Silent Alarm: We Don't Have a Hiring Problem - We Have a Discipleship Problem

Your staffing problem isn't really about hiring—it's about discipleship. Most churches have shifted from raising up leaders internally to importing candidates, creating a leadership development vacuum that threatens the future of ministry.

• Churches have forgotten that disciple-making is leadership development
• The pipeline for ministry leaders is drying up as fewer young adults consider ministry careers
• Too many churches wait passively for fully-formed candidates rather than developing their own
• When churches stop discipling people into leadership, ministry becomes professionalized and transactional
• Building your pipeline starts with identifying three people under 30 with spiritual leadership potential
• Create visible opportunities for emerging leaders to teach, shepherd, and disciple others
• Churches need to normalize the idea of full-time ministry and actively call people to consider it
• Model sending: If no one has left your church to serve elsewhere in years, that's a warning sign

Grab a copy of my book "Silent Alarm: The Quiet Collapse of the Church Staff Pipeline and How to Rebuild Before It's Too Late" at chemistrystaffing.com/silentalarm.

Have questions or comments? Send to podcast@chemistrystaffing.com

Be sure to subscribe to The Healthy Church Staff Podcast wherever you regularly listen to podcasts.

- - - - -

Is Your Church Hiring?
If your church is searching for a new staff member, reach out to Todd for a conversation on how he might be able to help.

Are You Looking for a New Ministry Role?
If you are open to a new church role in the next few months, add your free resume and profile at ChemistryStaffing.com.

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome to Silent Alarm Series

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:12

Hi there, welcome back to the Healthy Church Staff Podcast. My name is Tom Roth, one of the co-founders over at chemistrystaffingcom, and this is episode six of our Silent Alarm series. If you missed last week, go back and listen to the podcast from last week. We are building these 10 episodes to disrupt your assumptions and challenge your hiring strategy and help you rebuild out your staff pipeline from the inside out. And today's truth might sting a little bit. We're talking about staffing. And here's truth might sting a little bit. We're talking about staffing, and here's what might sting. Your staffing problem isn't really about hiring, it's about discipleship. Okay, let's unpack that a little bit. If your church has a hard time finding staff, here's a really tough question Are you raising any, or are you just hoping that someone from the outside will swoop in with all the right skills and the theology and the character? Because here's the hard reality. Most churches don't have a staff shortage. They have a leadership development vacuum. Here's what's happened in the larger US church we have outsourced our pipeline and we've forgotten that disciple-making is actually leadership development, and now in many places the well is running dry. All right. So I think we just need to be honest with ourselves here.

Speaker 1: 1:41

Churches used to raise up pastors and worship leaders and student ministry leaders from within. People came to faith, they grew in maturity, they sensed a call, they were mentored, they were equipped and eventually they were released. And now most churches are functionally importers. We post a job, we wait for the applications, we cross our fingers, but here's what's really happening behind the scenes. Fewer younger adults are considering ministry, fewer pastors are mentoring for the next generation and fewer churches are creating space for future leaders to explore calling. And far too many churches are waiting for the pipeline to just fill itself. How many times do churches just feel like our next worship pastor, our next senior pastor, our next executive pastor has already been trained and have already got experience somewhere else by someone else. We just have to find them and get them to move here and pay them a salary.

Speaker 1: 2:46

That's importing candidates, and what I'm saying is that when I was growing up back in the good old days, 25, 35, 40 years ago, churches instinctively called people to full-time ministry and gave that an option to many people, including myself. I probably wouldn't be in ministry today if it weren't for a couple of people that saw something in me and came up to me and said Todd, have you ever thought about doing this? I could go into early mentors who just really encouraged me when I was in high school to figure this thing out and see if God was calling me. So it's not just a hiring problem. This really, at its core in many cases, is a discipleship problem. And here's your truth bomb for today If your church is not raising up leaders, you're not short on staff, you're short on vision.

Speaker 1: 3:41

Okay, that might sound harsh, but there is a real cost to passivity. When churches stop discipling people into leadership, ministry all of a sudden becomes professionalized and staff roles become transactional. We just need to find somebody that we can pay to come and do the job. And future leaders feel invisible. Because we look up and all of a sudden our leadership pipeline, even our volunteer pipeline, our bench, is empty and the call of God becomes something people have to figure out on their own. And, worst of all, churches get older and they get more anxious and are desperate for solutions.

