Developing Pastors–David Horita

In the majority of Fellowship Pacific churches, the single largest budget allocation goes towards Staff salaries. This is as it should be since the pastors in your church are critical to achieving the mission that God has given. Obviously, there are a lot of other components involved in your missional success – not least of which is every other gifted person in the church. Yet the fact remains that pastors play an inordinately significant role.

Since this is the case, it makes sense to invest in the development of your staff. If we are willing to spend thousands and thousands of dollars to hire the right people, we should also be adamant that we put sufficient time, effort, and funds into ensuring that the staff remain current and relevant in their areas of expertise.  Most churches should be looking to spend between 2-5 percent of their staffing budget for ongoing staff training.  Conferences, training courses, books, and journals may seem expensive to many of you, but it is nowhere close to the waste that occurs when we are paying salaries to Staff who are out of touch with their professions. Remember that you can stretch your development dollars through such things as in-house courses, on-line learning, and Fellowship training.

Fellowship Pacific is continually seeking to help your church in the areas of leadership development and church health.  We make training available to help your church leadership be as good as they can be.  This includes such things as Executive Coaching, Birkman Assessments, Clergy training (Immerse), and Pastors peer-to-peer training opportunities.  All of these are part of our efforts to help your staff stay current.  The cost for each is subsidized through our combined Fellowship budget, and is at most limited to the actual cost of the resource.  In many cases there is no cost at all, but is a benefit that comes from belonging to our family of churches.

Whether you avail yourselves of the opportunities within Fellowship Pacific or you choose alternative training options is not particularly important.  Many of our churches choose to do both.  But is it important that you make the decision to have your Staff involved in ongoing and intentional development.  This means that you ensure there are funds to do so, and then become insistent that your Staff take advantage of the opportunities. 

And, in case you are wondering – Yes.  Within the Fellowship Pacific Ministry Centre, we do spend money on the development of our team.  In fact, the question of individual Staff development is a key part of every annual evaluation.  If we are not growing and learning, we would not be able to help you.  This is also true in your church.

Development of people is always good.  Development of Staff is essential.  Do it.