Avoiding ministry silos today on the church revitalization podcast. Hello, and welcome to the church revitalization podcast brought to you by the Malthus Group team, where each week we tackle important, actionable topics to help churches thrive. And now, here's your hosts, Scott Ball and A.J. Mathieu. Welcome to the Church Revitalization Podcast. My name is Scott Ball. I'm joined by my friend and co host A.J. Mathieu.
Alright. Here we are. Let's talk about you know, ministry silos is a phrase that we hear a lot when we talk to churches and not just big churches, but, you know, churches of all sizes have this problem of, ministries working in isolation. And and so you get this silo effect in ministry, but I don't know in 274 episodes of the podcast if we've ever done an an episode on specifically avoiding ministry silos. Not if I can't remember it, our listeners can't either. True. Yeah.
That's true. Yeah. I don't maybe not. I'm sure I think it's come up in various contexts because it it is an issue, and, it it affects a lot of things, and it reveals itself in different ways. Yeah. Probably a a majority of the churches that I work with either use the term. They're, like, familiar with the term, know they've got it going on, or not familiar with the term, but describe it. They have the same felt issue, but but don't use that phrase, ministry silos, but then they
describe it to a t. Yeah. We have a question in the church ministry analysis that we do, with churches that's kind of on this topic. Like, is it clear how all the ministries work together? And very often that is one of the lowest scoring questions. And we get comments there say, no. Our ministries don't work together at all. You know, they there's a lot of competition or they're really siloed from one another. They don't really integrate. They don't really collaborate. So, this is a
problem. And and so that's why we wanna be chatting about it today. Yeah. Yeah. And it's just we're just kinda breaking this down into 2 halves. We're gonna talk first about kind of identifying it. If you're not familiar with the term or if you're not sure if this is your church, we're gonna talk about root causes of it? The symptoms and the causes. Yeah. And then we're gonna talk about, yeah, what what's what's a better way of of handling our ministries?
What's the solution? Yep. Alright. So let's start talking about then, identifying silos. What does it look like? Because you can become, I think, maybe a little nose blind or just a little situationally blind to it. Not you just get into a routine and you don't necessarily step back and go, oh, we have ministry silos. You know? It just becomes so normal that you don't you don't even see
it anymore. Mhmm. Yeah. You know, I mean, my personal experience as a church member and a parent of students is where I have this is what bugs me the most. And over the last 25 years, you know, spent time in in just 2 different pretty large churches. But my kids needing to be somewhere, perhaps at the same time I needed to be somewhere, like some adult programming that starts at the same time as children's or youth or student programming in locations that would be impossible to happen. And
that is just one way. These calendar conflicts and logistical conflicts in which it is obvious the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing. And and, you know, I know a bunch of you are amening right now because you're feeling that too, in your own churches. Like, yeah, what how do we end up this way? We're asking people to be in 2 different places at the same time or to make choices, forcing discipleship choices that we shouldn't have
to make. But this is this is a big one for me, Scott, out of out of many symptoms that, your church might be siloed. Yeah. I think these calendar conflicts can come to in in terms of, 2 different ministries making a major promotional pull push at the same time, you know, to sort of major initiatives that are trying to compete
for that attention. And what ends up happening is they split that attention or or almost cancel each other out, and so neither group feels like they got the attention that they deserved. So trying to coordinate together so that you're not making a major push as best you can. You can't always avoid that, and you can't always avoid the calendar conflicts either. But even doing simple
things like, you know, good good staff meetings. We're gonna know what's coming up next week so you can strategize those things as best you can. I think another common symptom of ministry silos is, resource competition. You know, there's only so much pie. There's only so much budget. There's only whether whether you're talking about leadership resource or financial resource or attention resource, whatever it is, you know, you do wanna, in general, maybe have an abundance mindset,
but the reality is there is only so many dollars. I can I was telling you this story off air, A.J., but, I was on staff in a fairly large church and, this was, gosh, probably almost 20 years ago at this point? But we had, a budget surplus, 1 year of a not in, you know, inconsequential amount of money. I want to guess it was I want to say it was maybe in the neighborhood of $100,000.
