Anne Jackson is the blog author of FlowerDust.net. She serves on the staff of Cross Point Church in Nashville, Tennessee and has a book coming out next year on overcoming burnout titled, Mad Church Disease. Yesterday she posted the following post about the laziness of church staff members:
“the reason a lot of people choose to work on a church staff is because they’re too lazy or too afraid to get a job in the real world.”
wow. that was pretty harsh. i didn’t mean for it to come out so bluntly.
so at the lunch table with some friends, i backpedaled just a little bit and added,
“of course, that’s a very broad statement…not everyone who works in a church is afraid or lazy…i’m just saying there are a lot of people who take jobs in churches because a church can be a really easy place to work.”
emphasis on can be.
My reaction? SHOCK! On so many levels. First, I've been on the church staff here at Crossroads since 2004 and I have NEVER WORKED SO HARD IN MY LIFE! To put that statement into perspective, I spent my entire pre-ministry life (28 years) as someone self-employed. When you're self-employed, if you don't work you don't eat. With that in mind I say again - working at Crossroads is tough work. I'm not complaining or anything... love the work... love the challenge... but long hours, short nights, sacrificed weekends, stressful conversations, great expectations, high energy, and sometimes conflicting agendas all create a job you have to love or you won't survive.
I'm also shocked because I have assumed that my church staff experience is true of other churches too. But most every commenter (there's 84 comments so far) has AGREED with Anne. This includes Bill Hybels of Willow Creek, who is quoted to say:
There are a lot of Christ-followers who haven’t taken the time to figure out what their holy discontent is, and so they’re doing a gradual slide into apathy and complacency—and that is unconscionable in a broken and lost world.
Unconscionable for both employee AND EMPLOYER. It's one thing for an individual staff member to "slide into apathy and complacency," but it's another thing for the staff leader to allow that to happen and not stop the slide! That's why we have annual performance reviews. It's why we set goals for each staffer and why we check the goals on a regular basis. If there are church staffers out there gradually sliding into laziness, there also must be staff supervisors not caring or courageous enough to take correct action to stop the slide.
Too lazy or too afraid to get a job in the "real" world? Not in my world!
