by Ken Morgan | May 12, 2026 | Uncategorized
The idea of tinkering with church structure gets a bad rap: and it’s not entirely undeserved. I’ve watched denominations burn eye-watering sums of money paying consultant to advise on rearranging the organizational furniture. The dust settles with a whole load of new roles and organisational charts, and a nagging sense that the organisation is still doing the same stuff, making the same mistakes and facing the same challenges. You can’t fix cultural problems with structural solutions. I’ve heard cynical consultants say, “If you can’t figure out a decent strategy, announce a restructure – it will buy you at least two years of having the appearance of knowing what you’re doing. Yet structure matters – a lot. In my last article I spoke about growth barriers – size-points where churches seem to get stuck. More often than not it’s a case of the church having reached the elastic limit of its leadership structure, which is indissolubly linked to the leadership style of the senior minister. Issues like delegation of authority and responsibility, supervision and accountability all depend on well-functioning structures to work effectively – and those structures need to be tailored to the size and life-stage of the church. Mismatch these and you may get paralysis, chaos, demagoguery or death-by-bureaucracy. When talking over structure with church leaders, I employ a some generalized principles about structure relative to congregational size. The simplest is the ratio of full-time equivalent pastoral staff to average weekend congregational attendance. In general, this is around 1:80 to maintain stability, and a little ‘richer’ to enable growth. Another is the number of staff strata needed to sustain churches in...
