Adding Staff and Growing

We have been reorganizing our leadership structure and adding Staff this year. So far we have a new Director of Discipleship (Tim King) and a new Worship Coordinator (Jodi Anderson). We have more positions we’re working on, as well (Service Coordinator, Youth Director, Community Ambassador).
In the meantime, our leaders have heard a few questions about whether we should be doing this when currently we’re not fully “in the black,” financially. This is a good inquiry and deserves an answer.
One of our major goals the last two years, and we’ve talked about it for longer than that, has been to implement a staff reorganization to get the right leaders around the table to lead people and ministries to carry out our mission to make disciples of Jesus for the transformation of the world. These are also the areas we identified before our building project as being most important.
Back in 2011 our Study Committee spent time researching for our building project and met with leaders to discuss Salem’s strengths (warm welcome of others, our mission focus, and our teaching) and weaknesses (lack of space, lack of youth and youth ministries, and lack of hands on mission work transforming the world). We determined the three things we most wanted to see happen were 1) a building project, 2) the development of outreach and hands on mission work, and 3) more people, especially youth, engaged fully in the life of the church. The leaders affirmed the desire for Salem to grow and the willingness to make difficult decisions required for change and growth. This set our course, and today gives us a helpful view of the long range plan.
Therefore, with the building project now completed physically (we are still paying for it), we have been turning our attention to reaching out to new people, engaging the people of Salem, especially youth, in the life of the congregation and beyond in the community and world. We need people who take responsibility for those areas.
So we organized around our mission and began adding responsible persons to the Staff. Our leaders know it’s not realistic to hire people full-time or even half-time yet, so we’re starting with very small steps. We’re bringing people on at 1/8th time (4-6 hours per week). Furthermore, some of our staff are unpaid. They are serving gratis.
We have to start somewhere, though. We’re at the place where we need to push a little. Besides the priority of accomplishing our mission, in our current context, if we don’t intentionally grow, we will likely decline and die. We don’t decide how much we grow, God does, but either we grow or we decline. Maintaining is declining. Of course, in our culture today, most Christian congregations are declining. We don’t need to rehearse the statistics, but it’s estimated that mainline denominations in America, like United Methodist, have about 20 Easters left before disappearing.
Furthermore, our growth must be with younger people. While we want to be multigenerational to be most healthy, we must reach younger people or, again, there will only be a certain number of years left. The fastest growing religious group in the country is the “nones,” and our mission is to reverse that as we share God’s love and grace and make more disciples of Jesus who make a good difference in the world.
So, like many other congregations, Salem is at the place where we have to push forward to grow. It’s going to be hard, but we need to push the envelope. Eventually our growth and giving will catch up. Quality staff persons connect with more people and help the church grow. It’s the time to push. There will be a time to hold again. Right now, it’s time to push forward to grow and accomplish our mission.
Ultimately, this challenges each of us to consider what God calls us to give financially. We’ll spend some time this fall talking about stewardship. But the issue isn’t that we need a certain amount of dollars to do what we do. The issue is always this: if we all trusted God fully and gave as Jesus calls us to give, we’d have such an abundance we’d have to figure out new ways to give the money away to help other people.

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