9Marks eJournal Sept–Oct 2011: The Pastor and His Staff, Part 2

It’s easy to overlook the importance of wise management in the life of the church. But pick up your Bible and read 1 Kings 3 to 5. God gives Solomon wisdom, and the next thing you know, Solomon is doing everything from studying hyssop to getting foreign kings to help him build the house of the Lord. All the while every citizen lives peacefully under his own vine and fig tree. The point? Among other things, wisdom is a God-given skill for the work of ordering, building, and prospering the affairs of his kingdom.

The local church’s central work, 9Marks believes, is a prophetic one—proclaiming the Word of our Priest and King. But should God provide, you should want to build a big platform for that Word, and to set it in a teacher’s lectern, and to sit it in a counselor’s chair, and to give it a piano, and to send it out the doors and overseas, and to do everything you can to let that Word reverberate through your church and beyond.

But doing all this takes the wisdom of Solomon, so to speak. It takes skill in wisely discipling people and sometimes even hiring them to facilitate the work of the church.

I almost wrote, “hiring them to do the work of the church.” But Jamie Dunlop’s excellent article reminded me of why we should hire staff—to facilitate the church’s ministry, not to do it. If his article helps to know when to hire, Matt Schmucker and Phillip Jensen help to think about when (or whether) to fire.

Mark Dever, Ryan Townsend, and Patrick Traylor offer a few other nuts and bolts of staff management. And Greg Gilbert and Shawn Wright duke it out over whether we should call anyone a senior pastor.

Through all of this we pray that God would grow you in the wisdom of him who was wiser than Solomon, so that everyone in your church, too, would prosper in holiness, love, and grace. To read the entire Sept-Oct 2011 issue of the 9Marks eJournal, click here.