Chris Bright 0:06
Welcome to the thinking church podcast with me, Chris bright. Every week, I'll be speaking with a church leader about ministry strategy, and getting to grips with not just what they do, but the thinking behind why they do it. So without further ado, let's get on with the show. Well, my guest today is Dan Rylance. Dan is the chief of staff at 12 stone church in Lawrenceville, Georgia. He's previously partnered with John Maxwell for 20 years, first as the executive pastor at Skyline wisdom church in San Diego. And then as vice president of leadership and development at enjoy. Dan is also the author of books, amplified leadership, five practices to establish influence, build, build people and impact others for a lifetime. I actually have that book here. And so well used that I recommend it to everyone. So I love this book. And I was given this, and I've read it cover to cover probably more than once. So definitely recommend that. And also, Dennis, the author of his latest book, which is competent leader become one, stay one. Dan, it's so great to have you on the podcast today. Thanks for joining me.
Dan Reiland 1:20
Thank you, Chris, for inviting me, it's my delight to see you again. When we met here in the States, and now to see you and do this podcast with us. Wonderful, thank you.
Chris Bright 1:30
Brilliant, well, I've been wanting to speak to you actually, for a really, really long time. Because, well, when I think of the job executive pastor, which I think is probably somewhere near the field of that I work in, in the kind of in church world. You're the kind of, you're kind of point zero of the executive pastor. And I know that, that you kind of help to coin that term. So we'd love to kind of hear how that how that job title came to be. And also how you defined it and how it maybe is how it's defined today as well.
Dan Reiland 2:06
Yeah, I'm not I'm not sure I actually defined it. I think I was amongst the first group ever in the country, which is, uh, you know, your point zero, that's a nice way of saying I'm old. So I thank you for the nice way. But I will say that I don't I don't know, I think it might have been more Peter Drucker, who, who was introducing the big idea, I can tell you how it got started, really, you know, the Church Growth Movement up to the 40s, you know, 30s 40s and 50s. And even in the 60s, when the Jesus movement started in the 70s, that the church, there were really almost no churches over 100 or 200. I mean, they were small community churches. And so it was when the Church Growth Movement was introduced, and churches started to grow, that started to cause a need to organise a little bit more fully, to strategize a little bit more fully, because a large growing churches, completely different animal than a smaller one. So that's really how it actually began. And I was actually the, one of the very first small groups in Southern California, that was the kid actually in the group. Most of the other guys are retired at this point. But so I got to sit with some of the greats and learn from them. And, and now I'm the old guy who gets to help a lot of young, exec pastors. So it's kind of fun.
Chris Bright 3:37
Now, that's really cool. I'd love to find out kind of dig into this role, because I think it's robots, it's really starting to emerge a little bit more in the UK. And I kind of want to make sure that we can differentiate it, especially from the role of probably assistant pastor, because it seems like it's different. But I think people use that term, is what I'm hearing in the UK, especially it's quite interchangeably, but from what I've gathered, it's quite different. What how would you define that role of what isn't executive pastor?
Dan Reiland 4:06
Yeah, it is different, Chris. Traditionally, and I don't know if I may misstep on the difference between the UK and the states, and you can correct me, but traditionally, at least in my experience, the assistant pastor is much more pastoral, picks up a lot of pastoral care, maybe leads a lot more into spiritual formation, those kinds of things. Really helps the senior pastor with a lot of people overflow kind of a position. The executive pastor, really the essence of it really is the strategic side of vision. It's really the execution of the vision of the church. And if there were three main components course, we all do 27 different things. But if there were three main components, it would be all things staff, from culture, to development, to performance to hiring, all this to everything. And then second is ministry architecture, meaning what ministries you do ministry, you don't do. Is it working? Is it not working? Where do you start? Where do you stop? And the third would be leadership development. Probably both in the stat depending on the gifting, of course of the individual, probably both. In the staff and the congregation, that's kind of the core of it, there's obviously more things, probably the but then there's a big distinction. There's another one because one distinction you mentioned, the associate or the assistant and an XP. And then there's a, a distinction amongst exec pastors exit, there's a lot of them, but the two main ones are, one would be kind of what I just mentioned, more of the coach, the leadership coach, the staff, overseer, you know, the strategic person. And then the other one is the other big category would be more the administrative financial buildings property, kind of, you know, and, and there's a really, really big difference there. And depending on the size of the church, you're likely to have to. Yeah,
Chris Bright 6:06
I mean, it's, I've noticed that those roles, especially on the kind of more operational side, that that's already starting to exist, I think, on the strategic side, that's, I think, the UK anyway, that's, that's still quite new, because I think that's normally been expected of the senior leaders to be the kind of the key strategic person in church. Why is it? So? How does that work for you with Kevin misers is your co pastor at the moment. So how would you sort of work together with with your skills and his skills? And why doesn't Kevin take on that key strategic role? Why have you sort of differentiated that out? How is that helpful?
