As a church planter, your most valuable resources are the people who help you accomplish your church’s mission. How can you manage your staff well when times are tough?

0:18 This episode is a continuation of the conversation Lee and Danny had in the previous episode.

1:19 Danny points out a silver lining during this difficult time.

2:19 Danny recommends not to respond too quickly or emotionally if suddenly your giving is down.

3:35 Danny discusses looking at your current staff and assessing if you need to reorganize.

5:04 Lee shares an example of God's grace during a financially challenging time at his church plant.

5:49 Questions to ask when a staff member leaves: Do you need to replace them? Do you need that position? Or do you need something else? 

6:25 Lee asks Danny if his church ever had to cut salaries across the board.

7:44 Danny talks about his church’s decision not to provide health insurance for its staff. 

9:48 Danny and Lee discuss if the lead pastor should offer to take the biggest and first pay cut.

12:27 Lee and Danny talk about solo pastors who don’t have any other paid staff.

15:21 What are three options for a planter who is struggling financially after two or three years?

18:24 Lee encourages you to embrace the challenge because it’s in the challenge that opportunity is presented. Look for new opportunities and ways to do things differently.

18:42 Lee says pastors shouldn’t be afraid to have the financial conversation with their church and leaders and talks about what to say.

19:12 Danny discusses several ideas for sharing staff and resources.

Lee Stephenson: Hey, everyone, welcome to the Unfiltered podcast. Lee Stephenson here, executive director of Church Planting with Converge.

Danny Parmelee: Danny Parmelee. I oversee Church Planting for Converge MidAmerica.

Lee Stephenson: And we are in part two of a series of episodes where we’re just talking about managing, leading in the midst of economic downturn. And so, Episode One of this conversation was specifically talking about the art of budgeting, and putting together the numbers, if you know that you’re facing financial hardship. And this episode, we’re gonna take some time to specifically talk about the art of staffing. How do you staff? How do you manage staff in the midst of economic challenging moments, and even, I think some of it is the dream of staff, because sometimes you might be a young church plant, Danny, and you’re going, Man, this was the year we were gonna hire that position, you know, a number two guy or a worship pastor, or we were going to move our worship pastor from part time to full time, and then all of a sudden, you’re sitting there going, I don’t know where the money is going to be, or if the money’s gonna be there. How do you manage some of that? And maybe just talk, first of all, from your own personal experience with that.

Danny Parmelee: Yeah, well, I would say that, that while that this is a difficult time, I think there’s also a silver lining, and there are some opportunities here. I think that church planters, right now need to understand that this gives them almost an excuse or opportunity to shuffle the deck. There will also be people that are going to be losing their secular jobs that or, or getting their secular jobs going from full time to part time, that have always been considering ministry, maybe even God has made it really clear that they’re called to ministry and they’ve been fighting it. And this is going to be the thing that says, No, you will be doing this. And so I think that there’s going to be some opportunities here just as much as there are some hardships, I do think that obviously, things rise and fall on leadership and your staff are your leaders. So it also will require some hard decisions as well, too. I would also say to be careful not to respond too quickly. So if all sudden your giving is down, that you think the only way forward is literally to fire staff, OK? So instead, I might, I might suggest that, that you slow down, that you take a deep breath, and that you’re honest with staff without scaring them. In other words, like everybody’s job is on the line, and everyone’s going to take pay cuts, and yada yada, yada. But that you also have some conversation, just where things are at. Because there may be other people where things are changing for them and changing in their own family unit. And maybe someone who is in ministry now actually needs to go back to secular work because of homeschooling, you know, you know, virtual school, all sorts of different things. So to not just overreact to emotionally and make too many drastic decisions just based on emotion or on a month or two of bad giving, or Monday morning.

Lee Stephenson: Once you get those numbers, it is easy to take it very personal and allow your emotions to get invested. So let me ask a clarifying question. You said, you know economic challenge could be a moment of shuffling the deck. What do you mean by that?

Danny Parmelee: Um, so the other thing, I think, is that you’re looking at even the staff that you have now. And there may be different needs. So in other words before because things were so Sunday centric, there may be things that you’re not utilizing a person as much for how much resources, human resource you put into that. But you may need something else now. So before it would have been a luxury to have an online campus pastor, video streaming expert, whatever, I can make up whatever titles you want, where now that’s not the luxury, that’s actually maybe the main position. You may need to switch someone’s job and roll from whatever they’re doing over to that. There could have been someone who is a children’s ministry director, but they just happen to have this knack for all of that other online stuff, which again, I know, it’s kind of a cliche example. But just if you run with me, so that now all sudden they shift over to that, and that’s going to open up an opportunity. And maybe you’re not meeting yet with kids or you’ve realized that you can do kids in a different way. And so that goes from a full-time position now to a part-time position. So it’s almost bringing it back to a blank slate to be able to rearrange and figure out; here’s the resources I have, financially. Here’s the human resources, and here’s the the needs and the slots. If I’m starting all over, where am I going? To put people for how much time, how much money and that type of thing.

