Two things to think about:
1. If you lead a church that has a high turnover rate on staff, you may be the problem.
2. If you work at a church that has a high turnover rate on staff, you should polish your resume. Your time is coming.
Addendum
My recent rant about churches firing without warning and without a legitimate reason has received an unexpected amount of response. About 20,000 people read the post and almost 3,000 liked it on Facebook. That is a tsunami compared to the response my posts normally generate. There is obviously a lot of emotion around this topic. I have also receive numerous private message from people with open wounds from their interactions with churches. This breaks my heart.
I’m afraid in my haste writing the post I gave the wrong impression about a few things. Let me follow up on some areas where I might have been misunderstood:
1. I love the church. I work for a church, and I coach pastors all over the country. Although church leaders make terrible decisions and fire people in awful ways, I will not give up on the local church. I have had bad doctors, but I never gave up on medicine. If you have been hurt, please do not give up on the church.
2. I believe there are legitimate reasons to fire a staff member. If you consistently lie, cheat or steal, you should be fired. If you don’t keep your word, if you have sexual interactions with people you are not married to, if you repeatedly bring division in the church, you should be fired.
3. While being on staff is similar to being in a family, it’s not the same. You are not paid to be in your family, you are paid to work for a church. If you don’t do the job you are paid to do, the church has just cause to stop paying you.
4. No matter why someone is fired, it should never come as a surprise.
5. If you have been hurt by a church, you need to meet with a wise counselor. Time does not heal all wounds, time by itself just creates scars.
I promise this will be my last post on churches firing people for a long, long time. I think my next post will be about kittens and bunnies and adorable baby seals. Surely we can all agree on adorable mammals. And seals.
