The Healthy Church Staff Podcast
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The Healthy Church Staff Podcast
The Death of the Church Secretary_ How Technology Killed a Sacred Role
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You're answering the church phone during your sermon, right here. You're updating the church website at 9 p.m. because nobody else knows how. And you're folding bulletins in your office thinking, didn't we used to have someone for this? Over time, a lot of churches, small churches, have killed the church secretary, and we didn't replace him of her with anything that actually worked. Sound familiar? That's what we're going to talk about today here on the Healthy Church Staff Post Podcast. My name's Todd Rhodes, one of the co-founders over at Chemistry Staffing. Check us out at chemistrystaffing.com. Twenty years ago, every church had one. Big church, small church, every church had one. It was called the church secretary, usually a female. And the church secretary held everything together. She knew where everything was. She was the one that answered every phone call on the second ring. And she was the one that could find the key to any room. She was the one that remembered everybody's birthday. She was the one that knew where all the bodies were buried. She had the institutional memory with a smile and a filing system that actually worked. And if you were a new pastor, she's the one that showed you the ropes and told you who to watch out for. And then we decided that technology would do her job better. And what we lost in the digital shovel uh shuffle was we automated that person to a phone tree, and now important voice calls go to voicemail, sometimes for days. We moved to online giving, but nobody's tracking who stopped contributing. We digitized all of our files, but we can't find yet last year's VBS records. Nobody seems to know where those went. The database, it's a mess now because five different people update it randomly. Visitors are falling through the cracks because the system will catch them, but it never does. New members get forgotten because there's no human tracking their journey. And now we sit back and we wonder what happened. But thought we were making things for the better. Now listen, the heart was right. We wanted to be efficient, we wanted to be forward-thinking, but actually, churches actually need someone, a person, not a technology, not a new platform. Churches actually need somebody who owns that administrative ecosystem. Not just the data entry, but also all of that relational stewardship. Not just answering the phones, but also being the human face that people remember when they come into the office. Not just managing systems, but creating systems that actually serve people. And guess what? Here's the secret. And it might be counterintuitive in what we're doing in a lot of our churches and in the technology craze that we're in right now with AI and everything. Some of those roles just can't be automated. You can't automate following up when somebody misses three Sundays in a row. You can, but it's not going to be personal, right? You can't automate remembering that the Johnson family's going through a divorce or knowing which volunteers always bring the extra supplies or making sure that the new family gets connected before they slip away. And that's really the hidden cost of sometimes when we try to do the right thing, when we try to save money, or we try to get with the times, there is a hidden cost. And hidden cost in a lot of small churches right now, especially those with solar pastors, your senior pastors doing$15 an hour tasks instead of the$150 an hour senior pastor work that he needs to be doing. Your staff gets burned out on administrative details instead of doing ministry, and people are feeling just unknown because there's no institutional memory. The relational fabric could be freeing just because nobody's watching the threads. So here's the bottom line for today. You're gonna be tempted to automate. You're gonna be tempted to cut costs, you're gonna be tempted by a new shiny platform that's gonna maybe you don't want to say it's gonna take somebody's job, but honestly, it could take their job, right? Here's the bottom line. You can't automate caring. And efficiency without relationships isn't actually very efficient. So what I would love for you to do, the challenge for this week, is audit what's falling through those cracks since maybe you've eliminated or reorganized some of those support roles. Get a list of maybe three things, two or three things that used to get done consistently but now happen randomly, or maybe they don't even happen at all. And then ask, what would it cost to have a human own this thing again? Yeah, let's go old school on it, right? Your people need to feel known, not just processed. And sometimes the most forward-thinking decision and the best of technology isn't going to cut it. And you need to think about bringing back what actually worked. I hope this has been helpful for you today. An interesting take on administrative support in the church and what it looked like 20 years ago and what it looks like today is a lot different. And you need to make sure that sure, automate where you can automate, but keep that human touch. It's huge. It's huge. Hope that you will join me, continue making a habit in 2026 to be a part of the podcast. Join me every day. You and I get to spend some time together. We always enjoy that. But we also get to learn a lot along the way in our ministry journey. So I hope that you will make it a habit and join me every day right here on the podcast. And if there's any way that I can help you or your church, just reach out to me anytime. Podcast at chemistry staffing.com is my email. I read each and every email and try to respond to as many as I can. All right, thanks so much. We will be back on Monday for another episode of the Healthy Church Camp Podcast.