Lee Stephenson: And I think in that process trust the Lord’s grace in the challenges as well. I know even for us, like I had one time we were facing an economic downturn, we didn’t know it was quite coming. And all of a sudden had a staff person that came forward and said, “You know, I don’t think this is the right place for me to serve anymore.” And they felt like ministry was just beyond them, and they wanted to go take a secular job. And then they exit on their own. And then it was a month later that we went into economic downturn. And also I’m like, I’m thankful I don’t have that salary to pay. And I’m like, that was really the grace of God that that helped us out in that process before. You know, we didn’t know that the challenge was even on the horizon at that point.

Danny Parmelee: Yeah. And I think in addition to that, you may have someone who leaves and they’re actually really good and doing a good job. So you might think, I need to replace this position. In other words, hey, we’ve always had a full-time, XYZ fill in the blank. And, you know, Jim left, or Cindy left. And so now we have to replace. No, just again, pause and go, do we? Before you move forward. Do we need that position? And if so at how much? Or do we need something else? So that’s where again, just generally speaking, to kind of think from a clean slate?

Lee Stephenson: Did you ever get to a point in your ministry and leadership, Danny, where you had to cut salaries across the board? You know, so maybe you’re facing a major economic challenge and going, for instance, well, everybody on the staff has a 20% cut. Did you ever face that kind of situation?

Danny Parmelee: We never did, thankfully. And part of that in this, you know, listen to part one of this series of just kind of the budgeting. We were fairly conservative in how we did it. And whenever we built it, we almost did build staff as like, almost like the locked in, we wanted to make sure that we weren’t hiring staff or giving raises unless we knew that we could do that and everything else, there was other things that we could kind of take off. So thankfully, we were never in a situation where we had to cut staff. I never had to take a pay cut. Now, I would say that, you know, we weren’t paying oodles and oodles of money. I would say we were pretty middle of the road, if not middle of the road, even lower on what we paid our staff. And we also didn’t offer benefits even and when I left we had 22 staff. We didn’t have insurance or 401(k) or anything like that. We kept it a little bit simpler, where it was like, here’s the cash and we’re expecting you can get your own insurance and your own, you know, benefits packages that way.

Lee Stephenson: Would you have always maintained that? Or did you have hopes of changing that at some point?

Danny Parmelee: The insurance part of it, you’re saying? We wrestled with it a lot. Obviously, in the beginning, it was my choice, because I was leading it and in charge of human resources. And then obviously, as we grew, and there was, you know, an executive pastor, and then you know, even the board that played more of a role. And for us and where we were age of church, it worked out well. And especially, I mean, insurance was just that was the kicker, that was the hard one to kind of figure out how you get insurance. And we were finding that people were able to do better on their own because some people were choosing insurance other people were choosing, like the Christian share, like my wife and I, we used Samaritan Ministries. And so for the church, it was easier for them to just pay us an outright, you know, salary. And then for us, our insurance costs, were only, you know, $450 a month, you know, that we were paying in comparison to that full insurance policy probably would have been between I think it was like $1,300 and $1,600 a month, and now you multiply that towards lots of people.

Lee Stephenson: It adds up significantly. I know of pastors that have hit economic challenge where they’ve had to make a pretty drastic decision affected all the staff. So for instance, a 10% cut or 20% of salaries. Do you do you think that’s a great way to move forward? Or I can see bonuses and negatives on both sides. So I’m curious, like, where your own personal view is of that kind of strategy?

Danny Parmelee: Yeah. So I remember serving at a church where they were headed into some economic issues. I don’t know if it was how much was external and how much was just that’s just where the church was at and the lead pastor lead by saying I will be taking the biggest cut and I will be the first to be cut. Now, for me, I have always had admiration for that because I think that is true leadership. And I don’t know what happened if that did and they were all preparing for that that was communicated to the rest of the staff, if that ever happened, if his pay ever did get cut, but I don’t know, I just think that if you are going to cut any salaries that and this is my just my own personal perspective that you’re you as the leader, this is where you lead in that. You say, I will, you know, I’m going to take the most and then being cut across the board definitely seems the most fair, and definitely the easiest, then you just say, hey, everybody’s 5% lower. And if we can make it up by the end of the year, we’ll, you know, make it back up into you. At the same time, again, maybe this is the time where you have to have that gut level check to go, you know, what we if there’s this one person on the team, if we just cut them completely, because we probably should anyways, that’s what we need to do. And that’s what’s best for the church, I don’t know, part of me leans a little bit more towards saying, doing that evaluation and potentially going that route. What about you?

