Church Management: The Backbone of a Thriving Ministry
Spinning Plates: management is a skill set not generally covered in traditional biblical studies or seminary education.
Growth Through Management: as church management improves, more resources become available for growth initiatives.
Software to the Rescue: church management software streamlines the myriad tasks associated with running a church.
Leading a church is as rewarding as it is challenging, especially when it comes to church management. Balancing people, resources, and goals often feels like spinning plates that are always on the verge of crashing.
- You might struggle to keep volunteers organized and energized.
- Your church’s finances could feel stretched or disorganized.
- Without clear systems, it’s easy to lose focus on your mission and vision.
These challenges usually arise because we weren’t taught practical management skills in seminary or early ministry roles. But the good news is, with the right tools and strategies, church management can become the backbone of a thriving ministry.
This article covers the essentials of church management, with actionable advice and recommendations for tools to simplify your day-to-day operations.
Dive in and equip yourself to manage with confidence!
What IS Church Management?
Church management is the skill of deploying your church’s people, funds, and focus to ensure your church's mission is accomplished.
While management does involve some direct control from leadership, the best management is about placing the right people into positions where they will be most effective. That means being intentional about how you lead each ministry in the church, whether that's the worship team, ushers and welcome team, your board of directors, the volunteers who spearhead church project management...
Church management ensures every effort is pushing towards your mission.
What Church Management Is Not
- It’s not just administration or task completion.
- It’s not about maintaining traditions or keeping everyone happy.
- It’s not a distraction from spiritual leadership—it is spiritual leadership when done right.
Benefits of Church Management Skill Mastery
- First, church management multiplies ministry impact by equipping more people to lead and serve, expanding your reach beyond staff limitations.
- Second, church management improves execution by keeping systems, teams, and resources running smoothly so ministry doesn’t get stuck in chaos or disorganization.
- Third, church management aligns your efforts by ensuring that every project, event, and investment stays laser-focused on advancing your mission of making disciples.
Several distinct core skills, when bundled together, allow you to experience these benefits
1) To Multiply Your Ministry, Learn...
In order to multiply the reach and impact of your mission you must empower people, stewarding resources, and keeping everyone aligned:
- Financial Stewardship: Wise, mission-driven financial management makes bold ministry sustainable and credible.
- Volunteer Leader Development: Equipping ordinary people to lead and serve is the greatest force multiplier in your church.
- Clear Communication: Clarity fuels trust, alignment, and effective action across your entire team.
2) To Improve Execution and Operations, Learn...
These disciplines keep your church running smoothly, allowing your team to execute mission without chaos or waste:
- Day-to-Day Operations: Consistent, organized systems empower people to focus on ministry instead of dysfunction.
- Running Projects: Turning ideas into reality requires finishing what you start with discipline and clarity.
- Facility/Property Maintenance: Caring for your physical environment ensures your space supports your mission, not distracts from it.
- Tracking/Storing Records: Capturing meaningful data empowers pastors and teams to care for people intentionally.
3) To Safeguard Ministry, Learn...
These practices protect your church’s mission, people, and credibility from drift, distraction, or disaster.
- Crisis/Risk Preparation: Proactively planning for worst-case scenarios protects people and preserves your witness.
- Running Events: Every event must fight for alignment with your mission, or risk wasting your church’s time and energy.
Church Management Skill-by-Skill Breakdown
Weakness in any one of these can hamper your church’s credibility, limit your impact, or drain your energy. Excellence in all of them builds a robust discipleship-first management culture—and that’s what your church exists for.
1. Financial Stewardship
Verdict: Non-negotiable foundational skill.
Church financial management is not easy (especially for those of us who aren't blessed with super fine attention to detail). Churches aren’t exempt from accountability just because they’re non-profits. Money mismanagement erodes trust faster than almost anything else. Biblical stewardship isn’t just “being careful with money”; it’s vision-aligned resource deployment that maximizes ministry impact.
