Logistics > Staffing Formulas

by Rick Labate rickl@pcsda.org

One on-going challenge that conferences face is the decision of how best to appropriate pastoral resources among churches within the conference. When a conference grows in membership and churches but not in number of pastors it creates the challenge of how best to divide up the “pastoral pie.”

Some conferences are answering this need through creating larger church districts, the use of Volunteer Lay Pastors (the Florida Conference is the industry standard for this approach), allowing smaller churches to be lay led, merging churches or even closing churches.

Most every church desires to have their own pastor but financially this is not possible for most locations. So how to make the decision in the most equitable manner possible? One approach is to consider staffing formulas. When explaining to churches why they have gone from being in a two-church district to a three church district or why that large church got yet one more pastor, the staffing formula has been the spoonful of sugar that makes the medicine go down.

A staffing formula simply determines how to make x number of pastors serve y number of churches. It can be as simple as looking at a church’s tithe, membership or both. This simple combination works well and in one conference 55% of the formula is based on tithe and 45% is based on membership.

Staffing formulae criteria can also include the mission potential of a community, level of engagement by congregation, if the church or district has a church school, etc.

Whatever method is used, it helps to substantiate staffing decisions made by the conference regarding the appropriation of pastors to its churches.