Lee Stephenson: I’ve never had to cut staff. I’m thankful for that. I have had a year or two here, there where it’s like we can’t do a raise, or we couldn’t do any cost of living type of increase. And I think it’s just sitting down and telling the staff, Hey, guys, this is across the board. This is just where we’re at, we’ve got to be extra conservative, because I don’t want to cut your salary necessarily. And so, in order for us to do this, I wrestle on both sides of that argument to have, if the head pastor goes down, the rest of the church is going to go down, and making sure that the lead pastor is taken care of needs to be expressed, but at the same time, the lead pastor is the one that needs to lead. And you know, and show the staff and the rest of the church, this is what I’m willing to do. This is a sacrifice I’m willing to do in order for us to be able to move forward and keep the mission alive. I also want to be sensitive to those that are out there listening that are solo pastors, solo church planters, because sometimes you hit a season like I was talking with a planter recently. They’re a solo pastor, don’t have any other really paid staff, maybe a few contracted staff that are non-negotiables for them to be able to just to operate, you know, like an accountant. You gotta have somebody. What do they do when all sudden they realize, I don’t know if we’re gonna have a month, you know, a month from now be able to afford to pay me, that’s another predicament when it comes to the staffing side that sometimes gets missed in this conversation. What would be your counsel to a solo church planter, Danny, if they realized, man, a month from now, I don’t know if we’re gonna have enough money to pay me?

Danny Parmelee: So first of all your this is a total cop out. But I’m gonna say, Did you raise your full financial support before you started this thing? Because do you remember me telling you the importance of that? But seriously, joking aside, it is another one of those reasons why having that outside support for that three- to four-year period when there is I mean, just complete instability. Now let’s say your solo plant or your you raised your support, but that’s ran out internally, it’s, you know, it’s started to go down. I mean, it’s so hard to speak to that, because there are just so many, each scenario is different, like, are you at a place where it makes sense that even if you take no pay for a while that that’s actually what’s going to help the church and eventually you’ll get back up and maybe even get back pay at that point is also different than you know, what if I, if I take a pay cut, now, this whole church is done because it means I have to go get a job somewhere else. And we’ve been on a decline, which then again, might go to some of the things that we’ve talked about where it’s like, Hey, if you’re already kind of on a decline, and you’re unhealthy COVID might be, you know, the straw that breaks the camel’s back type of thing. And that just might be the way that that it works out. So I think it’s really hard because each situation is so different. And there is there’s that balance of leadership, self-sacrifice, but you also still need to provide for your family. So are there other things that can go in maybe that maybe it is maybe you literally go you know what we’ve been renting the super nice theater, whatever, we don’t have a lease and we can say, no, we’re not going to meet there, we’re going to meet here or something else. So that, you know, we can make up some of that money. So I don’t know, I agree to disagree with them here. That’s a hard one. So thanks for asking me that one.

Lee Stephenson: And I think people have to be reminded, embrace the challenge, because it’s in the challenge that opportunity is presented. And so look for the new opportunities, ways to do things different. And I think the other thing I would encourage, as we kind of wrap up the second level of this economic downturn leading in the midst of it from a financial standpoint, don’t be afraid of having the conversation. People need to know, your church needs to understand, your leaders need to know before it hits crisis level. And you want to cast the vision and help reimagine the mission without using guilt and fear as the driver to why people should give. Don’t shame them into it, but cast clear vision and compelling like, this is why we’re doing what we’re doing. Would you be able to step up and help us with that?

Danny Parmelee: Yeah, that’s great. And again, I keep having different ideas that are kind of popping in but again, maybe this is the time where we go to unthinkable areas such as even sharing staff, so it’s like, oh, man, like the other person that can’t afford a full-time worship person that meets Sunday mornings, and you can’t afford a full-time worship person and you’re meeting Sunday nights, maybe for the kingdom of God, you know, something’s orchestrated there — no pun intended — that the worship person is shared, or whatever, or maybe it’s even us the pastor and you’re, like you said, you had mentioned a few different things I think is great. Like, hey, maybe there is some sort of merging together, maybe there’s some sort of sharing and sharing space, sharing staff, meeting at different times. All sorts of different things. So again, I especially if there’s planters that are listening to this that feel hopeless because in their minds, it just has to be either one way or the other that I just want to encourage just start to think and to dream, what could be the possibility your own staffing, other staff members and have much more of a kingdom perspective than this is how we’ve always seen church done.

Lee Stephenson: Absolutely. Think out of the box for sure. Well, great conversation. I want to thank everybody for tuning into the Unfiltered podcast. Until next time, keep it real.