The Healthy Church Staff Podcast
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The Healthy Church Staff Podcast
Small Church, Big Struggles_ Why Staff at Churches Under 100 Are at Highest Risk
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Hi there, welcome to the Healthy Church Staff Podcast. My name is Todd Rhodes. I'm your host and also one of the co-founders over chemistry staffing.com. And we are looking at our top 10 discoveries from our Healthy Church Staff assessment that we just released on Monday of this week. 200 pages. And I'm going to tell you how to get all of this in a free 200-page download. Absolutely free for you. Has all the stats, all the trends, everything that we've learned. We want to open-handedly give this to you to kind of share with you how church staffs are doing across the United States. And we've talked about four discoveries so far. If you've missed those, you can go back and see the podcast. On Monday, we talked about the flight risk crisis, where we talked about how many church staff are actually looking and open to taking new positions. On Tuesday, we talked about what we call the three to five year wall, which talks about staff members that have been at your church three to five years are at elevated flight risk levels, according to our research. On Wednesday, we talked about the second chair crisis, about the difference between how maybe senior pastors and executive pastors view their churches compared to second chair leadership. That's a really interesting one. Yesterday we talked about what we call the evaluation disaster. And today we're going to talk about the small church struggle. That's discovery number five. Now, if you were listening yesterday, I accidentally said that today we were going to talk about benefits. I got a little bit ahead of myself, and we're going to actually do that on Monday. So come back to the podcast on Monday and we're going to share our discovery on benefits packages and the benefits gap that we found. But today we're going to talk about the small church struggle. Why churches, why the churches that can afford loss have the highest risk. That can least boy, I totally butchered that title, and I'm even trying to read it. We're going to call it the small, and I'm too lazy to edit it out. You guys know that, right? The small church struggle, why the churches that can least afford loss have the highest risk. Okay. So again, this is all part of our series, 10 top discoveries. And here's what we found when it comes to small churches. Nearly half of everybody that responded to our church staff health assessment uh this past year is at a church under 250 in attendance. Okay. So these aren't outliers. These are really the heartbeat of the American church ministry, and we captured a lot of responses from small church pastors and staff people. And here's what we found. Churches in staff, staff and churches under 100 in worship attendance, their average health score is about 176. Remember that number, 176 out of 250. Okay. Churches and staff, staff and churches over 2,000, so megachurch staff members, their health score overall was 185 out of 250. So if you remember that 176 number, 176 score for small church pastors, 185 for staff members at larger churches. Churches that can least afford to lose staff have actually the highest turnover risk. We put this into what we call flight risk, okay? Percentage of flight risk. So for small churches under 100, flight risk is about 61%. That means 61% of small church pastors and staff are considering moving on to something different. In larger churches, it's about 40%. So a 21% gap. And that's where the problem is. And that's what we're going to try and unpack and understand a little bit better today. Okay. I want to share with you four insights. Okay. First insight is this gap is real, but it's not your destiny. Okay. The 21 personally different difference that I just talked about between flight risk, between smallest and largest churches, it's real, but it's not your destiny. So six out of 10 staff in churches under 100 have seriously thought about leaving. And the biggest drop-off happens below the 100 mark. After that, the scores kind of cluster pretty tightly together. So here's where there's hope, right? 67% of small church staff are in healthy territory overall. Okay. 67% are doing okay. Two-thirds are doing okay. Size is a factor, but it's not a destined uh sentence. It's not your destiny. So some churches, some small churches have figured that out. And the question is what they're doing about it differently. So let's talk about, first of all, before we get there, let's talk about why some small churches and small church staff struggle. And I'm not I'm preaching to the choir here. If you're in a small church, and I've served in a small church before, so I totally get these. This is a rocket surgery here, but there are resource constraints, those hit hard in small churches. There's lower pay, there's fewer benefits, there's outdated equipment. If you have equipment at all, there's no budget for training and there's no bells and whistles, right? So resource constraints are real. And isolation is real too. If you're the only person doing your job, you don't have any peers to brainstorm with. And that can lead to some pretty, pretty heavy burnout and disillusionment. And it's because you're wearing multiple hats, right? You've got the multiple hat problem if you're in a small church. You're probably the senior pastor, you might even be the youth pastor on Wednesday night. You might have to get out your guitar occasionally and lead worship. You might be the person that unlocks the building and locks it back up when everybody's done. You're not doing one job well. You're doing four jobs poorly. At least that's how you feel. And