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Long before we had ever heard of COVID-19, a paradigm shift was underway in the church. Although the pandemic did not trigger the paradigm shift, it certainly seems to be expediting the process.

This paradigm shift will impact almost every facet of ministry, including the way we communicate, the way we plan worship, the way we budget, the way utilize space, and the way we configure our staff teams. In this lingering pandemic, we do not yet know for sure all of the ways the church will be impacted.

Certainly, we should expect that some church staffs will undergo a process of downsizing due to a decrease in giving. In an ideal world, such downsizing could be accomplished through retirements and relocations. However, if downsizing leads to displacement of a staff minister, a church should offer as much financial and networking support as possible to the minister being involuntarily displaced due to economic factors.

The more important question for churches is not, “how many staff can we afford?”, although that is a vital question. The most crucial question is, “What kind of staff do we need to equip us to accomplish our mission?”

In recent years, some church staff members have become so specialized, they have tended to function in compartmentalized silos of isolation. In my experience, the healthiest church staffs I have been blessed to serve alongside have functioned as a team with each staff member fulfilling individual assignments and sharing team responsibilities. Perhaps staff organizational charts should look less like a pyramid and more like concentric circles, indicative of team-oriented relationships.

In a season of uncertainly, what are the primary factors a church should consider when preparing to upgrade their staffing model?  I suggest the following considerations for re-aligning and re-assigning staff for a post-pandemic church:

• Staff assignments should be contextual to your specific congregation and strategically aligned to empower your mission and vision. Staff titles and job descriptions should correlate with your unique mission objectives and opportunities. This means that your staff model will likely look different than other churches.
• Future staff ministers will be both generalists and specialists. It will be more important than ever that staff function as a team, with each team member having one or two specialized responsibilities and many general responsibilities. Just as a university student may have a major and a minor area of study, a staff minister may have a major area of specialization such as music, and a couple of minor or general areas such as technology and pastoral care.
• Re-alignment is an ongoing process, not an event. Set re-alignment goals and implement them through re-assignment, staff transition, and attrition. Unless your staff culture is toxic and needs an extreme makeover, a gradual re-alignment process may provide more time for upgrading your staff culture and adequate time to acclimate your congregation to the new staff assignments.
• Build your team with a strategic mix of full-time and part-time ministers. Churches that once had numerous full-time staff members will likely build a staff team composed of full-time ministers, bi-professional ministers, residents, interns, and volunteers. This shift will be partially driven by economic factors. But it is also propelled by the rich talent pool of ministry candidates who prefer to serve in ministry part-time while remaining engaged in a meaningful full-time career.
• Re-orient your ministers to be coaches who encourage and equip the congregation for their ministry. This aligns the role of staff with the biblical commission found in Ephesians 4:11-12: So Christ himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers, to equip his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up.
• Transition to a smaller pool of administrative assistants, and utilize interns or residents as ministry associates, following a model that resembles a medical residency. Many of our churches hired secretaries and administrative assistants at a time when ministers were highly dependent on the clerical skills of their assistant. This model has not been re-aligned since the dawning of the computer age. A resident or intern may assist with a few clerical tasks but will gain valuable experience as they are mentored for future leadership roles in ministry.
• Create a healthy succession plan that provides continuity and prevents long-term interruption. We are beginning to realize that in most cases a 6-24 month interim period between every staff transition is not healthy. A strategic plan of succession enables the church to identify and call a new minister, and it enables the departing or retiring minister to “pass the torch” so that ministry continues without disruption.

Many respected leaders, including Carey Nieuwhof and Bill Wilson, have suggested that the current health pandemic will do more to change the way we do church than anything in our lifetime. A leader in our church asked me recently, “Will the pandemic change the church for the better or for the worse?” I responded, “That depends on how we navigate the changes.”

When it comes to church staff, we can emerge from the pandemic better prepared to engage our communities if we realign our staff model with our mission and vision.

(Barry Howard is the pastor of Wieuca Road Baptist Church in Atlanta, and he serves as a coach and columnist with the Center for Healthy Churches.)

In a post-pandemic world, the church, in words of Mark Twain, may need to declare, “The rumors of my death are grossly exaggerated.”

While it is true that many struggling churches may close, merge, or re-purpose in the near future, this process was already underway and will only be accelerated by factors related to COVID-19.

