Welcome to Church Mice

Several years ago, our church staff delivered special autumn-themed baskets to our neighbors. Methodist neighbors, Greek Orthodox neighbors, Jewish neighbors. As I entered each of their offices I laughed at how similar we all were. Sure we had theological and traditional differences by the fist-full, but we all had the same pressboard desks, the same phone system from 10 years ago, the same printer that works half the time. Somehow, even our hallways smelled the same.

I just wanted to talk to all of them. What works? What doesn’t work? How do you handle difficult congregants? How are you managing the parade of risks that walk through the doors every day? 

That’s when I found a low of our community: we don’t talk to each other. We have our ways of doing things, but there’s always the nagging feeling, “There has to be a better way to do this.” But we don’t have a network of fellow-workers we can reach out to.

Hi, my name is David. I’ve been working with nonprofits and churches for 20 years and been employed in a local church for almost 10 of them. I’ve done just about every job you can do in a church, from cleaning the toilets to leading the worship, to fixing the wifi, to preaching the sermon. I’ve learned it’s very tiring, very scary work that somehow manages to be relentless fast and aggravatingly slow.

But I’ve also learned that there are answers, I just have to know who to ask.

If you’re a church worker and you need place to ask. If you feel like you don’t know what you’re doing (and like everybody else does), if you feel like, somewhere out there, there must be a better way to run things, you’ve come to the right place. 

Every Tuesday morning, I send one idea that has shaped my everyday church work. Not pastoral work (like how to pray for people, who to console the hurting, how to help the poor), there are tons of resources for that. I mean operational ideas. I’ve spent the last 5 years getting certified in the major “way of work” (PMP, CMP, PSM) and it’s fundamentally changed how I approach work: how to lead good changes, how to stop bad changes, how to get unburied, how to square up to the parts of my job that I hate. The nuts and bolts of clocking in-and-out that are NEVER covered in a seminary course.

But what I’m really interested in are your comments. I’m on a quest to find the coolest, most innovative, most off-the-wall answers to the problems that church works face and I think the answer isn’t in professional certifications; I think it’s from you. So if you hear my idea and think, “Well, actually, we have a crazy way of doing that, but you're probably not going to want to here it.”

I absolutely want to hear it. 

Hit reply and let’s find the answers together.