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The current legal and organizational climate all but demands that your conference have a person designated as HR director. In smaller conferences, the HR director might be function of secretariat, while in others it will be treasury. Larger conferences will have a full-time staff position directing the HR department.

Am interesting paradox can sometimes emerge when HR persons become involved with pastoral placement, discipline, and terminations issues. Much of this comes from the training HR directors receive. They are responsible to know all pertinent employment guidelines and regulations in order to appropriately protect both the employee and the church organization. And you will run into situations where one or the other needs the knowledge and expertise HR folks bring to the table.

But there are still some differences in general employment situations and church-based employment situations. The tendency for HR people is to try to overlay what they learn about secular business employment requirements onto the business of hiring and firing in a church-based organization. While it's true that most guidelines and regulations for the secular workplace are also appropriate in a church organizational setting, there are some things that churches can do (at least at this point in time) that you cannot do in a secular setting. In the church we may choose to do some things differently, because, well, we are a church and we should do things differently!

It would be well worth your time to learn all you can about how church organizations can and should be different where it's important to be different in our hiring and firing practices. You might need that knowledge one day to help remind the group deciding on someone's future of some options open to them that the HR person might not recognize.

Permit, please, the author of this page (Mic Thurber) to relate a short illustration of this. When I was in Ministerial in Southeastern California Conference years ago, we hired our first, fully trained HR specialist to head up our conference's HR department. SECC is a big conference with a large number of pastors and teachers and auxiliary employees, so we needed a professional HR director. The person who was hired was very qualified, very knowledgeable, and well experienced. But not in church work. In many, if not most situations, this was not a problem, for much of employment processes and regulations are a matter of common sense, and our HR director often kept us from making some mistakes along the way.

In one rather contentious AdCom meeting when we were discussing whether or not to recommend termination of a particular pastor, I had suggested a way forward that did not, at that time, include termination. My suggestion was met with a strong statement of opposition from the HR director who sternly said, "But that's not the industrial model!" My reply was to remind her that we were not an industry, and that we had every right to proceed as I suggested (which we did, by the way). I do not fault the HR director for their response. It was completely understandable, and perhaps even expected, given the director's background and training, which was in an industrial HR setting.

You may find yourself needing to mediate between administration and your HR person from time to time. So take the time to really learn about the appropriate lee-way you have as a church organization.

Finally, spend the time needed to develop a healthy, cooperative relationship with your HR person. Because you may often find yourself on opposite sides of a discussion or argument, it's easier to mediate differences if you have a good working relationship.