But make no mistake, to be effective in the next chapter of ministry, churches must navigate many cultural changes. A few weeks into the current health pandemic, I was jolted into reality when I heard Bill Wilson, executive director of the Center for Healthy Churches, suggest, “We should prepare for COVID-19 to change the way we do church more than anything in our lifetime.”

We are now six months into dealing with coronavirus concerns, and we are still discerning the impact that the health pandemic will have on the church in the short-term and the long-term.

As we search for best practices that promote health and vibrancy in the next chapter of ministry, I want to highlight 12 trends that I see emerging for being church in a post-pandemic world:

• Being the church will become more important than going to church. Gathering with those in your spiritual community will continue to be an important spiritual practice, but not necessarily perceived as the most important thing. The next chapter of church life will be much more incarnational and much less institutional.
• New metrics of effectiveness will emerge. The old six-point envelope system from my childhood, which included being present, on time, studying your lesson, bringing your offering, staying for worship and reading your Bible daily will become completely obsolete as a way of measuring spiritual fidelity. Future metrics for effectiveness may focus on life transformation, community connections, ministry touch points, mentoring relationships and funds invested in missional causes.
• Congregations will be better stewards of campus space. Church campuses will be smaller, more energy efficient and will maximize smart technology. Spaces will be multi-purpose and shared by multiple groups.
• Churches will be more community oriented. Inward-focused churches that exist primarily for the benefit and use of their members will diminish. Outward-focused churches that embrace their communities will be more likely to flourish.
• Ministry staffs will likely be composed of more generalists and less specialists. Staffs will be smaller, and ministers will work more as a team with each minister expressing leadership in multiple areas. Ministers will take on a more biblical model of a coaching/discipling role of being “encouragers and equippers” of the congregation for their work of ministry.
• Healthy post-pandemic churches will welcome honest inquiry and dialogue. While it is important for churches to live out foundational convictions, most people are not looking for a litany of legalistic dogma. Effective churches will adopt a new apologetic, taking on more of a Mars Hill flavor, where seekers and believers meet near the altar of the “unknown god” to discuss the meaning of life.
• A hybrid model of participation will continue to emerge. Both in-person and virtual gatherings are around to stay. Worship services, small groups gatherings and committee meetings will offer in-person and virtual options for participation. Many churches will have online members from different communities who connect with worship and mission virtually.
• Church programming will be less Sunday-centric and will focus on opportunities throughout the week. The majority churches will continue to have a Sunday worship service, but effective churches will create multiple options to connect on days other than Sunday.
• There will be more emphasis on small group gatherings and less emphasis on large group gatherings. The strength of a church will be manifest in small group connections, rather than crowd size. The post-COVID church will focus more on spiritual muscle than physical mass.
• Surprising partnerships will be formed. As local churches will become more collaborative and less competitive, many churches will discover they do not need to “go at it alone.” Formal and informal partnerships between churches may evolve as networks between groups of churches who will share ideas, resources, assignments, and in some cases even staff members or campus space.
• The gospel will be presented positively as good news. As we slowly emerge from coronavirus concerns, people will be even more hungry for good news. Guilt-ridden, judgment-infused, condescending approaches to evangelism will give way to Jesus-centered conversations about deliverance, healing, forgiveness and life transformation.
• Effective evangelism will become more relational and less transactional. Rather than conversion being thought of merely as an introduction to Jesus, salvation language will employ multiple expressions that describe a re-orientation to following Jesus and holistically adopting the Jesus way of life.

These are only a few examples of the trends I see emerging for effective ministry in a post-pandemic world.

In any season, becoming a healthier and more effective church is an ongoing journey. In his book, Becoming a Contagious Church, Mark Middleburg writes the following:

One thing is for sure: without intentional planning, prioritization, decision making, and leadership, and a whole lot of course corrections along the way, a church will never experience sustained evangelistic fruitfulness. This is not something churches drift into naturally or on their own. No, becoming a contagious church only happens on purpose! 

These adaptations will not emerge quickly. This is a major sea change, an ecclesial paradigm shift, so let us be faithful and flexible as we navigate uncharted waters.

(Barry Howard is the pastor of the Wieuca Road Baptist Church in Atlanta, and he continues to serve as a columnist and leadership coach with the Center for Healthy Churches.)