It's a lot of extra cash at the end of the day. And we were asked to come to a meeting with some proposals of what we thought the church ought to do with this extra money. You could make it for something for your ministry, or you could just make some general proposal of what you thought the church ought to do with the money. This is a staff meeting, staff ministry leader. Staff meeting. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We have staff. Just the staff.
And, and so, you know, we we kind of put our stuff all together. I don't even remember what I had proposed, because again, this is a long time ago. But, I we came into the meeting, and at the beginning of the meeting, the senior pastor said, okay, Just so you know, half this money is now going towards buying new risers, like the kind of risers you would only use on Christmas and Easter, like, for a, like,
a cantata or a production of some kind. They're not the ones that are out all the time, but and we even had ones, but they were just getting a little older or whatever. And but I'm thinking, well, yeah, they're getting a little older, but who cares? They're only out twice a year. Anyways, but it was gonna cost $50 for the new ones. And, and so the pastor just said, well, we're buying those. And, the worship guy, I still to this day, I don't know. How did he, he, he
managed to get a meeting before the meeting to get his thing in. And what did he say? Like what boot did he have to lick to, to, to get that 50 grand claimed before the meeting even started? And so, yeah, I don't even remember what I had proposed, but can I just tell you, A.J., I had gone into that meeting thinking we were gonna collaborate and work together and make a plan for how we were going to steward these resources that the Lord had blessed us with? And this was like
surplus after we had put money away towards rainy day fund. Like this was like legit capital expenditure money that we didn't have a plan for. And I thought we were going to collaborate on that and to come in there and go now half of it's gone. It was so deflating as a staff person. And do you think that that helped or hurt the silo situation among our staff? That sounds like an aggravating circumstance. Now with, half of what's left, everybody now is clamoring for.
Yeah. That's right. I'm like, oh, this is dog eat dog. You know? This isn't a team. This is every man for himself. You know? So, we also see information hoarding. A.J., you can expound on this, but I we we interact with a lot of churches, and I I think a lot of it's innocent. I don't think it's even intentional, but, you know, you've got the youth ministry has their own, social media or,
like, their own texting service that they have. That's not one that the whole church uses that's sort of subdivided, but it's, you know, or, you know, again, or social media accounts or, you know, one ministry is using Dropbox, the other one's using Google Drive. You know, the worship ministry is using Planning Center, but the rest of the church is on Shelby. Like, there there's all kinds of things like this where Yeah. I don't even know that it's
malicious, but it it it happens, and it causes problems. Yeah. Usually, it's not. Yeah. Well, you know, my son just went to a weekend winter camp with our student ministry this weekend. I had to install 2 new apps on my phone to be able to communicate with the leaders and get pictures for the weekend. So, you know, I mean, why? Why? Why? You know? Can't or do we already have things we can be using for this? But, yeah. They
you know? These ministries, they just kinda spin up whatever they whatever they wanna do next, and it's just not part of maybe, of a more communicative plan, unified plan. So Yeah. Yeah. And then we also see duplicate programs. I'm about I'm gonna call on the carpet women's ministries. It's long overdue. I'll do it because you can't. I can't. No. I I mean, don't I don't mean
you. I mean, listener. Okay. Listener can't. The pastor listening probably is not at liberty to call on the carpet their their churches, women's ministry. But are you probably, you probably have, I mean, AIG, how often do we walk into a church and there's a whole discipleship plan and then often its own little bubble, like can't be touched. No one mess with women's ministry. They got their own bible studies. You know? They got they got a little tea. You know? Yeah. Not in never
malicious, always with the best of intentions. And I think I'm not gonna say never malicious. I'm gonna say rarely malicious. Yes. Often territorial, often highly protected. Very territorial. Mhmm. Yeah. May or may not be malicious. But I I have I have met the militant women's ministry leader, but rarely the militant men's ministry leader. There often is no men's ministry leader. True. Yeah. Actually, they're they're only doing it
because nobody else will do it. Fun fact. The number one video of ours on YouTube, I think, is how to run a men's ministry in church. Like, that's how yeah. It's certainly in the top 3. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's a mystery. No one knows how to run a men's ministry because most of the time, none of the men wanna be there. Yeah. We do. Go watch that video. I'm just kidding. Yeah. Yeah. The answer is what do what do we do with the guys while
the women are doing 10 other things? So that's the Just do just do just do a prayer breakfast once a month. That always works. Okay. But anyway, so these are some, some symptoms, you know, that you got the calendar conflicts, you have this resource competition, you have information hoarding, or, or even just information siloing different random different systems being used by different ministries and duplicate programs. And so here's here's
why they form. I think the reason why they form, A.J., is laziness. I think that's probably number 1 is you didn't take the time to know that some other that the rest of the church already has a texting system. And rather than bother trying to figure that one out or to get added or onboarded or whatever. You just went and created your own. Or Yeah. You know what I mean? Like, you didn't wanna work through the proper channels. You didn't wanna take the time or ignorance.
