Turnover is a brutal fact of life for congregations. Most, because of the hard reality of their budgets, generally pay their employees less than wages available elsewhere in the marketplace. Whether they are youth pastors, choral staff, pastors assistants or custodians, folks tend to come and go more often in the quest to make a living. Continuity in programs suffer, and church members sometimes feel let down by chronic departures.From heading a pastor search committee to being in groups screening applicants for youth programs and music staffs, I have come to recognize the odd kind of special niche that is the faith community as it fills staff positions. Most churches and temples tread slowly in creating new job slots and often eliminate them when people depart. Some jobs draw quality candidates, and it takes careful evaluation and screening by personnel committees or pastoral staff to whittle down the applicants. Some jobs go wanting and the application period has to be kept open — just waiting for potential candidates to stumble onto job notices on Web sites or in classified advertising or on bulletin boards at denominational offices.
Arizona State Universitys choral and music program, for example, has been a gold mine for churches filling professional music positions, especially masters and doctoral program students. To a lesser extent, they benefit from students in education fields. But come graduation, those people tend to move on. Across much of the country, congregations fill some paid jobs with members of the the congregation — taking advantage of loyalty, peoples already established familiarity with the churchs culture and their being able to pay less than for someone from the outside. Church secretaries (better known as administrative assistants) sometimes are a pastors spouse or daughter — or the spouse of someone else on staff. Sometimes, it is hard to turn down a church member who applies for a job, and there can easily be a risk of taking advantage of that person who may still be viewed as half church volunteer or one of us. And you never fire volunteers, you know. Being both a church member and an employee can be conflicting.
Employee search committees sometimes get burned in the often informal way they hire staff. Churchstaffing.com, a Web site where the faith community can advertise jobs and search for candidates, warns about filling slots without fully checking people out. It used to be commonly believed that pastors, church staff members, or children’s volunteers would be the last group of people in the world on whom you would need to run a background check, it notes. Unfortunately, news headlines of the past couple years have shown this to be a myth. Some of the trouble has been in candidates with criminal pasts, including cases of sexual misbehavior. Churchstaffing.com, for example, provides background checks from $93.99 to $7.99 (a state criminal search, plus sex offender search only).
A Christianity Today article notes that hiring for the church is different, and hiring committees, while looking for quality, still can cut some slack. Our philosophy of grace and forgiveness enables us to consider candidates who may have a criminal record or bad credit history. That doesn’t mean we should hire a serial killer or child molester, but if someone has served time, repented of a crime, and found new life in Christ, then we should do what we can to help. Of course, bonding the treasurer is essential.
Most churches and synagogues realize they are a training grounds, stopping off places for young professionals to get experience to move on to higher roles elsewhere. Thats especially true with youth leaders, who can turn over every couple years, or sooner.
Of course, many congregations lack the “luxury” of finding quality and qualified candidates who ALSO are on the same wave-length theologically with the teachings of the particular churches. While probably most staffers make the adjustment, some suck it up and go along with doctrines or beliefs that they may privately find troubling. In multi-pastor churches, clergy just about have to be on the same page theologically, or it will be obvious and cause dissonance. A choir director and a pastor could clash over appropriate worship music if they came from divergent traditions. I recall how my church once hired a choir director who soon found herself unfamiliar and uneasy about worship language and the pastors hymn choices. She abruptly resigned because of the theological mismatch. There was a realization that both sides failed to talk about their theological positions in the interview process.
I find it interesting the struggles that protestant churches have with staffing church positions with paid personnel. As a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, all of our local congregational staffing comes from local people who volunteer their time. I am glad that we do not have to do it that way. I personally think that we get a better quality of person when they give of their time freely to do church service that if we had to hire people as employees generally are worth what they get paid.
If I were a member of a protestant faith, I would find it discouraging to realize that much of my hard-earned offerings/tithing paid to the church went to financially support people who ran the church. So many churches seem to me to be more a business promoting its advantages than a collection of like-minded people gathered together to worship God and support each other.