Beyond Youth Pastors: Our NextGen Staffing Experiment – Part 2
They hired a Family Ministries Pastor. They hired me.
Ok, so hiring me wasn’t the significant part, it was the underlying ministry philosophy of this new position that would have the greatest impact. Not only did it elevate the importance of supporting parents and married couples, it also connected and aligned all age-group ministries from birth to young adulthood.
Sometimes called a NextGen Pastor, this role is changing the conversation around leading the younger generation in the Church. Two writers who summarize this new position well are fellow NextGen Pastors, Jim Murphy and Nick Blevins.
5 years later, our church has taken this shift in NextGen staffing structure one step further. For the first time in decades, there is no one on staff with the title of Youth Pastor. In fact, there is no longer a Children’s Pastor either. And we believe this signals an increase in our investment in the next generation, not a decrease.
Beyond Youth Pastors
Welcome to Part Two in the “Beyond Youth Pastors” series where I am attempting to give voice to some long-felt frustrations about the role of youth pastor and begin to look at what might be next for the church.
If you haven’t already, check out Part 1 to read more about those underlying frustrations, as well as the values that have led to the structure I outline below.
In this post, my goal is to outline the current NextGen staffing structure at our church and present it as one working alternative to more traditional models. This is not a perfected model, so don’t simply copy-and-paste it into your own context, but rather use it as a learning tool to help you evaluate and develop your own structure.
Age-based Staffing Model
Traditionally, Youth Pastors exist in something that can be called an age-based staffing structure. From babies up to retirees, every age group has their own staff member focusing on the needs of their particular demographic.
E.g. Grandma doesn’t want to worship to Planetshakers and hear about dating issues and your 8-year old son probably doesn’t want to sing Gaither hymns and hear about staying faithful to Jesus in retirement. Give them their own space. This is a good thing.
Let’s make a clear distinction here, though. Age-based programming does not necessarily dictate that you need to have age-based staffing.
What if, instead of hiring staff based on the programs we want to run, we hired staff based on the leadership roles that needed to be filled? What if, instead of requiring a staff member to oversee everything for a particular age-group, we asked them to oversee only a few things for multiple age groups, allowing them to work more closely within their natural strength areas?
In other words, what if we flipped the traditional Org chart on its side?
We would call a model like this role-based rather than age-based.
Two Primary roles
As we have experimented with a role-based model in our context, we have settled on two distinctive roles that need to be filled:
Our goal is to help every parent widen the circle of support around their child. For us, some of the key people in that circle are the leaders in our weekly Kids and Student groups. In order to give every kid a leader who cares about them, someone needs to be thinking about recruiting, screening, orienting, and coaching these leaders.
Our champion for this role is called a Team Development Director.
Create the Place
We can’t simply recruit leaders, introduce them to kids on a Sunday morning in the foyer and expect a meaningful relationship to spring up. We need to create environments that help initiate and sustain these relationships. In other words, we need to create programs. Programs move the abstract idea of “influencing the next generation with the message of God’s story” out of the realm of theory and into a real-time and place on our calendars.
Our champion for this role is simply called a Programming Director.
The New Org Chart
Take a look at how these positions fit together in our most recent Org chart:
The circular design of the Org chart is to better visualize the highly collaborative nature of this team (and because it looks cooler). To borrow Cindy Fiala’s words, every staff member in this new model “swims in the Family Ministries waters” during the week. Another way of putting it is that every staff member “owns the line” that runs from birth-young adulthood and contributes to the direction and leadership of these ministries.
For example, the Team Development Director is tracking recruitment needs and developing coaches for all leaders within Family Ministries (FM), while the Programming Directors prepare curriculum content and designs physical spaces for both Kids and Teens programming.
In our context, it has worked out better to hire two half-time Programming Directors even though the initial position was created for one person. In this scenario, one Director owns the weekend ministry environments, while the other owns the midweek environments.
Team Leaders – A weekly “dock”
While each person swims in the FM waters during the week, we wanted to give each Director a place to “dock” where they would feel a sense of ownership over a particular group. We did this by making each Director a Team Leader of a particular ministry environment. These are the little blue circles on the Org chart.
This keeps our feet on the ground as well as giving all volunteers a very clear point person for their ministry area. For example, all volunteers in the High School area would see the Team Development Director as their primary leader, as this would be the person who is present with them on a weekly basis.
Still confused? Hang in there. Let me give you a quick summary.
