What is the email address for your Finance Office? Too many times churches use the name(s) of staff. It’s good and necessary for your Finance Office staff to have an email address for their professional needs. However, your Finance Office needs a generic email address for companies use for sending invoices or acknowledgements or other financial docs.

I recommend that every church create a fictional person which will be the point of contact for all routine Finance Office correspondence, snail or email. This “person” is:

• First Name: Finance
• Last Name: Office
• Email finance@church.org (where “@church.org” is your church’s email server)
• Address: your church’s main mail address

Creating this will ensure that whenever there is staff turnover in the Finance Office, you won’t have to change email addresses on all the various accounts the church has with vendors. This also creates a standard by which everyone in the office (and even the membership) use with vendors to get bills sent to the church. This keeps things simple – simple is good!

Lead On!

Steve

Every employee must know on a monthly basis how she or he is performing according to the supervisor. Saving all the info and “dumping” on the employee at the annual meeting is unfair to the employee, the supervisor, and the organization. Monthly meetings are a must for the health and well-being of all. These monthly conversations will also help the organization progress faster and farther.

Some managers are fearful of what to do and say in a monthly meeting. The following is a “Staff Development Conversation Guide” from North Point Ministries in Alpharetta, GA. All rights to this material belong to them. This is a tool they use to help their supervisors know how to craft these meetings. I appreciate that church sharing their resources.

Goal: Ensure that every employee has routine conversations with his/her boss allowing for a full bilateral dialog about all aspects of the job and permits discussion about the current situation and his/her personal and professional development.

Method:

1. Every staff member should have a one-on-one meeting with his or her boss on a monthly basis. Those conversations should be designed to discuss one or more of the items mention in the goal above.
2. The following five questions are examples that can be used to capture information, emotion, and foster conversation.
   1. What are you most excited about right now?
   2. What’s most challenging?
   3. What’s bugging you?
   4. What do you wish you could spend more time one?
   5. What can I do to help?
3. Additionally, here are five questions/statements which can be used periodically to allow conversation around the work environment, personal growth, and the staff member’s future desires.
   1. What changes, in areas outside of your control, could be made to improve your job?
   2. Let’s identify specific growth area and develop a plan for improvement.
   3. Do you feel ready for more responsibility? If so, what type?
   4. Let’s discuss your priorities for your job for the next 6 months.
   5. What changes would you suggest to help make our team function better overall?
4. Managers should have some written method to capturing critical elements of the conversations and actions that come from each one-on-one meeting.

Lead On!

Steve

The format for email addresses for most companies is firstname.lastname@company.com

However, many churches use the firstinitiallastname@church.org format and that leads to some interesting combinations. Here are some that I’ve collected over the years:

• Sean Lutz becomes slutz@church.org
• Mark Adams becomes madams@church.org
• Helen Ellis becomes hellis@church.org (that’s my favorite)
• Even my name is comical: Steve Law becomes slaw@church.org

I strongly encourage churches to use the standard format used by most companies and organizations. There are several advantages (you’ve already seen the disadvantages above!).

• The email contains the full name of the employee which makes it easier for people new to the church to remember the staff person’s name
• It differentiates between people with the similar names: James Smith and John Smith would have different email addresses (under the older format the church would have to come up with something to differentiate between the two and that can cause confusion to people trying to contact them if they presume they know the church’s email format).
• Writing an announcement becomes as easy as: “Contact john.smith@church.org for info on the deacon retreat.” You don’t have to write out the contact person’s name because it’s in the email address.
• You can still have email aliases for the other email addresses that people might use while you train them to use the new email format.

Lead On!

Steve

Does an executive pastor do any ministry or that position completely subsumed in financial, personnel, and facilities management? Good question and here’s my answer:

1. “Back office” work is ministry, but at a creative and different level. It is not “just” paperwork. I can’t tell you the number of vendors I’ve talked to about church – and those are doors that are not open to other staff persons. When I’ve called a customer service line and got a call center in India, I knew that they could see they were dealing with a church and that I might be the only Christian that person EVER speaks to in his/her life. Paying bills on time is a HUGE witness to vendors who are sour on church. I used all those things to educate other ministers to help them think outside the box and understand that the minutia they detested really did have a Kingdom impact. Think about this as not “just paperwork” but as opportunities for creative ministry. For instance, every year I shred old financial docs – I leverage that by telling members that they can bring in their stuff to shred (because I really don’t much for the shredder). The senior adults LOVE that they can bring in all their old files from the 1960s. So, what I was doing any way I could use to help others and everyone wins.
2. The XP ministry is higher and more focused in scope. XPs continue to do the ministry they were doing before but now use those opportunities to train the campus and other pastors so they can learn from the XP. Every XP must seek every chance to teach the next rising generation how to do avoid mistakes and to stand taller on the XP’s shoulders. XPs get to work with a high level of volunteers and members – leaders in their community and businesses who can open doors for the church that most ministers can’t imagine. That can give an XP an opportunity to reach people who would never come to the church, all because the XP is working with high-net worth members or upper management members. Most churches neglect high capacity donors but that needs to a focal point for the Senior & Executive Pastors for both the sake of those people and of the church.
3. The XP ministry is at a broader level. Not just on a campus but on a larger basis and even, through professional contacts, the XP reaches people across the state and region. People will come to the XP’s church to learn the way that church does things and the XP can teach them so they can replicate what the XP is doing in their own context. Just as the XP needs to follow in the footsteps of others, every XP is also responsible for pulling those behind him or her up to his or her level. This is a leadership position – one that people look up to and want to emulate. This position needs to be worth following, not “just another minister.”

The ministry of the XP is more creative, deeper, higher, and broader than other ministers. It requires more excellent ministers to do this work for the Kingdom.

Lead On!

Steve