The Ministry Sabbatical That Nobody Planned For

This episode of the Healthy Church Staff Podcast, hosted by Todd Rhoades, addresses the challenge of dealing with unexpected leaves in church staff due to emergencies or health issues. Todd emphasizes the importance of preparation for such events, sharing insights and strategies from his experience in church staffing.• Unexpected staff absences, like health issues or family emergencies, are common in ministry yet often not planned for.• Churches frequently treat these absences as temporary annoyances and fail to manage them well, leading to overburdened staff and guilty feelings.• Todd advises every role should have a 90-day backup plan, covering all essential tasks and access information, to ensure continuity.• Regular 'hit by a bus' preparation discussions are recommended to maintain smooth operations despite unforeseen events.• The 'two week test' approach suggests identifying what would break if a staff member disappeared for two weeks and preparing for those tasks.• Unplanned absences reveal system dependencies and individual knowledge silos, highlighting areas for process improvement.• Todd shares personal stories of planning around his own absence, reinforcing the value of preparedness for staff well-being.

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Transcript

Sudden Staff Crises Hit At Once

SPEAKER_00 0:09

Your executive pastor just texted the test reader. Family emergency, need to step away from food. Your worship reader is having a test period, and the doctor says stress. Your children's pastors and counseling and can't just can't handle Sunday mornings right now. Nobody planned for any of this, but here you are. Happens all the time in ministry. Sound familiar? We're going to talk about it today, right here on the Healthy Church Staff Podcast. Hi there, my name is Todd Rhodes, one of the co-founders over at Chemistrystaffing.com. Thanks for joining me today. Nobody really discusses this reality: the unexpected leave of absence. We plan for everything. We plan for vacation schedules. We budget for sabbaticals. We prepare for maternity leave, but we never really ever prepare for the call that changes everything overnight. And here's what I've learned from watching churches navigate these unplanned breaks. First thing I've learned is that a lot of churches, they don't plan for it, but they don't handle it really well either. As a matter of fact, they do some things wrong. They treat it like it's just a temporary inconvenience, right? We'll just cover for a few weeks. And then they pile on responsibilities to whoever's left. Whoever leaves, just all their work gets spread out or put on somebody else who already has a lot on their plate already. They keep texting the person who's supposed to be stepping away. They create guilt instead of space, and the staff member feels like they're just letting everybody down. And the rest of the team just feels overwhelmed and resentful. Now listen, now nobody wants this to happen. Good teams care about each other, but caring isn't the same thing as preparing. So every role. How do you prepare? Every role, every single role should have a 90-day backup plan. Not just who covers, but how they cover. And this can be really pragmatic too. It can be things really you think they're minute, but when that person's not there, they're really important. What's the password? What's the password? What vendor do I contact for this? What decision-making authority does this person have that now I need to have handle or somebody else on the team needs to handle? One person designated as a pri primary point person per area is really important. And you need to have those regular conversations about what could happen if somebody couldn't work. Make normal, you don't have to make this morbid. At chemistry, I've mentioned it before. We have with uh members of our ops team, I have uh ongoing training every other week. And now it's going to be once a month because I've drained a lot of stuff out of my brain. There's not a whole lot there to begin with. But we call it Todd got hit by a bus training. And it's exactly this it's if Todd doesn't come to work tomorrow, will everything at chemistry staffing still go on as normal? So we kind of joke about it. It's in in jest. If Todd really did get hit by a bus, it would be morbid. But we try to make it as normal as we can because I tell you what, if something happens to me, if I get sick or I have a family emergency and I need to step away, I want to make sure that the work that I've worked so hard on continues. Here's what I would recommend. And just think about it, maybe through the lens of let's call it a two-week test. Okay? Here's what you need to ask yourself. If this person, or if you're doing it for yourself, if I disappeared for two weeks tomorrow, what would break? Okay? What would break? Whatever you just thought of, that's your prep list. Okay? That's your prep list. Give yourself permission to step away. The staff member needs to hear, hey, we've got this. Don't feel guilty. Matter of fact, if there's a family emergency or a health crisis or something that comes up, they're gonna feel guilty. They're gonna be involved in something that they didn't see happening, most likely, and something that took them by surprise and all the stress. But you don't want to add on extra stress about making them feel guilty that they're not available to be there. So the first thing you can tell is just don't feel guilty. It's okay. These things happen. We've got this. And the team needs to hear as well. This is temporary. This person will be back. We're not gonna be doing this forever, okay? Because here's the thing about unplanned ministry breaks, they reveal how dependent your systems are on individual people. They show you where your processes are actually just one person's knowledge. And they force you to have healthy conversations about workload and sustainability. Here's the bottom line for today the sabbatical nobody planned for, that family emergency, that two or three weeks that you have to take off and you weren't planning on it. Those things that nobody planned for might be exactly what your team needs to build those better systems and healthier boundaries. Can I tell you a little personal story? Last week, last week, last year, I was feeling a little I had been working kind of hot and heavy, hard, really leaning in for a good amount of time at the beginning of last year. And I determined that I needed to take a little bit of a break. Not a full-blown sabbatical, but I told my team, the people that report to me and the people that I work with, hey, think of this as I'm calling it Todd's Quiet April. And I think I might actually do it again this year. What I did was I made sure that I didn't make a lot of appointments. I did not take the time off. Matter of fact, I probably worked harder during April than I did, maybe even leading up to it. But here's the thing, it was different work. That's a different podcast for a different day. But I did this. I told my team, hey, if you need to get a hold of me, I'm here, but don't get a hold of me. Right? So I took a little bit of time off, and it was really interesting to see what broke. It was really a test of what I had hopefully put into place and what I've been trying to get out of my head and into my team for the previous year. And what I found was on the good side, not much broke. And that was a tremendous testimony to the work that we had done as a team. So that if anything came up out of the ordinary, any edge cases, they for the most part knew how to do it. Now, there were a couple things that broke that they needed to reach out to me for, and but like maybe two or three things in a whole month, which I took that as a giant victory. And another example of this is when I have one of my team that goes on vacation. I will often step in and help take care of their responsibilities. And I always find ways that I think, hey, I can make this easier for this person, or I can, how about if we did this? Not micromanaging at all, but trying to make things better. So all of those kind of things, those gaps and those issues come up when people are either on extended vacation or they just have these emergencies that come up. The challenge for this week is I just I would love for you to pick one key role on your team and just ask, hey, if this person all of a sudden couldn't work for a month, what would we need to have ready? And then start documenting that list. Again, don't make it morbid. Talk with the person, work with them, and make sure that you know exactly how you would be able to do this without killing everybody else on your staff. Don't wait for the crisis to teach you what you already should have prepared. All right, that's uh that's it for today. Your team will face some of these unplanned breaks sooner or later. So preparing for them isn't pessimistic. It's loving. And I hope that this has been helpful for you today. And I'd love to hear your comments. Good, bad, ugly. I would love to hear them. You can reach out to me, podcast at chemistry staffing.com, or you can head over to my website and find out a little bit more about what I do in chemistry staffing. And my website is called Todd.church. That's the domain name, Todd.church. All right, thanks so much. We will be back here again tomorrow. Thanks for joining me on the healthy church.