The Church Answers Podcast
#160 How the Work-from-Anywhere Movement Has Impacted Churches: Part 1, Non-Ministry Staff
Welcome to the Church Answers podcast presented by Chaney and Associates. Chaney and Associates are the accounting firm for the church. Now get ready for fast-paced insights on key issues affecting the local church today. We release three episodes each week, so make sure you've seen or heard them all. And now, here is the CEO of Church Answers, Tom Rayner. Thank you for telling us about Chaney and Associates, our sponsor. Thank you for that nice introduction. Her voice is so much better than mine. We've got a three-part series that we're about to introduce this week. And when we say a three-part series, you don't have to wait. We release all three of them at one time. This particular series is being released on April 11th, 2024. So I'm dating it in case you're listening to it later, but you can go back and listen to all three of it, all three of them. What we're going to be talking about is the work from anywhere movement and how it's impacted churches. We know that the work from anywhere movement has impacted culture, businesses. We know that it's impacted employees and employers. We know that it is more than just an incipient movement now. It is an ongoing movement that has momentum. Even though there's a bit of pushback, especially post-COVID and getting some people to return to the office, the work from anywhere movement is not going to go away. It may have some waves in and out, but it's not going to go away. But what I want to do in this three-part series, I want to look at the work from anywhere movement from the perspective of the local church. So we're going to do this in three different parts. And in part one of this, we're going to look at how the work from anywhere movement has impacted churches, particularly with non-ministry staff. I don't like to use the adjective phrase non-ministry, because that's suggesting that the people in support positions aren't doing ministry. I don't mean it that way. It is just simply the way that we identify these persons. They're usually not vocational ministers. They're usually not ordained ministers. They support staff. They may be assistants or bookkeepers or custodial. You get the point. So I don't like calling on non-ministry staff, but again, I'm just going to yield to the common nomenclature by calling them that. So they're basically two types of non-ministry staff in churches. Now, here, understand what I'm saying. There are some churches that have several full-time. There are some churches that have some part-time, and there are some churches that have volunteer. In my first full-time church, we had two paid people other than me. I was full-time. And those two paid people were youth minister and a worship leader, and they were paid so pathetically low. I was paid pretty low, too. It was full-time, but they were part-time. Fortunately, there was a seminary in the town, and we were able to get people for a very low wage, because usually they wanted to do it very, very part-time. And so we had on our staff, we had a worship leader very part-time, a youth student leader very part-time, and me pastor theoretically full-time paid. Then we also had an assistant and we had a bookkeeper, but they were volunteers. And here's the point I'm making. When I talk about staff, you may be thinking, "Oh, Tom's talking about the large churches that can afford a lot of employees." No. Some of them may be, but some of them are volunteers or part-time. So when I start talking about the non-ministry staff, I understand it's going to be different in different churches. But all churches that have non-ministry staff have them in two categories. One, the category of required presence, required presence. Let me give you a good classic example. Custodial help, building maintenance, whatever you want to call it. You cannot be a custodian or maintain a building remotely. There might be a few things you can do. Understand technology is picking on up, but you're usually not going to clean or sweep or mow or do anything remotely. Maybe at some point we'll have the robotics that will allow us to do that. But at the church, at the church facility, that's at the building. So you have some that just by their very nature, they have to be there. So we're not going to include these that work from anywhere movement because they have to work there. I live in the Nashville area in Franklin, Tennessee. There are a lot of Amazon employees in this area. Amazon has a major corporate presence in downtown Nashville. But Amazon has these places where they had these massive buildings, these warehouses where they're all over the Nashville area and they're massive. Well, Amazon has to have people in the buildings. I know that they have computers that can pick the books and the other things that people order, but they have to have people there. So Amazon has a very in-person presence and even in their corporate area, they're bringing more and more people back to the office. But how about the church? Well, the church can have people that are on staff that may not need to be physically present. Let me give you just two examples. One would be an assistant and another would be some type of financial or bookkeeper. They may be one in the same, I understand that, but those are two examples. More and more assistants are virtual. More and more assistants can be virtual. We have all the tools that make it necessary. There are a number of bookkeeping organizations, but I'll tell you, our favorite of course is Cheney and so is the accounting firm for the church. How's that for our sponsorship? They can do this for you. It can be outsourced as well. So you have some jobs that require physical presence. You have some jobs that don't. The latter that don't have their functional roles can take place anywhere. Here's one question or one point that many people will raise when I say an assistant can be virtual or not on the field. They say, well, ours is a receptionist. Our assistant welcomes people when they come in the church. We need that. And you know, there are some churches that are like that, but the foot traffic during the week of those coming into the church is less and less than it used to be. I'm not making a qualitative statement. I'm just making an observation. People don't come to the church building as often as they used to in most churches. So you may not need a receptionist to greet people. So just to put that out there because I can understand that many people will say, okay, we've got an assistant that also functions as a receptionist. So you have the non-ministry staff that can function outside of the building. Should you do it? There's not a yes or no answer to that. The answer is one of my favorite things that Jonathan Hough and I used to say back on the whole Raynoran leadership, I guess we still do that one, of course, is it depends. It depends on what the culture is. It depends on whether the people really need someone to greet them, a receptionist. It depends on what will happen if you move from on-site to off-site from work from anywhere. So it depends. But I will say this with many of the non-ministry workers. Again, I want to be careful with that non-ministry phrase, but with many of those who are not a minister of or a pastor or associate pastor, executive pastor, many of them can work remotely. Again, can should that happen? Well, what we're going to do is we're going to talk more about this and another podcast and we're going to talk about the accountability issue because quite frankly, one of the challenges with having virtual workers is you're not looking over their shoulder. It's not like being in an office, so there's a high level of trust that they're putting their quote-unquote hours in. So what we're going to do, we're just going to pause right here, we're going to recognize that there are two groups and sometimes one of those groups, they can work outside of the church building. Eventually, we'll get to answering the question about should church ministry staff also have the opportunity to work from anywhere too. That's going to be our third episode. We're talking about this work from anywhere movement. We're talking about how it's changed culture, change businesses, change the world, and also change the church. And we're asking the question, should churches readily acquiesce to this movement? And the answer to the question is sometimes yes, sometimes no. It's not a good answer, but that's the way it is for now. Just stay tuned for the next podcast because we're going to be talking more about the accountability issue and the work from anywhere movement. We'll see you in that next episode. You have been listening to the Church Answers podcast presented by Chaney and Associates. Chaney and Associates are the accounting firm for the church. You need to focus on ministry. Chaney will focus on finances. Also, please subscribe and give a review to the Church Answers podcast on YouTube and on your favorite podcasting app.