You’ve just been given your first parish assignment. Whatever life experience you have been blessed to receive is about to be thoroughly tested and reconstituted.
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The Sometime Challenge of the Professional Volunteer
What a blessing it is when a working professional offers their assistance in service to the parish! And yet there may arise managerial challenges to the relationship.
Five Essential Elements of a Successful Parish Leadership Development Program
Build leaders. Then let the leaders build additional leaders. And so the parish grows and fulfills its mission.
The Ten Tasks of Effective Parish Leadership
Compare one’s own list of important tasks or roles as a church leader with these ten suggested ones.
Clergy Taxes and Proper Classification
Clergy taxes have bedeviled many priests and parish councils struggle to ensure proper classification. Here is the beginning of help.
Parish Council Meeting Challenges and How to Address Them
Parish council meetings have the actual potential of being the highlight of a priest’s monthly tasks. That’s the good news. The more difficult news is that to achieve this will take time and energy.
The Orthodox Clergy Survey 2015 (Full Report)
346 Orthodox clergy participated in answering 12 simple but possibly revelatory questions in the Orthodox Clergy Survey helping to identify the challenges and joys of contemporary parish ministry.
Retaining Volunteers: the “Stay Conversation”
Here is a very practical tool in helping priests to retain key volunteers with the well being of the volunteer foremost.
What the Spouses of Priests May Wish for You to Know
For starters perhaps we should begin with the subject of the “role” of the priest’s wife. Please hear this loud and clear: there is no longer a standard defined “role” for the spouse of a priest. There are as many roles as there are spouses of priests! This in no way denigrates the traditional pattern […]
Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast
If you want vision and strategy to succeed, it will be necessary to analyze, understand and engage the culture of the parish and be prepared for push-back.
Important Tasks the Senior Priest dare not Delegate
The massive responsibilities that a priest bears makes it difficult to read any article that begins “important tasks”. Yet if these are attended to, the smooth running office lightens other burdens.
Sample Template for a General Survey of the Parish
Well done surveys with good reporting back to the parish is a wonderful way to listen to the community.
What do clergy do all week? Findings from the U.S. Survey of Congregations
Compare your non-Sunday morning work load and type of work with Catholic and Protestant pastors. Of course this will vary by size of parish, age of clergy and “energy quotient” of the pastor.
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