken in love, and love is grounded in truth. Okay, here's my final thought, bottom line for today. Spiritual alignment doesn't usually explode. It does explode at some point, right? It's going to reach a point where it just everything blows up. But it doesn't get there overnight. It erodes. It takes its time to get there. And the sooner you name it, the sooner you can build something stronger. Here's my question for you today. What's one belief or conviction or idea or theological, theological truth, theological conviction that your team needs to align on this year? Maybe you fell a little bit adrift. And this is the time between now and the end of the year where you need to get everybody at least having the conversation so that you can find some unity in this area where there appears to be a little bit adrift. I'd love to hear from you. Reach out to me, podcast at Chemistry Staffing if there's any conversations that we can have that will help lead your staff to a healthy point. We are opening up some coaching and consulting opportunities for 2026 already. So if you are interested in cultivating some type of a partnership or coaching or consulting agreement on healthy church staff issues, I'd love to reach out for you to reach out and talk to me. Let's talk and see what we can work out. My email is podcast at chemistry staffing.com. All right, that's it for today. Hope you've enjoyed the podcast. We're here every day, Monday through Friday, and I'll talk to you again tomorrow.