Dan Reiland 6:52
Yeah, well, first of all, Kevin is extremely strict, he's very strategic. And he has a very, so it's not about gifting with him, or a lot of situations, sometimes it is. But he's very strategic as a very strategic mind, and did it all himself to the church was 1400 people, I think, you know, but it simply becomes a matter of time, and then skill set. So it's, he's good at it, but he's not passionate about it. And so the larger the church gets, the more he has to more the senior pastor has to devote their time to vision, communication, becoming a better communicator, contacts in the community, they just have to put their role and function in a different place. And they, if I put it simply, they just run out of time. And they need somebody who can just pick up, pick up the ball and run with it. Where it's more their gifting, and they can put all their time there.
Chris Bright 7:48
Yeah, yeah, that that makes a lot of sense. And it immediately makes me think about how could that work at small churches at that extra level? Because, you know, there's many churches, many church leaders that, you know, strategy is just not their gifting. But could that work? Maybe not in a staff capacity, but maybe in a volunteer capacity? What do you think about it working in in this kind of small church? environment?
Dan Reiland 8:13
It's a good question. Let me let me start with this, Chris. Typically, the role of a full time executive pastor, probably best starts in a church of about 1200 or more, maybe 1000. But you know, in that area, but 1200 kind of idea, by the time you're 1800, you're a little late before that. So if you get down into small midsize and smaller churches, the role and the function of the XP is still needed. But but usually seen it like you just sent usually the senior pastor carries that role. So if, if the senior pastor didn't have that strategic gifting, maybe they're good communicator, good people, person, Good Shepherd, they didn't have that strategic gifting and, and you decided what we need that, then then either, if you choose to make it a staff person, a paid staff person that you would, that person will have to carry additional roles. And depending on the size of the church, they'd have to carry multiple roles. So it could be where this person carried spiritual formation, small groups, maybe outreach and the executive pastor kinds of roles but when you think about it, if the church is that much smaller, there's not as much need the staff is smaller, the complexity is less. So there isn't and that's why there's room for and the need for that XP to carry those other roles. But it is it's a little early and I would say there's a danger in if you couple of things. One if you hired an XP to offload stuff because you just don't want to do it or to to have an XP and that's all they do because they That's too expensive for a smaller church to hire a full time person to carry a pretty simple strategy at that level. So I don't want to I don't want to talk too much SawStop. And
Chris Bright 10:14
I think this probably goes on to my my next thought, which is, your job is chief of staff. And obviously, I think the church world has done and Alicia has done a lot on who you hire, and you know, looking for the right, the right people. But I never really hear much on when and you mentioned that kind of, you know, it's right to get a full time x paid about 1200. So that unless maybe started from the beginning, maybe you can run this through for me, and when's a good chunk? When's a good time for a church to make its first hire? And then maybe the kind of the key hires? And what sort of sizes? Are you starting to put these things in place?
Dan Reiland 10:56
Yeah, there's a lot of rules of thumb. So first, if I can give a gigantic caveat. Every environment is different. So I'm a little hesitant I love this question. It's a brilliant question. But I'm a little hesitant because every environment is different, every situation is different. So some of the things that we have to use as benchmarks up front, and let me say them, and then we can have the conversation. So So for example, one of them is your your percentage of budget to staffing, you want to you know, that percentage is important. You don't want to get too too high on that stuff. You know, we can talk about those numbers, if you want. So funding. Secondly, is is is the church growing? And then And then third is what is the current use of high capacity volunteers. Because our first knee jerk things shouldn't be to hire, our first response should be to raise up high capacity volunteers. Because sometimes the high capacity volunteers are your very best staff. They are you're even in a in a huge church, they can be your very best staff. So really, the only reason you hire if you if you don't have, if you don't have a volunteer who could do it, or the time requirement is just so vast, that a volunteer can't do it. That's really how so now, going to your question. I think there's a couple of categories to look at. One is a church plant and one's an existing church. So let's, and let's break down a church plant into two categories, right. So if we start with with the kind of a popular model today with Ark and other places, have a large church plant, that's kind of a newer, not a new idea, but it's a newer idea of a large church plant. And some of those organisations including Ark would probably call that about 200. Where that not the first day when everybody shows up, you know, but it the church actually starts off settle in about 200. That the experts would say that around three full time staff, I typically I'm a little I put it on the leader side, but 2.5 to three FTE, which of course, would be the senior pastor, and then two others. Typically, we can talk about which ones are most common and most used, and which ones maybe I even think are most important. But sticking with the principle though. If you're if you start with around 200, and you're going to go with 2.5 to three FTE, then you need to hold to the churches about 300. Before you start hiring more, and I think a lot of pastors, a lot of us, maybe all of us, were tempted to hype, we're tempted to solve our pressures by hiring people. And that's not a good idea, because you it actually