Speaker 1: 4:21

And we can't just program our way out of this. We have to disciple our way out. Our way out of this. We have to disciple our way out, and that means pastors, church staff, all of us. We need to start spotting that potential early. We need to invite people into deeper spiritual responsibility. We need to let people try things and give them ways that they can lead, that they can try and that they can fail and that they can grow. And then we have to be able to release people, not hoard them.

Speaker 1: 4:54

If the next generation of pastors and worship leaders and disciple makers doesn't rise from within the church, where do we think they're going to come from? Again, todd, you're just painting a rosy picture of how everything is broken and nothing's going to get it. No, I want this to be very encouraging, so I want to give you some ideas for some things that you can do right now. You can start even today. No matter where you are geographically, no matter what the size of your church is Pastor, church leader, whether you're a senior pastor or a worship person, or a kids ministry director, or a pastor, church leader, whether you're a senior pastor or a worship person, or a kids ministry director or a pastor. Here's one thing that I think you can do to start and we all have to start Identify three people in your church under 30 who have some real spiritual leadership potential. Okay, I bet you've got them. I bet you could probably say, todd, I know at least one or two of these people just from what you've just already said. But identify three people in your church under 30 who have some real spiritual leadership potential and start asking them some intentional questions.

Speaker 1: 6:10

Have you ever considered ministry, even vocationally? Create visible, real opportunities for leadership, for teaching, for shepherding, for creating, for discipling. I give some examples in the book that I'll tell you a little bit about here in a second. But, as a staff member, champion those emerging leaders and do some publicly normalize the idea of full-time ministry again. We used to do this a couple of generations ago where we would actually call people out to full-time ministry. I remember in college, I remember in my local church, being called out Todd, have you ever considered full-time ministry? I remember going to college and going into missions, conferences and different things where man, the Spirit of God, was so strong but the call was are you willing to go, are you willing to serve? Are you willing to give your life full-time? Are you willing to give your vocation? We need to start doing that again and we need to start normalizing at least the idea of full-time ministry and we need to model sending.

Speaker 1: 7:15

If no one has left your church to serve somewhere else in the last five years, that should be a warning light that should just be going off. It's not intentional. We ask pastors, are you doing this? And they say no. And we say why? We just got busy or we just haven't thought about it. So there needs to be some intentionality there as well. As you reflect on this, though, your church might not have the budget to add another full-time staff member this year, and that's okay. What you can do, what you can do at your local church, whether you're a church of 30 or a church of 3,000, you can start building your future pipeline today and, honestly, this is not going to happen overnight. It might take five years, it might not solve your immediate opening and your immediate problems, but it will start to shape your legacy and your future at your church, because the real question isn't just can we fill this position? The real question is are we building something that lasts beyond our current team?

Speaker 1: 8:22

So this entire episode kind of stems from the core idea of my book. It's called Silent Alarm the Quiet Collapse of the Church Staff Pipeline and how to Rebuild Before it's too late. It's me trying to get some stuff out of my head that I have had a front row seat to see, because we're doing like 75 searches across the country right now. So I have exposure to a lot of churches and hiring processes and candidate pools and lack of candidate pools that most people in most organizations and most churches don't get to see. So I've tried to take what God has been showing me and put it, get it out of my head and into a book form. I think it should really be helpful to you. If you're in charge, if you're a senior pastor, if you are on a leadership team or if you are on a search committee or a search team, I think this book would really help you and you can grab a copy today. I'd love for you to do that If you would like to. It's chemistrystaffingcom slash silent alarm. Chemistrystaffingcom slash silent alarm. If you felt the slow erosion, if you've started to see the discipleship gap in your own team, I really think this book could be really something that'll help equip you and your team to lead differently.

Speaker 1: 9:41

Tomorrow we're going to shift the spotlight to the other side of the hiring quotation and equation. We're going to talk about candidates and we're going to ask this question why are so many qualified leaders sitting on the sidelines just quietly burned out or disengaged or unsure where to go next? Here's a clue. It's not because they're lazy. There's a deeper reason, and we're going to unpack that tomorrow right here on the Healthy Church Staff Podcast. We will talk to you then. Hope you'll join me. You.