Why you can hire too many ministers

Who do you hire when you suddenly discover that God has grown your church large enough that the senior minister/church planter/pastor can no longer hold it all together?

In the Anglican model (the church as village centre), the senior minister is called a rector.  I'd like to think that this draws on the Latin for 'teacher', but the period between rectors is called an interregnum ('between reigns').  In a one-minister parish, the rector does it all - preaching, Sunday School, visitation, flower arranging....  However, the last 20 years has seen a decided move towards team ministries as some churches have grown to multiple congregations.

Here is how it usually works.  The morning congregation has grown and the children of the first families are now young adults.  The church decides to start a new evening congregation (the use of 'plant' in this context is a little disingenuous) for students and young workers.  However, the rector is already flat out like a lizard drinking.  So a new minister is hired to pastor the new congregation.  And this new minister is kind of a 'mini-rector', to repeat all of the behaviours of the 'maxi-rector' in the new context.

As a result, rather than a larger, unified organisation, we find many churches around Sydney with multiple congregations are effectively clusters of independent silos.  Each congregation gets its own sermons, its own small groups ministry and so on.  There are no economies of scale.  Because the mini-rector and maxi-rector are duplicating the full range of each other's efforts, too, they have no time to spend improving their teaching, ministry structures or leadership development.  And because of this, the upper size limits placed on these congregations are very strict.

Instead, churches should recognize that leaders lead best when they build on their strengths, not their weaknesses.  If a church is able to add a second full-time member of staff, the goal is to complement, not duplicate, the gifts of existing staff.  Each addition should free up existing staff to focus more and more on what they do best.  A church that begins with a pastor teacher should next appoint a gifted administrator (this is not the same as an admin assistant) to remove the administration burden from the pastor and allow them to focus more on the their teaching.  Alternatively, they might hire a small groups coordinator, music director or children's worker - but a second preaching pastor ought to be a long way down the list.