How To Organize Church Operations: A Guide For Lead Pastors

From daily operations to managing church leaders and board members, knowing how to organize a church can be a difficult task:

• Struggling to balance administrative duties with spiritual responsibilities.
• Difficulty in keeping clear communication between staff, volunteers, and leaders.
• Managing conflicting opinions among board members and leadership teams.
• Overseeing multiple church programs while maintaining a consistent mission.
• Ensuring financial transparency while managing budgets and donations.

Thankfully, though, there are many excellent software solutions for your church management headaches. (And, if you need 'em, we've ranked the best free church management software options as well. )

Church organization is unique.

While your organization would benefit from a church business plan, keep in mind that organizing a church is fundamentally different from any other business or nonprofit operation. It requires pulling from a plurality of disciplines in order to manage your church well. If that seems a tall order, you're not alone: George Barna’s 2022 research report found that 1 in 5 lead pastors “don’t feel equipped to cope with ministry demands.” But I've got you.

In this article, I will define what it means to organize a church, discuss leading small vs. large churches, and give some productivity and time management tips so you can organize a church more effectively and efficiently.

I’ll cover:

• How To Organize Your Church’s Operations
• Organizing Small Churches vs Large Churches
• 10 Productivity & Time Management Tips For Lead Pastors

How To Organize Your Church’s Operations

The local church is a messy and beautiful community. Whether you are church planting and trying to figure out how to organize a church or have been at a local church for a while, there is a steep learning curve on what it takes to manage a church organization.

What is a church organization?

Legally, a church falls under the definition of religious organizations who maintain regular church services, religious rituals, and typically are defined by their tax-exempt status.

However, a better definition for our purposes might be: "church organization" is the total management process of a local church.

If you are just beginning to get a church organized and started, then there are some basic legal and financial considerations to cover. However, if you are trying to figure out how to organize a church that is already in operation, then there is more on the managerial side that many pastors are thrust into without much guidance or preparation.

1. Church Leadership & Board Members

Whether you are starting a new church or managing an existing church, you need to consider how you will organize church leaders and board members. Some of this will include deacons and elders, other churches will focus more on small groups of church members.

Some (like your church finance committee) will be focused on, surprise surprise, organizing church finances while others may be focusing on how to practice evangelism and train members of the church to invite new members into the local church community. When you are trying to learn how to organize a church only one thing is certain: communication is key.

Here are some tips for organizing a church leadership or board effectively:

1. Focus on the people first, then the process
2. If someone can do a task 80% as effectively as you, delegate it to them
3. Be consistent
4. Create and follow policies and procedures
5. When in doubt, ask for guidance from others and allow the group to self-organize as needed

2. Church Administration

Church administration involves managing the day-to-day operations of a church to ensure it runs smoothly and efficiently. It covers areas like staff management, communication, event planning, record-keeping, and maintaining the church’s facilities. Church administrators often ensure that church activities align with the church’s mission and vision, supporting the pastor and leadership team.

Acts 6:1-7 highlights the importance of administration when the apostles appointed leaders to oversee the distribution of food, allowing them to focus on prayer and ministry.

However, church administration is less about the details and minutiae and more about organizing the people and resources of a local community to better love God and love others. As you organize a church, at any stage or age, you are going to need to focus on how to utilize your resources rather than manage mountains of paperwork.

For best tips and best practices to balance the administrative tasks and administrative nature of church organization, check out the list below:

1. Delegate administrative tasks according to gifting, not position or role (don’t give the bubbly communicator all the paperwork and the local church curmudgeon the people resource tasks)
2. Create an organizational structure that clearly defines order of operations and defines the lead pastor’s authority, for their own healthy and safety
3. Focus on the tasks that move the mission of the church forward, not what is typically expected
4. Lean on teams and small groups to continue pushing the administrative goals of the church forward

3. Structuring Finances & Managing Donations

Managing financial accounts according to best church accounting guidelines, while sticky for some, is a crucially important element to be aware of. Financial management of a church is a tricky subject and there are always denominational factors that will come into play when discussing exactly how church finances are managed.

Generally, though, every lead pastor should have the support of a church finance committee. It's also helpful to keep tabs on the general state of the church’s financial situation at all times(using accurate, regular church finance reports), at least to some degree. It is difficult for a lead pastor to be able to encourage and push church leaders forward towards the mission of the church if the lead pastor has no idea the church is in the red financially.

Financial Management is Critical.

Church giving software is a fundamentally important tool. All nonprofit organizations are concerned about giving. Here are a few best practices that can make a difference in how you manage church finances and giving:

1. Evaluate the past and current financial health of your church before making adjustments
2. Create a simple giving process and giving campaign that you teach at regular intervals
3. Set reasonable and attainable financial goals, with plans for what happens if God shows up in a big way for your church
4. Make sure you are staying on top of your tax benefits and nonprofit organization status requirements
5. Set up a church finance management committee

Read more about the different positions in churches here.

