3. What’s the biggest challenge in pastoring at a large church?
Again, I’m gonna give you a couple since I think 1 “BIGGEST” challenge is an unfair question. Let me preface my challenges by saying I absolutely love working in a “Team Staff” type setting. We have 7 full-time directors here at GWC that work closely together on a daily and weekly basis. Knowing myself, my creative energy feeds heavily off working collaboratively in a group setting. I know if I’m thinking at my best it’s being done with a team. It only usually takes the pump being primed with one simple thought and it’s off to the races. That’s part of the curse of living with a supremely ADD brain.
The team setting does present a few challenges. Scheduling can be one of them. With so many departments all working simultaneously with support staff in each it’s very important we work collectively and not just in spite of each other. While we do work well as a team, failure to communicate can surprisingly result in the failure of all ministry areas, not just one. If one is succeeding, we all are.
We also have something I like to call the “Volunteer Myth.” Everyone automatically assumes the larger a church is, the larger a crop of people you have to draw from to take part in your ministries. Right? Yes and no. Yes in terms of face value. Technically there are more people overall to draw from. But the answer is often no in terms of who visits your church. Large churches are often painted with the brush of being a safe place to visit where you can fade into the background and preserve a certain amount of anonymity in order to evade possible recruiters. I would argue that this is true of all churches regardless of size. We pride ourselves at being a “small large church” where the leaders are easily accessible and getting plugged in to a ministry is easy. But, it’s often not as easy as it sounds. It takes real work, and in a youth ministry where our main weekly service is on Sunday mornings during second worship service, it means my recruiting work becomes significantly more complicated and challenging. This leads to my next thought…
Multiplying myself is absolutely essential. If I had to give a biggest challenge of working in a large church this is it. It is impossible to do my job well without handing things off and recruiting people to do so. Handing it off has come easier the more evident the need has become, finding new volunteers to do so hasn’t been quite as easy. Remember, the bigger the church, the bigger the children’s ministry is. Typically infants-5th grade ministries require more volunteers. It’s their nature. Bottom line is, Childrens ministry is a much less scary one to volunteer for than youth ministry, right? Well, at least that’s what the perception is. The challenge here is not competing with this ministry to find volunteers AND battling the temptation of recruiting from within, though some naturally make the change as their own children grow older. This also means that you’re recruiting from a pond that’s been pretty heavily fished. It takes a growing church to provide fresh people to recruit from.
Part 1 of the interview is here and Part 3 will be up later today.
Eric Ebbinghaus is the Director of Student Ministries at Greeley Wesleyan Church in Greeley, CO.
He blogs at www.ericebbinghaus.com.
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