Budget boldly, account scrupulously, and spend in alignment with your discipleship priorities. Your church accounting software is a critical part of your toolbox, as is your church giving software.
A financially 'safe' church that’s missionally stagnant is just a religious country club.
Do you have the right people in charge of your church's finances?
Use this church financial calendar to add some additional structure to your church finance team:
2. Volunteer Leader Development (with Template)
Verdict: The single biggest multiplier of discipleship.
If you aren’t developing leaders, you’re bottlenecking your church’s potential. Recruiting new volunteers, then discipling them to leadership is critical. Volunteer management may not be
Recruit, train, release, and coach—don’t hoard responsibility. Your job isn’t to do all ministry; it’s to equip others to do it. Volunteer management is a growth engine for any healthy church.
Here, I've provided a sample Onboarding Handbook template you can customize for your new leaders:
3. Clear Communication (with Template)
Verdict: Essential for unity, trust, and execution.
In church, communication clarity is oxygen to your team. If people don’t know what matters, what’s happening, or what’s expected, you will lose influence.
- Communicate early, often, and simply.
- Over-clarify.
- Assume nothing.
Unclear communication breeds frustration and division—two enemies of discipleship. With that in mind, download and utilize this church communications template. It'll ensure all your church comms are thoughtful, streamlined, and impactful.
4. Facility/Property Maintenance (Template)
Verdict: The silent credibility builder.
Nobody notices a well-maintained facility—until it’s not maintained. Your building is a tool for mission, not a museum or a monument. Mold, leaks, weird smells, broken HVAC, and unsafe environments undermine and distract from your discipleship efforts.
Good stewardship includes proactive facility or property care that supports the mission—not drains it.
To that end, our thorough church maintenance schedule will be super helpful for you and your team:
5. Running Projects
Verdict: The skill that separates amateurs from professionals.
Many churches drown in half-finished projects. Strong project management requires scoping clearly, managing stakeholders, and actually finishing. Churches need fewer ideas and more executions. Equip your teams with the courage to say no, the focus to finish, and the grit to clean up after the project’s done.
6. Overseeing Day-to-Day Operations
Verdict: The engine room of your church.
Operations may feel “unspiritual,” but they are deeply theological. Your church administrator (or admin team) is the hidden support structure that lets relational ministry happen. Managing calendars, team meetings, tech systems, policies—all of it creates clarity.
Sloppy operations exhaust people and waste time. Running a tight ship allows your best to focus on discipleship, not chaos.
Joshua Gordon
7. Tracking/Storing Records
Verdict: A discipline that fuels pastoral intelligence.
Good data management isn’t bureaucracy—it’s pastoral care at scale. If you can’t track who’s attending, giving, serving, or missing, you’re flying blind. Your church records should empower personal pastoral care, not serve as digital clutter. If it doesn’t support discipleship, ditch it. If it does, treat it as a sacred trust.
8. Crisis/Risk Preparation (with Template)
Verdict: Better to prepare than to repair.
This is where most churches are dangerously naive. Hope is not a strategy. Whether it’s medical emergencies, legal issues, cyber attacks, or moral failure, your team needs security plans for responding to crisis. This protects people and preserves your witness.
At New Life Fellowship, we've used a tool like this free Risk Registry Matrix, where-in key people review potential risks to your church, and discuss the results:
9. Running Events (with Template)
Verdict: A risky time-and-resource black hole if not mission-aligned.
Events can fuel momentum or drain the soul of your team. The question isn’t “Was the event good?”—it’s “Did it serve our discipleship pathway?”
- Host fewer, better, and more aligned events.
- Stop doing events that exist because “we’ve always done them.”
- Make every event fight for its life.
Interested in a breakdown of the steps required to create and run a rad event (like a conference)? We've explored this in-depth before - I'd encourage you to dive in:
Choosing the Best ChMS for Your Church (Checklist Included)
Church management is a wonderful and complex undertaking that can define the difference between a growing church and a stagnant one. This article is a great jumping-off point to refine and develop your management toolbox.
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