Putting it all together
Here’s an overview of each position you see on the Org chart:
Family Ministries Pastor
This is me. I sit in the centre of this structure and lead all Family Ministry Team (FMT) members, coaching and guiding them as we work towards the bigger vision of our church. I sit on the Leadership team with the Lead Pastor and act as the champion for families at that table as well as ensuring that the FMT is collaborating and aligning with the other ministries of the church (otherwise, we haven’t eliminated silos, we’ve just made a bigger one).
Apart from the FMT, I also lead our MarriedPeople, Parenting, and Young Adult volunteer teams (not pictured on the Org chart, but still vital to our overall strategy).
Team Development Director
This person takes the lead in recruiting and developing leaders for both kids and student ministries, while also acting as the team leader for our weekly High School environment.
They “win” when each child and teen has a team of responsible and passionate Christ-following leaders investing in them and influencing them with the message of God’s story.
Programming Directors
These people will coordinate content, production teams, and physical spaces in order to create unforgettable and transformative weekly ministry environments for kids and teens, while also acting as the team leaders for our weekly Kids and Jr. High environments.
They “win” when the ministry environments engage the next generation with the message of God’s story and meaningfully connects them with a team of small group leaders (SGLs) who are investing in them relationally.
*Update: One Year Later
We’re entering year 2 in this new structure now and have learned a great deal about what it takes to pioneer a new structure in a church.
On the plus side, we’ve found a lot of clarity and have seen a level of collaboration on our NextGen team that I’ve never experienced before. One of my Directors just told me the other day how night and day the difference is from where we came from. There is just no sense of competition or comparison and nobody feels like a lone ranger anymore. The silos really have fallen down.
On the other side of the coin, this process has been a huge amount of work and has certainly required everyone to be ok with a level of organizational “messiness” as everyone settles into the new system. Because of this, we’ve had to slow down and put the brakes on some initiatives in order to get everyone oriented. At the end of year one, we’re starting to see momentum and capacity build again.
We’ve pushed through the initial challenges and have definitely found it to be worth it.
What’s Next?
Where we’ll be in the future, I’m not sure, but we’ll continue to evaluate and innovate however we need to in order to influence the next generation. The mission is too important not to.
Is your church exploring the possibility of restructuring but you’re not sure what your next step is? Feel free to connect with me. I’d love to chat.
Don’t forget to download the job descriptions and Org chart files below. Hope they’re helpful to you!
Also, check out the great content being put out by Kenny Conley and Cindy Fiala. These two are fantastic leaders and have proven to be valuable voices for many new leaders who are entering the NextGen role. I am in a debt of gratitude to both of them for helping me process through the changes I’ve outlined in this article.
Got questions? Leave a comment.
Thanks for being here,
-Dan
Let’s say you have 3 leaders leading leaders: family pastor, a leader for programming, and a leader for teams. What does this look like then? How does the programming do it for both?
Hi! Came across your post…excellent info! Can you talk about how this works if you are multi-site? I’m trying to re-org our children’s ministry but we have a total of five campuses and I’m struggling to figure out how to do that. Any insight would be helpful.
Hi Kelli.
Thanks for the kind words. I’m not sure what your current structure looks like, but multi-site certainly adds complexity. It is likely that you’re running a bit of a matrix model right now, with a campus staff member reporting to both the campus pastor and a Children’s Min leader at central, is that right? Or do you run more of a network model with no clear “central” campus?
One option is that instead of duplicating the age-based divisions at both central and at each campus, you could develop a hybrid model. For example, the new function-based structure could be pursued at the central level (ensuring alignment at the top), with the traditional age-based model in place at the campus level (allowing for the programmatic specialization that we’ve all come to know and love). Generally, the further down the org chart you go, the more specialized roles become.
Hope that helps!
Thank you so much! Yes, we’re running more of a matrix model! I didn’t realize you responded. I’m STILL working on this, so, again, thank you for your insight and this is a great idea.
Hey Dan, not seeing the job descriptions or organizational chart file links.
Nevermind, just realized I’ve got to sign up to receive them. Brain is on overload LOL
Nice! Glad you found it, Shane! Feel free to reach out if you have any questions about it
I attended your breakout at OC19, and I’ve been thinking about this ever since. Thanks for laying it all out. I’m not sure if this will work in my context, but I’m down for exploring the possibilities.
Thanks David. Feel free to reach out as you continue to think through this stuff. It’s a process and takes a good deal of time.
Thank you so much for the advice and resources.
You’re welcome! Hope you find them helpful!