can hurt you. If you hire too much. You should never ever, ever hire faster than the church grows. So if we took a small church plant, we'll make this more brief. If you take a small church plant, maybe 50 to 100 I think it's really the senior pastor and that's it. You really shouldn't start thinking about staff to your about 100. I know that's going to be a little aggressive sounding to some, but that's really a smart way to go leaning into high capacity volunteers. And maybe you could do like a 10 hour children's person or maybe a contract worship leader, you know, young young person who's gigging on the side, that's you could do that. But I wouldn't be very careful to to strap and strain a small church to having too much of their budget in the staff. The last category I would would think about Chris is the small existing church. The thing about a small existing church or existing small church is that they typically were larger. And so they have already have too many staff. And that's where it gets complicated, you know, they fade invited me or you or somebody into helper code, we might even say you have too many staff and they would feel like we don't have enough staff. Because I would use the same numbers, if it's under 100, I would really try to kindly encourage them. Let's look at developing volunteers because you're straining your budget, to have staff and not that much is being accomplished in terms of a beat, that when you're that small, you tend to go inward, to take care of yourself, take care of each other, rather than outward to reach lost people for Jesus.
Chris Bright 15:37
Yeah, I think that's, it does make so much sense, especially with those kind of established churches when when churches have shrunk, or, you know, the staff, you know, you want to keep all of the staff as long as possible. People don't want to, you don't want to release staff unless you really, really have to, and can be really, really tough. You talked before about that kind of the percentage of budgets to staffing budget to the total budget, what kind of parameters do you set around that?
Dan Reiland 16:04
Yeah, for sure. I think and of course, a church plan is a little bit different. But right off the bat in this, this number hasn't changed in decades, you really don't want to be more than 50% total staff compensation of your total your church revenue. But the healthier number as the church gets larger is closer to 40%. When I when I came to tall stone, we're about 52% to staff budget, and we it took us 10 years, 10 years to march it down to 40%. And and that comes with better staff and we want to, you know, fewer staff, greater skills, compensate them better, that kind of a thing. But it's just much, much healthier to get that if you can I mean 38? I mean, sorry. 4746 48. That's all good. But the further you can get toward 40 is a healthier church. Yeah,
Chris Bright 17:03
yeah, that's a, that's a really helpful things, I think, for churches, because I think, and even just thinking about the percentage in itself, and just thinking as defined percentages, it just helps you scale as you grow. And you know, that if you can stick to that 40%, that's going to help you when you know whether you're 50 people or 500 people or 5000 people, you know, that's good, it just helps you scale that up. And that's, that's really helpful. Okay, that's if we think about, we've thought about kind of the amount and the amount of money that goes into that. And then you sort of talks about the kind of the first roles when we're looking at, you know, hiring a pastor wait until about 100. As a good, kind of good kind of rule of thumb to start off with, if when you're starting to scale up, I remember seeing this, I was interviewing one of your staff when I when I went to visit topstone, back in 2016. I remember they had a chart of that they said they said it was from you I didn't I didn't actually get to see the chart, which is really unfortunate. And it was helping to think about staffing as the church grew at different sort of size increments. And it's just, it's only in my memory, I never actually got to see, I think. And so how does that how does that work? How would you think about okay. When you're going to, you know, be you got the first first plant, you know, the first one is that senior leader, but then what's the next one's after that? Would you would you put in?
Dan Reiland 18:37
Yeah, and that the chart, you know, it's in the under a shroud and or a glass case somewhere? I'm just getting that actually that chart was there's two different I'm sorry, I wish this we I wish it was just simple answers, but there's always more involved. So the chart that they were talking about was for multi site. And the way you staff multi site is entirely different than the way you staff up a one one shop place. And so your your multi site campuses are staffed much leaner, they need to be there have to be because you have a central services staff. And so you can't be reproducing all that that's the whole point of multisite that you have central services, finance it all that kind of stuff. And and so the campus staff can be leaner because their total focus is on the people. So, but to go to your question, the the typically the very first one that's hired, well, it goes back and forth depending on who's available. It's either a worship person or worship leader, or a children's person, or multisite. It's both. Rarely would you start at that size of a church without both. But depending on the size of the lodge, you know the factors, it would be the difference between a part time A children's in worship and a full time. So that's where it starts, then it gets into nuance. For example, if the if the pastor's if the campus pastor, or the senior pastor has a lot of gifts and skills in spiritual formation, meaning, you know, first time guests and baptism and new Christians and small groups and all that discipleship, he or she might take that on their self, they may, they may run that, and they may prefer because of the age of the church, or the proximity to schools, which is really smart. They might want a student pastor. And or somebody just now you start, you start late lacing them in according to the vision, the opportunity, the need that kind of thing.