uh in the small church, everything feels personal. Every decision affects people that you're gonna see tomorrow at the grocery store. And the ceiling just feels really low that there's no path, no pathway for advancement. You're not gonna move up the ranks to the senior pastor from the senior pastor. The only way up is out a lot of times, and that that can be hard for many people. All right, so that's insight number two, just kind of looking at some of the realities. And for insight number three, I just want to talk about the cruel math of small church staffing. And this again, I'm not rocket science here, but when a megachurch, one of large churches as a staff member, it's disruptive, but it's survivable. But when a church of 75 loses their only staff member besides a pastor, or they lose their pastor, or they lose a key volunteer, man, it can be catastrophic because there's nobody there to absorb those responsibilities. And there's sometimes not even enough budget to hire a replacement, and the candidates are sparse. So the search drags on and on, and volunteers burn out, the pastor burns out. And so one departure can trigger just this downward spiral. And with a 61% flight risk already, that trigger is closer than most boards realize. So our final insight for today is what healthy small churches do differently. And this is some of the things that we pulled out of the research. And this is if you're in a small church, you have a superpower, okay? You can do this better than larger churches, you can do this better than medium-sized churches. You have a superpower, and churches that get this lean into their superpower, and here's what it is, okay? Relationships. Everybody knows everybody. And you might think, well, that's not a good thing. But no, that's really an advantage. They set realistic expectations most of the time, honest about what's possible and clear about what's not, and they connect staff to outside peer networks in healthy small churches, they know that they you're the only guy, you're the only gal there. That's why it's important to connect with people outside of your church. And if isolation is the enemy, then connection is the cure, and small churches that get it. Small churches that have understood this also know that they invest with what they have. Right? They're flexible, they give autonomy, they give trust, they give genuine appreciation to the staff that they do have, and they on top of that they compensate fairly and they communicate transparent transparently about the limitations that they have. Now listen, you're never gonna compete with large churches on salary, but absolutely you can outcare them. You can totally out care them very easily. So here's the bottom line. If we're talking about bottom lines for today, small church leaders must be more intentional about staff health because the margin is just thinner. You can't afford the assumption that everybody's fine. You can't survive a preventable departure. If you are a small church pastor, I want you to think about this. If you're a small church board member, you need to think about how susceptible your pastor, your key volunteers are, and how tired they might be and what you lack in resources, man, you just gotta make up in relationship and in communication. So here's my advice for you today my action plan. If you lead a small church, have an honest conversation with your staff. And you're like, Todd, I don't think you understand what a small church is. I don't have a staff. That's fine. Have a conversation with your board, have a conversation with your key volunteers about what's sustainable and what's not. And if you serve in a small church and you don't have anybody you can talk to, any peers, find a peer. Reach out to me. I'll try and help you find somebody that you can talk to outside of your walls, because the isolation, man, it will get to you and it will erode you if you let it. And if you're on a small church staff board, ask yourself if our staff member, if our pastor, if our key volunteer left tomorrow, what would happen? That vulnerability should shape how you treat them today. All right, so this is just one of the top 10 discoveries that we have discovered on our church staff health assessment this year. We've compiled everything, as I've said, into a free 200-page report. You can get it right now, all the data, all the insights, all the trends. If you're a church geek, you will absolutely love it. If you're not a church geek, you're like, Todd, I don't have time for 200 pages. Just read the executive summary at the top of the report and you'll be good. But you can get it right now for free. Download it for free at churchstaffhealth.com. We've also added a couple of additional reports. If you are a staff member and would like to see how you are doing, how your church staff assessment compares to everyone else in our national sample. We have an individualized report that you can order as well. And if you're a pastor and an executive pastor at your church and you're like, this is really fascinating, but I wonder what it's like actually in my church. We can run a churchwide report for you as well, and there's information about that as well. How you can order that over at churchstaffhealth.com. Of course, I'd love to hear your input. My email address is podcast at chemistry staffing.com. All right, thanks for hanging with me. I know some of these podcasts are a little bit longer than we normally do, but I want to take some time and really unpack some of the things that we've been learning on our healthy church staff assessment. It's really important for your church and for the church, the big city church as a whole. All right, thanks so much. Have a great weekend. We'll see you back here on Monday, and we will talk about benefits on Monday project.