I mean, that'd be another that'd be another issue. It's just like lack of communication. You didn't know that there was a texting system, so you rather than taking the time to ask, you just did it yourself. That's almost like to me, I think that's like second level down on the primary plane Because the reason they don't know is because, again, it's like circular logic. Because they're siloed, they don't
know what's going on over here. The reason they don't know what's going on over here is because the upper level leadership is not in place. There is no system. There's no organization for knowing what are we doing together as a church, which is that's our primary solution to siloed ministries is kinda unified ministries. What unifies ministries? Mission and vision first. And then a leadership pipeline second. We'll we'll get into the details. Yeah. Yeah. So a lack of
accountability for definitely. I think that you might be right. I think that's probably number 1 on the list. It's just, you know, if you as a ministry leader don't know who you are accountable to, and maybe even worse than that and often happens is you do know who you're accountable to, but that person never holds you accountable. Yeah. There's you don't have any interaction. To anybody. Yeah. You're not not
really accountable. You're not really accountable. Yeah. And so you you just you just do you've never been given boundaries, positive or like, you you don't know. You just you just do stuff. And so you you're trying to run the ministry because you were told that you're in charge, but you don't really know what you're doing, and you don't know what you should should and should, you know, what resources are, aren't available to you outside of maybe what your budget is to
spend. And, and so you just were like, well, I'm just gonna go. I'm just gonna do my own thing. And then you get mad. You know, when, when when things aren't communicated or aren't announced, or you can't get something in the bulletin or whatever. But you were never told, like, how do things get put in the bulletin? Who decides, you know, is there a, an actual plan for that? Or is it just who who's, you know, on the secretary's good side,
who the the whoever makes the bullet? Do you know what I'm saying? Yeah. Right. Just maybe there is no system. Maybe it isn't that isn't communicated. There just isn't one. Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, you know, going back to these foundational things of mission and vision, and those are in kind of 2 different lanes. I mean, establishing mission in the church is necessary and good based on the great commission, especially. But that, still, we have to have a system in place to even communicate that
to our team, to all of our ministry leaders. One of the big questions that we get frequently going through our strategic envisioning, strategic planning process, is we establish mission for the church, and then the ministry leaders are like, so we need to do that then? We need to create a mission statement for our ministry? And that's a hard no. That that just feeds into
siloed ministries. The mission of the church is the mission of the church, not not some ethereal thing outside of actual functional ministry. It is that is what unifies us. We're all doing this together, but then getting more specific is when we start talking vision. Like, what what are the actual things that we're gonna be working towards together? So these two elements are primary in unifying all across all ministries of the church and beginning to defeat the siloed mentality.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So let's dive into this solution a little bit more. It it it starts, as you said, with unified direction, and, you know, I've I've worked with a lot of churches that the it's usually the youth ministry, you know, because they got some young gun in there who
has their own purpose statement or mission statement. They've got their own vision or their own systems and kind of corralling those guys and gals and going, no, we're going to have a church mission statement and you're going to fall under that. And, and it goes beyond that to shared systems and good communication, and holding people accountable. You also need to be able to say no to things when you have answers to
