The False Urgency Epidemic on Church Staff

In this episode of the Healthy Church Staff Podcast, Todd Rhoades addresses the issue of false urgency within church environments, where every task is treated as an immediate necessity. He discusses the detrimental effects of manufactured crises on church staff, including burnout and neglect of real priorities. Todd offers strategies for distinguishing between genuine emergencies and less critical tasks, encouraging leaders to create criteria for urgency, train their teams to identify true priorities, and maintain a calm presence. Ultimately, the podcast urges churches to foster a more balanced approach to urgency, reducing unnecessary stress and enhancing team effectiveness. • False urgency is prevalent in some church staffs, equating every task to an emergency. • Constant urgency can bury real priorities, leading to staff burnout and inefficiency. • Leaders should track tasks labeled as urgent to identify patterns of false urgency. • Todd suggests criteria for determining true urgency, focusing on immediate impact and safety. • The importance of distinguishing between urgent issues (e.g., a broken heater in winter) and non-urgent ones (e.g., updating a website). • Encourages maintaining calm and not creating a sense of urgency where it isn't needed.

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Transcript

Two Church Cultures Of Urgency

SPEAKER_00 0:07

I get to work with a lot of churches and it's really interesting to me. Some churches, when you serve on a staff, everything is urgent. Everything that comes in is urgent. We need to talk about this as soon as possible. We need to act on this as soon as possible. We need to just get this off our plate right now. That's one set of churches. Across the street could be a totally different church where it seems like absolutely nothing is ever urgent. Today we're going to talk about churches that have a lot of urgent things on their plates. They drop everything. Their hearts are constantly racing. It turns out there needs to be a change here. There has to be an emergency meeting there. There's a crisis over here. There's a fire over here that we got to put out. Somebody complained about the coffee in the lobby for crying out loud. We got to get that figured out by Sunday. Nobody ever says this can't wait till next week because everything is urgent. So we're going to talk about that today. Maybe your church is not in the middle on this. Maybe your church is one of those where it just seems like everything is a fake emergency. We're going to talk about that today here on the Healthy Church Staff Podcast.

False Urgency And Staff Burnout

SPEAKER_00 1:24

I'm so glad you're here. My name's Todd Rhodes, one of the co-founders over at Chemistrystaffing.com. In churches like this, the epidemic is really real. False urgency is like crack cocaine of ministry culture. It feels productive because you're always busy, you're always putting out that fire. You're always trying to solve something. But at the same time, it's destroying your team. Every email marked urging when it's not, every drop everything moment that could wait until tomorrow or next week. Every crisis meeting for non-crisis issues. Your staff is living in fight or flight mode all over the time, all the time, over every single conceivable situation, it seems. And here's what's really happening. Your actual priorities are getting buried under fake ones. Your actual priorities, the things that are really urgent, the things that are really important when you put everything as urgent, those actual things that you need to be doing get buried underneath fake ones. Staff stops believing that anything is truly urgent, and the boy who cried wolf effect kicks in really hard. And when real emergencies do hit, nobody moves fast because you just can't. You can't hit everything fast. Your team burns out fighting fires that they were never really ever burning in the first place, and they start dreading all of your texts and all of your calls. Now, I do understand this. Ministry feels urgent because souls are at stake. I do not discount that at all. But manufactured crises isn't helping anyone's soul.

Audit Your Urgent Requests

SPEAKER_00 3:13

So here's what I would suggest. Start tracking what you call urgent for the next two weeks. Just write them down. Write down everything that comes across your desk, every single emergency, every single crisis, every single as soon as possible request that you And at the end of each week, I want you to ask yourself, what would have happened if this waited? And you'll be shocked how little was actually urgent. Create an urgent criteria. Does it affect the Sunday? Does it affect safety? Does it affect major relationships? If it doesn't hit those marks, it waits. Teach your team the difference between urgent and important. I'm in the process of planning a vacation for my wife and I over the summer. And I always get and we're gonna be we're gonna be on a ship in the middle of the ocean. So used to be you couldn't get any access to internet, but now it's they got Starlink and high-speed internet, even out in the middle of nowhere. I always get a little antsy though. I always get a little antsy when I don't have constant access to my phone or to my email. And it's because I suffer from this. Everything I feel like everything I need to know everything because you never know when something's gonna need my attention. And then I sit back and I think about this. I do this every time I take a vacation, and then it constantly

Real Versus Fake Urgency

SPEAKER_00 4:40

creeps back in. I think, when was the last time? On my personal email. Now, business is a little bit different. There are things that come up that you have to do, but in my personal email, when is the last time I got a personal email that demanded my immediate attention? And you know what? I cannot think of one. I cannot think of one. Not something that, you know, there are important emails that I need to return and those kind of things. But can they wait for a day or two days or a week while I'm on vacation? Absolutely. We get this real versus fake urgency. Real urgent versus fake urgency. The real urgent is the heart's broken and it's 20 degrees, the heat's broken, I'm sorry, and it's 20 degrees outside. That's a real urgent thing. A fake urgent is changing the worship order for on Thursday for Sunday. The real urgent is a staff member is struggling with depression. A fake urgent would be to found on the website needs updating. The real urgent is major conflict between key leaders on your team. The fake urgent is when somebody doesn't like where we put the welcome table. Train yourself to spot the difference. Don't treat the welcome table issue as the same, the same level of urgency as the conflict between a couple of your key team members.

Be The Calm Leader

SPEAKER_00 5:56

Here's your bottom line: manufactured urgency is just procrastination with anxiety attached. So your team needs to be the calm in the storm, not the creator of it. And you, as someone who leads your team, you need to be the calm in their storm. Don't create more urgency when there doesn't need to be urgency. For some churches, I think this is something that hopefully will hit home. And hopefully some of these things will help you to make it a little bit better for you and your team. Not everything is an emergency. That's it for today on the podcast. We will be back tomorrow. And tomorrow's gonna be a really interesting topic. I hope that you'll be here. We're gonna talk a little bit about staffing, a little bit about salaries and finances. And the title for tomorrow is God Will Provide is not a financial plan. So if you struggle with salaries and compensation and all that, I hope you'll join me right here on the Healthy Church Staff Podcast. Right here again tomorrow.