The Ministry Identity Crisis_ When Your Role Evolves But Your Job Description Doesn't

In this episode of the Healthy Church Staff podcast, Todd Rhoades addresses the inevitable evolution of job roles within church staff positions. He discusses how church growth and emerging needs can lead staff members to take on tasks outside their original job descriptions, which can create confusion and tension. Rhoades provides practical steps to manage this evolution intentionally and to ensure clarity in job roles.• Church staff roles often evolve beyond the initial job description.• This evolution can lead to role confusion and job dissatisfaction.• Key steps to manage role evolution: recognize changes, evaluate role fit, rewrite job expectations.• Essential to discuss role changes with supervisors for clarity.• Role audit can help identify current responsibilities versus job description.• Intentional management of roles prevents burnout and improves job satisfaction.

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Transcript

When Your Role No Longer Fits

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You're sitting in a staff meeting and the singer pastor's talking about your role that you're thinking, hey, that's not even what I actually do anymore. Your job description says you're a children's pastor, but you're also doing some facilities and some admin and some crisis counseling, and apparently you're also the unofficial IT department. If this sounds familiar, you're listening to the right podcast today. I'm Todd Rhodes, and you're listening to the Healthy Church Staff Podcast brought to you by ChemistryStaffing.com, where I'm one of the co-founders. I hope you'll check us out over at Chemistry Staffing. It's an inevitable drift. And here's what hardly anybody will ever tell you before you get hired at a church. Your role will most certainly evolve. Here's the reality: your church, while you're there, will grow or it'll shrink or it'll pivot, and new needs will emerge, and your gifts will become obvious outside of your core job description that you were hired for. And suddenly you're doing work that doesn't exist in any job description you've ever seen. Let me tell you, it's strange, it's weird, but it's not necessarily a bad thing, but it does many times create some tension because it gets really messy. You could start to feel confused about your actual value. Are you a children's pastor who happens to fix computers? Are you a person that's really good at computers who now, because of all your computer work, has just a few hours a week to be a children's pastor, which is what you were actually hired for? Maybe you're becoming something else entirely. Your performance reviews, if you even have one, they just get weird because how do you evaluate somebody against a job description that's three years out of date? Over time, if you're not dealing well with it, you begin to resent those tasks that really aren't your job. And even though the church desperately needs you to do those things, you just resent that you're being asked to do them. Now, listen, this evolution isn't a failure of planning most of the time. It's actually normal, it's actually often very healthy, uh, but it is an evolution. So how do you navigate that? First of all, I think if you're a staff member and your not job description, because a job description is actually what's written on paper. If what you do in your role actually has changed and morphed and evolved into something that your job description wouldn't even recognize, that's the first thing you need to do is just name that. Don't pretend that your role hasn't changed. Sit down with your pastor, sit down with your board, sit down with your supervisor, and map out the shift that you've seen. Ask them if they've seen the same thing and tell them how you're actually spending your time, what you're spending your time on. Not what you think you should be doing, but what you're literally doing week after week. So that's the first thing is just write it all down and acknowledge that this is that this evolution, this morphing has actually happened. That's number one. Number two, I think with you and your pastor or your supervisor or whatever your situation is, you need to decide what stays and what goes. Some evolution is good. You've discovered new gifts. Maybe you stepped into a role because another staff member left or was sick and you need to step into that. It's not really your gift, but you stepped in to do it because there was nobody else to do it. And now six months or a year later, you're still doing it, and it's just not your gifting. Those are things that you need to bring up and things that you need to be honest about. The church has grown into new needs, but some drift is just poor boundaries. So you need to identify, first of all, that it's happened. And second of all, identify what are the healthy areas and what are the areas that really are not healthy for you or for your church long term. And then number three, rewrite those expectations. And I realize this is Todd you don't know my church. You don't know my pastor, you don't know how difficult this is. Oh, yeah, I do. Yeah, I do. I've been exactly where you are. So I'm not saying this is easy, I'm saying this is what should happen. And hopefully this is what you can start a conversation and a dialogue around. Number three is rewriting those expectations. Get that update to your job description, not as a legal document, not as a document that, you know, is gonna kill you when you get to your evaluation, but update it as a clarity document so that everybody knows, so that so that your church knows what success looks like. This is especially hard for churches under 200 because everybody wears multiple hats. But wearing multiple hats is different than wearing a hat that doesn't fit anymore. Okay? Your role can expand, but it needs to expand with intention, not just because somebody else as somebody has to be there to do the job. So here's your bottom line for today. This whole job and role evolution, it happens, it's natural, and sometimes it's actually healthy for you and for your church, but left by itself, it does need to be intentional. If it's not intentional, it can burn you out and make you very unhappy over time for sure. So here's the challenge I would love for you today to uh to do in the next week or so is just write down a roll auto. Write down everything that you actually did last week. Not what your job description says, but what you actually literally spend some time on, and then schedule a conversation with your pastor, your supervisor, your board, not to complain, but just to get some clarity. Role evaluation is normal in healthy churches, and the key to managing it is to manage it intentionally. That's it for today. I hope you'll join me right here again tomorrow on the Healthy Church Staff Podcast. If there's any way I can help your church in hiring, firing, any kind of healthy staff decisions or consulting, you can reach out to me. I can either help you personally or have a great, unbelievable team here at chemistry staffing that works with churches all over the country. Reach out to me at my website, Todd.church. There's a contact form there on the website to fill that out. It'll come right straight to me and we can start a conversation. All right, that's it for today. Hope you have a great day, and we'll see you right back here tomorrow on the public.