Every church minister is ordained with a certain set of skills acquired through the seminary courses s/he completed and the practical education s/he experienced in a local church setting. One thing I have come to understand is the way congregations can value clergy who are good administrators. When I was in seminary and then out serving congregations as an ordained minister I would never have thoughts about administration skills as important to the effectiveness of a ministry. But a very gifted minister who cannot be efficient with her/his time, cannot complete basic tasks and fails to enter important data in church records is not a minister who will be serving her/his congregation well. And over time these churches being served will see this reality and it could become a problem down the road.
Conversely, clergy who may lack a certain sparkle or polish or genius in their skill sets but who offer strong administration skills can, over time, become much appreciated, even loved, by their churches. Administration skills are not fun or dynamic or even deeply interesting but they offer to the church a way to apply the resources available to people in a most efficient and thoughtful way. If clergy return correspondence that tells the caller or the emailer or the letter writer that they matter, specifically that they matter to the church, the minister, and in a rather existential way, God. Further, helping to run the day to day functions of the church in an efficient manner frees up time and other resources to be spent on the hands on ministry people do enjoy. An example is a church that keeps the administration of a church humming like a well-oiled machine and thus frees the clergy, support staff and lay leaders up to offer programs, support and leadership to the church in surprising and life-giving ways. I have also seen churches that do administration poorly or in a hap-hazard way, the result being a mad scramble to address every report that is overdue, every basic task that is undone, work that goes undone causing others to feel little confidence in the church as an institution. As a practical matter people do not offer their time, their talent or their treasure to any institution that appears to be in perpetual chaos.
This awareness of the importance of administration and its application to the life of an institution applies far more broadly than churches. Almost everyone in their vocation has some part of it that can be described as administration. I think all of us can “up our game” when it comes to administration requirements. I once had a colleague describe me as someone who excelled in “knuckle-head” skills. By that he meant that I am always attuned to the tasks that are on the horizon, looking ahead and planning to accomplish tasks in a way that reduced that chaotic scramble when one is trying to do things at the last minute. One observation I would make about “stress” is that often it is less about workload and more about the person in question who procrastinates on tasks and when an unexpected tasks falls from the sky it can produce deep stress as the person needs to do things s/he could/should have done weeks before and now has to deal with something s/he did not expect. There is a certain point where that surprising tasks needs to be factored in as a constant and thus the necessity to get one’s tasks done in a timely manner.
But despite my skill at “knuckle-headed” tasks I am not in any way interested in the polish or details of said tasks. A Board member I work with in the secular world once said to me, “you know how to do polish and attend to details, you just don’t value them or care about them.” This adds another layer of frustration to those who work with me because unlike co-workers who just can’t do polish and details they know I can but don’t. That can leave a bad taste. In my defense I do think I know my audience, and in the world of church the polish and detail are NOT a priority. But in other vocations I recognize that my indifference to small details and polish might be problematic.
As an example very few of my colleagues would be driven to write a daily blog, post all sermons and have bulletin drafts completed 12 days early. But it will not surprise any reader of this blog to know I write these reflections without ever proof reading or looking over the text before I press the send button. We are all differently gifted and differently challenged, are we not?