questions, when stuff comes up. I do think that a lot of times, you know, we're afraid of saying no to a leader and losing the volunteer. So we just let them do whatever they want because we're afraid of losing that volunteer. But that's not really good because it just contributes to these silos, and no one really knows. The number of times we go into a church for strategic envisioning, A.J., and, we're we're kind of mapping out all the ministries. And how
have you ever had this situation? I'm sure you have. Where they just start asking around the room. Hey. Does anybody know what this thing is? What is this ministry? What does it do? You know, they're supposed to be evaluating it, but no one in the room even knows what it is. Yeah. You know, usually the pastor will go, oh, oh, oh, Jim Smith runs that ministry. He's been doing it for 15 years. And then normally what comes after that sentence, A.J. is we're just, we're not gonna
touch it. You know, Jim's been doing that for 15 years. He does his thing. Mhmm. We let him do what he wants to do. We're not gonna tell him no. And I'm like, what? What is going on? This is crazy. Totally. Yeah. I mean and yeah. So kinda think about how does that play out? I mean, I just just mentioned having a leadership pipeline in process for this. So, yeah, when this there's a thing that somebody's leading, but and we're dealing with a room full of leaders,
ministry leaders in the church. And so what what is happening here is we've got the highest level leaders in the church, and not one of them has oversight responsibility over that individual that's leading another ministry. So that That's right. That person, that outlier, isn't at the level that they should have been included in this strategic planning work, and none of the people that should be included have oversight over that individual. This is a broken area in the church. That's right.
And so what happens is we create these rogue ministries unintentionally. And but what else are they supposed to do? If you if you don't have a clear pipeline and a clear structure where every ministry leader knows to whom they are accountable. And that that should cover a 100% of people in the church. Even your senior level board, they are accountable to one another, at least. I mean, there is not one person, not one volunteer, not one staff person in your church who doesn't have another person
to whom they are accountable. But what happens is that isn't clearly mapped out, and so you have it is why we have these problems, A.J., with women's ministry. You you can have, I'm not trying to call out well, I kind of am calling out women's ministry. They do a lot of good work, so I'm not calling them out in that sense. But I'm calling them out in the sense that they really do operate almost like their own subsidiary of the church, usually totally insulated from everything. And it's not
I don't think that's I really don't think that's good. I don't think that's healthy, for them to essentially function almost like a parachurch organization within the within the church itself. Yeah. Right. Right. And we've even you know, you and I, I know, have leaned more into this in in a lot of the last year whenever we're working with churches is we we don't even let anybody get away with saying women's ministry and leaving it that. You know, we work we work with post it notes. We write down
ministries, and there's a post it note that says women's ministry on it. We don't let anybody get away with that anymore because it's not one thing. It's always 6 or more things. And and sometimes less frequently, but still sometimes on the men's ministry side. But, you know, I mean, I call these ministry buckets. It's a it's a bucket with a name on it, but inside the bucket is packed all kinds of other things. And if we don't unpack those things, we
don't really have a clear view of what's happening in the church. And Yeah. Sure. You know, what ministries are we really doing? Who is affected by these? Who's leading them? Who are they accountable to? If in if anyone, are they effective ministries? So, so, yeah, we you you can't hide that anymore. If you're dealing with the Malvers Group, you're not there's no hiding spots for ministries anymore. Yeah. And and yeah. And and it would be good. So, you know, you could have bible studies.
