Church Management: The Backbone of a Thriving Ministry
Church management is a learnable skill that drives mission impact.
Strong church administration systems multiply ministry by empowering your members.
Competence in church management can drive member growth and church wellbeing.
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.
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.
- Financial Stewardship
- Volunteer & Leadership Development
- Clear Communication
- Facility & Property Management
- Project Management
- Administrating Daily Operations
- Tracking Data & Storing Records
- Crisis Preparation
- Event Management
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 & Leadership 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. Effective Events Executiong (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:
Benefits of Church Management Skill Mastery
Church management mastery turns chaos into clarity—fueling growth, improving execution, and protecting your mission:
- Multiply your ministry: Develop leaders, manage finances wisely, and communicate clearly to empower more people to serve and lead.
- Run smoother operations: Master daily systems, project execution, facility care, and data tracking to keep your church moving forward without burnout.
- Protect what matters most: Prepare for crises and align every event to your mission so your church stays focused, resilient, and impactful.
1) Multiply Your Ministry
In order to multiply the reach and impact of your mission you must empower people, stewarding resources, and keeping everyone aligned. These skills have the greatest impact towards this benefit:
- 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) Smoother Operations
These disciplines keep your church running with less friction, allowing your team to execute mission without chaos or waste. Invest in these skills to improve this:
- Day-to-Day Operations: Consistent, organized systems empower people to focus on ministry instead of dysfunction.
- Executing 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) Protecting the Ministry
These practices protect your church’s mission, people, and credibility from drift, distraction, or disaster. Ensure these skills are represented on your leadership team.
- Crisis Preparation: Proactively planning for worst-case scenarios protects people and preserves your witness.
- Effective Events: Every event must fight for alignment with your mission, or risk wasting your church’s time and energy.
This Year's Best Church Management Software Tools
| Tool | Best For | Trial Info | Price | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Best for all-in-one church management | Free plan available | From $12/month | Website | |
| 2 | Best for organizing member information | Free trial available | From $69.99/month | Website | |
| 3 | Best for managing church donations and events | Free plan available | From $19/month (billed annually) | Website | |
| 4 | Best for ease of use | Free demo available | From $25/month | Website | |
| 5 | Best for centralizing church functions | Free plan available | From $9/month | Website | |
| 6 | Best for growing congregations | 30-day free trial | From $58/month | Website | |
| 7 | Best for managing people and payments | Free demo available | Pricing upon request | Website | |
| 8 | Best for church finances | 30-day free trial | From $50/month/account | Website | |
| 9 | Best for connecting the church community | Free trial available | Pricing upon request | Website | |
| 10 | Best for on-site local network installation | Not available | Website |
What a ChMS Is
Church Management Software (ChMS) is a digital platform designed to help churches handle their administrative, communication, and pastoral tasks more effectively.
At its core, a ChMS is a database—but it's so much more than that. It functions as your ministry’s central nervous system: managing people records, tracking attendance, organizing volunteer teams, collecting donations, sending updates, and planning events.
Done right, a ChMS saves hours of admin time and prevents people from slipping through the cracks.
Joshua Gordon
Benefits to Expect from your ChMS
The right ChMS can bring tangible ministry benefits almost immediately:
- Improved Organization: Centralizes your records, calendars, and communication tools.
- Better Pastoral Care: Helps you see who’s missing, who’s giving, and who needs follow-up.
- Increased Engagement: Make it easier for people to sign up, serve, give, and stay in the loop.
- Financial Clarity: Track giving trends, create reports, and ensure accountability.
- Stronger Volunteer Systems: Coordinate teams without email chains or clipboard chaos.
When your tools work with your ministry, not against it, you create margin for your team to lead well.
ChMS Features to Prioritize
Not all features matter equally. When choosing a tool, focus on these core ChMS capabilities:
- People & Household Management: Easily update profiles, track engagement, and view giving history. This gives your team a clear picture of who’s connected, involved, and potentially slipping through the cracks—so you can follow up personally and pastorally.
- Communication Tools: Email, text, and push notifications that are intuitive and reliable. Effective communication keeps everyone in the loop and ensures important updates don’t get lost, confused, or overlooked.
- Volunteer Scheduling: Assign roles, send reminders, and handle swaps or cancellations. Keeps services and events staffed without last-minute scrambling, and reduces burnout by making it easier for volunteers to show up and succeed.
- Event & Service Planning: Create recurring events, manage signups, and plan service elements. Helps you execute events smoothly and consistently, while keeping the details aligned with your mission and discipleship goals.
- Giving & Contributions: Online giving, recurring donations, and detailed reporting for transparency. Makes it easier for people to give consistently, builds financial trust, and equips leaders to steward resources wisely.
- Reporting & Dashboards: See trends, spot gaps, and make data-informed decisions. Translates raw data into actionable insights so your team can lead with clarity, not just instinct.
Checklist: Choosing the Best ChMS
Church management is a wonderful and complex undertaking that can be the difference between a growing church and a stagnant one.
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