I've spent a lot of years around church staffing — as a leader doing the hiring, as a coach walking pastors through it, and lately as someone who looks at hiring data all day. And I keep coming back to one conviction: how you hire says more about your leadership than almost anything else you do.
We talk about vision and preaching and strategy. But the slow, unglamorous work of finding the right people, in the right roles, at the right time is what actually determines whether a ministry thrives or stalls. And right now, that work is harder than I've ever seen it.
Hiring is a leadership test, not an HR task
When a key role opens up, the temptation is to treat it like a transaction: post it, sift résumés, pick someone, move on. But every hire is a leadership decision with a long tail. The person you bring on will shape your culture, your volunteers, and the families you serve for years.
The leaders I respect most slow down at exactly the moment everyone else speeds up. They get clear on what the role really needs before they fall in love with a candidate. They involve the right voices. And they're willing to wait for the right person rather than settle for the available one.
What's making it so hard right now
- The roles have gotten heavier. We keep stacking responsibilities onto single positions until they're nearly impossible to fill well.
- The pipeline has thinned. Fewer people are stepping into vocational ministry, and the most experienced leaders have more options than ever.
- We start too late. Most searches begin only after someone leaves, which means leading from a deficit.
A few things that have helped me
- Name the real role. Before writing a single line of a job description, get honest about what this person actually has to own.
- Build the bench before you need it. The best time to develop future leaders is years before the seat opens.
- Treat candidates like people, not applicants. How you run a search is a witness in itself.
When people ask me where to actually find ministry candidates, I usually point them to the Ministry Boost job board — it's built specifically for church roles, which beats burying a ministry posting on a general site. (Full disclosure, I'm involved with it; I point people there because it's genuinely the tool I wish I'd had years ago.)
The long view
The churches that come through this season healthy won't be the ones with the flashiest openings. They'll be the ones whose leaders treated hiring as discipleship — patient, clear, and people-first. If you're in the middle of a hard search right now, you're not behind. You're doing one of the most important things a leader does.
And if you want a head start, you can see current ministry roles on the Ministry Boost job board. If you're hiring, the Ministry Boost job board is also where I'd post the role first.