Chris Bright 20:46
How does it change them? Because you mentioned about the multi sites a different model, what how does that? Did? Did the numbers change? And when you would, when you would hire and how many hires you'd have? Yeah, how does that change with multisite? What did the numbers change to? I know, it's going to be different for each situation. But like, I think the rule of thumb is really helpful for us, because I think it's going to help us give us something that we can kind of latch on to a little bit, which is can be really helpful. I guess it's the principle of the thing about Yeah, how does that change? multisite? To? To, to a single church? Yeah,
Dan Reiland 21:24
so for example, you can you can have, and I might not get the numbers, right. I don't, I'm not in the details that much right now. But But I get the concept that I'm for you. So you might have a, let's say, you've got five or six campuses, and you have the smallest ones, maybe four or 500 people, and the largest ones are, it could be 2000 people, it could be 3000 people, well, a multisite campus of a call it 2000 People, you could run that with different ones in Life Church might do that with six, or seven or eight people. Or you might eat you know, so let me just give us a generic, you know, somewhere between seven and 10, people can run a giant campus, seven, seven to 10, full time, where if you were to 1000 people, you might have 20 staff in a one site, right? Because they're covering everything, where the campus out there, they're focused, they don't have to deal with it. And, and, and finance and producing the product spot X meaning the children's material and the student material in the spiritual formation of small group, they they don't, it's all done for them. So that staff is all their functions are about literally the ministries of the church. And so you just don't need that much staff.
Chris Bright 22:49
Yeah, that's really helpful. And that thought that the kind of the, the return that you get for fewer staff with multisite does make multisided obviously, we do multisite, so many other reasons. But then the ability to run very, very lean is very helpful, because it means that you can keep your budget a bit lower, be able to put that that budget into other things because it's, you know, the the budget can then go into the community or whatever. And that can be really helpful with, with with, with hiring, how would you balance the administrative and the pastoral side? Because there's always a, you know, as soon as you get started, there's always a need for, you know, we just call us admin that seems to sort of pile up. How do you balance that? Because it always seemed really tough. And it always seems like everyone needs more admin staff.
Dan Reiland 23:37
Yeah. Yeah. Interesting, though, Chris, that the trend has gone away from more admins there. It's in my era, it was admins, admins, admins, and that's typically, you know, a knee jerk reaction, but it's going away because we're technology has helped us do a lot of our stuff on our own. And also we've we've realised that there's, you know, and again, that the administrative and support staff, they're really important. I mean, some of the backbone staff of the church, they're amazing people, we would be in trouble without them. I just don't know that we always need as many as we think we do. And the difference to your question, Chris, the differences, the staff who actually grow the church and the staff who manage the church. And so that's the significant thing we have to be honest about and let's take an admin to start with because that's what you brought up. Sometimes we can be really blunt on our on your podcast here that what's important knows you don't never hire never hire an admin to make your life easier. You hire an admin to make your life more productive. And and so oftentimes, admins are brought on because they just hear you do all this stuff. You do all this stuff, and that's, that's not a good stewardship use of time and money. The administrative staff to support staff manage management oriented staff are really important. people, they're a gift to the kingdom, but they should free up the ones who grow the church to actually grow the church. That's the idea. So I think you'll always lead with the growth oriented staff. And you follow with the more support administrative staff, if you ever flip it, and again, this always goes back to pressure. People want to offload their pressure, even the ones who are growing the church, they want to offload their pressure so they get me some help get me some help get me some help. And that's okay, as long as the help that's been provided actually allows the ones who want the pressure relief to be more productive if they're not more productive, really not accomplished anything.
Chris Bright 25:59
Well, thank you so much for listening to this week's podcast. This is only halfway through the podcast, and you can listen to the full conversation by joining our members podcast, just go to our website, www dot thinking dot church and you can sign up to our members podcast there, it only costs the price of one copy per month, so it's well worth doing. So why not get a copy? This is the podcast and learn something new. We'll see you again for this podcast next week. So bye for now.
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