Editorial Recommendations

Growing a strong ministry team requires targeted training and resources. With this in mind, here are resources to help your team serve with purpose and skill.

• Christian counselling courses teach skills for offering effective, supportive counseling.
• Explore evangelical seminaries that provide solid theological foundations for leaders.
• These Baptist seminaries offer specialized training for upholding Baptist doctrine.
• Use church administration books to streamline operations, helping your church run smoothly.
• Children’s ministry newsletters keep young families connected and engaged.

4. Property Maintenance

Sometimes, in order to breathe new life into a church organization at any level, you have to put some elbow grease into the maintenance of the building as well as the community. Bylaws can be a hassle, but they are made to foster healthy relationships within the local church community. Likewise, investing time in property management can go a long way to creating a proud community.

Here are some simple tips for maintaining a healthy church community as well as a church property that community can be proud of:

1. Remember that God has granted the gift of the building, so encourage people to care for it accordingly
2. There are plenty of free resources for healthy church community management, so use them!
3. The Kingdom of God is wherever the people are, so treat all new members like a part of the family

5. Recruiting, Managing, and Equipping Volunteers

Church volunteer management is the process of recruiting, organizing, and overseeing volunteers who serve in various roles within a church. It involves tasks like:

• scheduling, training, supporting volunteers
• ensuring volunteers are matched with roles suited to their skills and passions
• Clear communication (providing encouragement, feedback, and coaching)
• Recognizing volunteers for their contributions

1 Peter 4:10 encourages using gifts to serve others, making volunteer management essential for maximizing the church's collective talents to fulfill its mission.

Volunteer Organization Tips:

Here are some tips to organizing volunteers while also keeping the right mindset about the people who choose to fill those roles:

1. Recognize that volunteer management takes a lot of work and prepare accordingly, because they deserve your best!
2. Match people to passions, not positions
3. Limit the amount of volunteer positions needed until you have more volunteers than positions, then you can scale with your capabilities rather than outpace your growth
4. Celebrate your volunteers at every opportunity, in small and big ways

10 Productivity & Time Management Tips For Lead Pastors 

If you want to understand how to organize a church, then you are going to need to manage your time and productivity to the best of your abilities. Every lead pastor and senior pastor is different. All pastors will have slightly different roles.

All of these productivity and time management tips come straight from some of the best and brightest (Carey Nieuwhof and Craig Groeschel)!

1. Take a nap: the power of sleep is amazing for your productivity. A midday 20 minute nap can refresh your mind and spirits.
2. Create an idea capture system: part of the problem with trying to hold ideas in our brain is that it takes up too much mental bandwidth. Create a system to get an idea out of your head and into a note, on a piece of paper, a voice memo, etc. Then move on until you are ready to nurture that idea at another point.
3. Understand the difference between urgent and important: not everything that is “urgent” is “important.” Work to grasp the difference between these two. Do this well and you'll discover a lot less stress (and a lot more time) in your life.
4. Learn to say “yes, but...”: church members will bombard you with problems, proposed solutions, ministry ideas, etc. Learn to start saying, “Yes, we would love to do that, but...I don’t have the bandwidth. Do you think you could head this up for us?”
5. Have an open-door policy, but close your door when you need to focus. As pastors, we want to make ourselves available to those who need us. Ask your volunteers and staff to respect your time when your door is closed. This will increase productivity and help you manage your time more efficiently.
6. Silence notifications: this may sound like a no-brainer. However, a surprising number of people don’t put their phone away during deep-focus times.
7. Take full advantage of your peak productivity window: Carey Nieuwhof covers this in his At Your Best course, but everyone has a 3-5 hour window where they are at their most energetic. Identify that block for yourself, ask Jesus where to spend that time - then guard it with your life.
8. Schedule your values: give priority in your life and work to the things that are of the highest value. Be comfortable saying “no” to a few things so you can say “yes” to the most important things.
9. Create artificial deadlines. For some, deadlines add some extra motivation to get things completed. While this is an unhealthy practice over the long term, it can be useful for a short time.
10. Empower and delegate to others: you cannot go far in ministry without recognizing that you are incapable of doing everything. Find people who can do the work better than you, and empower them to do it.

Adjust, Tweak, and Maximize.

Understanding how to organize a church is a never-ending process of adjustments and improvements. Things that seem nailed down today will need to be changed (often sooner than we'd like.)

Whether you're starting a church or walking through the incredibly painful process of closing a church, embrace these principles of organization.

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