Staff, systems, budget, and board in a church of 550–650 after twenty years running $20M+ portfolios and teams of up to ten.
You need someone who can hold the staff, the systems, and the money without carrying it all on his own, and who won’t treat the operational side as a consolation prize. I functioned as the church’s operational leader even though there was no formal Executive Pastor role, and I spent two decades before that doing the same kind of work in a different sector.
The situation I inherited, what I built, and what changed. Written the way I would brief a board.
Ministry management ran on spreadsheets, memory, and one person’s inbox. I evaluated the options, selected BreezeChMS, migrated the church onto it, and trained the staff to run care tracking, group registration, online giving, and attendance in one place.
Children’s, Youth, Young Adults, groups, and adult discipleship all reported into me, along with communications and care. I supervised the Youth Pastor and staff directly, set the rhythm of one-on-ones, and built the volunteer structures each area needed to run without me in the room.
Benevolence sits where compassion and a fixed budget collide. I worked with the trustee board on requests, advocated for families inside real constraints, and pushed for criteria written down in advance so that decisions were consistent instead of personal.
I haven’t seen your church, so these are questions, not proposed changes. They're what I'd ask about before proposing anything.
He took the operational weight off the rest of us, and he did it without making it about himself.
An executive role isn’t necessarily a teaching role, and I’m not pitching for the pulpit. I preach when asked, I’ve taught classes church-wide, and one message will tell you more than a line on my résumé can.
References with names and titles, the full executive resume, and my long-form doctrinal answers are one email away.
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