Those should be grouped together with all of the other bible studies. You know, you could have these fellowship events. Well, those should be maybe clustered together with all of the other fellowship events. It's another type of a fellowship event rather than it being it's this own, you know, again, sort of para church organization within the church itself. It's not good. So, alright. So when it comes to the solution, so far we have said we need
a clear mission and vision that's shared. We need language shared language around that. We've said we need clear structure, so we need to know who is accountable to whom, and there shouldn't be anybody who doesn't know to whom they are accountable. I'd also just say shared systems. So, you know, understanding how budget things get worked out, understanding communication systems, inter ministry communication systems, as well as external communication systems, and then having good systems
meetings themselves are a system. So how often do we meet and when do we meet and what do those meetings look like and how are they structured? And we can't tell you, we can't be prescriptive on that, in a general sense because it's gonna depend, you know, if it's a large church with multi staff, you know, we're gonna drill down on those staff meetings. If it's a smaller church where it's just a solo pastor type situation, that's gonna probably look a little bit
different. But having a good meeting system culture where you have the ability to communicate and propagate things this is why we have such a prescriptive approach on the strategic envisioning process for the implementation meetings, because we know that if we don't get the communication right in the implementation process, it's just not gonna work. Yeah. The wheels fall off. Yeah. Totally. And then you wonder, like, oh, did we waste our
time? Did we waste our money? Mhmm. And to some degree, the answer to that is yes. I mean, if we if we can't if we can't implement stuff, then what does it matter that we developed a new mission statement if we can't actually live it out? Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Yep. Yeah. Planning planning, communication. These are just hallmarks of of a good, approach in a healthy church That everybody is just aware of what everybody else is doing. We know we know what
our major goals are. We know what our specific goals are at the ministry level and at the volunteer level. And, and we're able to hold each other accountable. We're able to evaluate our effectiveness. We're able to make, strategic and tactical changes along the way that help enhance the overall success of the church.
Yeah. I mean, can't stress enough, you know, the strategic planning process and the leadership pipeline structure, being key to, eliminating siloed ministries and finding overall church health and success. Yeah. Which is a great segue to kind of an action step that that you can take if you're listening to this. You still have you still have access to the Church Check-up Challenge between now and the end of the month of January when that's when this is being released.
Be released on the, what, the 22nd this episode will. So you got, yeah, 9 days left. Got a little bit of time. And in the Church Check-up Challenge, we actually guide you through multiple audits to help you figure out, are we clear on our mission language? Are we clear on our vision language? Are we clear on how our ministries are connected to one another? Are we clear on how our leadership systems work? So all of this stuff is stuff that we go through.
I I made this comment, I think, either last week or the week before. I almost feel a little bit like we give a ton away in terms of the strategic envisioning components, not the workshops. It's it'd be a lot to get done in 7 days, but, this really will help you both figure out, do we have silos and also help you think through, where we need to put in some work to address these silos if you have them. So it's totally free. No no credit card required. Go
to malphursgroup.com/challenge. To sign up for that, you get 7 days of the challenge, which is like a course. But also in that is the, you get access to the Healthy Churches toolkit, which has a ton of stuff in there as well. So Yeah. Absolutely. We're gonna give you an email. We're gonna send you an email every day with a little reminder so that you can do those just a few minutes a day on the challenge.
But it's really gonna be eye opening for the current state of your church's ministries, and begin to give you this this, holistic view of how all of these components work together to build a healthy church. And then while you're there in the toolkit, honestly, you're not gonna be able to get through everything that would fix your whole church in 7 days, but you can at least get an overview. I mean, click in there and check out all of the training content on strategic envisioning, the training
content on leadership pipeline. It's gonna you're gonna be able to see, in a healthy board. Yeah. If that's a problem or yeah. Yeah. Totally. And then, you know what? If you want to, get that get that subscription. We've priced it to be affordable for churches of any size so that you can stay in there, have access to all that content along with all of our coaching, that'll be provided
for you there too so that your church can get healthy. So definitely go to malphorsgroup.com/challenge and sign up for the Church Check-up Challenge, ending at the end of January. So don't don't delay. That's right. Alright. This has been episode 274 of the church revitalization podcast. Go to malphorsgroup.com/274 to read today's full show notes and article. Share it with a friend. Like, subscribe, smash the notification bell. I I we haven't said that in a while.
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