Three High-Yield Onboarding Activities With Your New Pastor(s) and Program Staff

by Rev. Mark E. Tidsworth, Founder and Team Leader

How important is it that your new pastors and program staff persons start well? How much time, energy, effort, and resources did your church invest in this new call? How might smooth onboarding quicken your church’s missional progress?

Clearly, efficient and effective onboarding with key leaders positively impacts church progress. Even so, few churches give much consideration to the onboarding process. We could tell multiple stories of otherwise high functioning churches who leave this to chance. The inevitable outcome is a weaker start, slower connecting, and unnecessary scrambling for the newly called pastors and staff persons.

Rather than be those churches, here are three onboarding activities that accelerate new ministry when pastors and program staff persons are called to your church.

Design and schedule your onboarding questions and conversations experience.

First you will need to decide whether to facilitate this experience with in-house leadership or outside assistance. Unsurprisingly, we recommend outside assistance, since this is one service we provide with churches. Not only do we bring expertise and experience, we also provide a way for those who are involved to participate rather than facilitate.

Then you are positioned for scheduling a questions and conversations experience with your staff team (and/or lay leadership), blocking off a half-day, or including in a larger retreat type experience. The flow of this event is:

• The staff team collectively responds to a set of questions we provide which open windows into the life of your church and the staff team, without the new person(s) present. A couple examples – What would we want to know about this church were we just starting? What would we need to know about this staff team?

• The facilitator shares the questions and responses with the new person(s).

• The new person(s) joins the staff team for questions and responses, talking through and responding to what’s generated earlier.

Awareness is raised immediately while bonding starts right away, too. Some churches schedule a very similar experience with their lay leadership team or deacon body (Baptist). This kind of conversation with lay leaders gives deeper insight into the character, dynamics, and essence of a congregation. You can imagine the benefit to the church when lay leaders explain their church to newcomers in this focused way. That kind of awareness raising activity is gold in the pockets of lay leaders.

Choose a tool for connecting and team working.

There are so many excellent relational tools and systems designed for strengthening team working… we recommend every church staff select and implement their approach. For quite a long time now, we have used the PeopleMap Communication System, a simple personality inventory and training for team connection and working. Rhonda Abbott Blevins, who leads Ascend Enneagram at Pinnacle, is also engaging staff teams toward applying this spiritual growth and interactional system to their ongoing collective lives. There are other quality tools available as well. The point is to select one your team can use for nearly instant connection, followed by ongoing learning.

Schedule your administrative orientation.

In fact, this may require several scheduled meetings with various persons in the church. The goal is to help your new people get up to speed with all things administrative…job descriptions, organizational chart, personnel manual, by-laws and constitution, book of order or discipline, etc. Don’t forget a facilities orientation, too. Which keys do your people need… and DON’T need? Share the relevant passwords. This administrative orientation prevents many problems and saves boatloads of time.

There’s more, too, but these three select actions will significantly improve the onboarding of your new pastor(s) and program staff persons. Do we really want to leave this to chance?