Field of Church Administration

However a church might be organized, the concern of church administration is with the mutual relationships of the members with one another, with the corporate church, and with the world in which the church is placed to minister. It is likely that the total church member group is the most neglected administrative unit among the entire scheme of church groups. New emphasis is being placed upon this total unit. The emphasis is needed and deserved. Much of it is coming through the church’s program of pastoral ministries. The church is the field for church administration.

Administrative Work in a Church

Broadly speaking, it is valid to include as church administration all the administrative work in a church. Not all of what occurs in the groups is administrative. Certainly there should be more than administration going on in and through the church’s groups, or the administration is indeed poor. Good administration exists to help ensure that ministry will be per-formed according to some orderly design to reach certain needed and desired goals. Church administration is more than moving about among the groups of a church’s administrative structure. It is more than dealing with the organizations, though the organizations are involved.

Church Administration as Functional Areas

To study the field of church administration in terms of functional areas seems more appropriate than to study it in terms of organizations. There are certain functional areas in which the administrative leader must function, regardless of the forms or organizations chosen to implement the action. A functional area of church administration is a part of the field in which leaders perform certain administrative actions which are natural, characteristic, and essential to the life of the organism, the church. A function is a natural, characteristic action which is essential to the life of the organism. In church administration a function is an administrative action and is performed in a functional area.

Functional Areas Together Comprise the Field of Church Administration

These are the functional areas which comprise the field of church administration:

Purpose

Objectives

Program (or Ministry Plan)

Organization

Human Resources

Physical Resources

Financial Resources

Control

Church Leaders Lead in Functional Areas

In these working territories church leaders perform certain administrative actions or functions. The common thread which weaves through all the administrative functions is that the nature of the functions is leading. Not all administration and leading are synonymous, but all administration is related to leading, if it is good administration. An administrator employs certain skills, techniques, and knowledge working in the privacy of his or her own thoughts and singular efforts. But one does not become an administrator until one has related in a leadership way to the church or to a part of the church. One administers in relation to persons, not things. The work of the administrator is principally leading and guiding persons.

The Administrator Performs Certain Basic Skills in Particular Functional Areas

The administrator leads and guides persons by performing certain basic skills in the particular functional areas indicated. He leads in planning, initiating, organizing, delegating, directing, motivating, supervising, performing, influencing, control-ling, evaluating, communicating, and representing. An administrator sometimes might exercise all of the basic skills in a single functional area of administration.

Logic and Sequence in the Functional Areas

Completeness, logic, and sequence are apparent in the order of the functional areas when applied to a given instance of use. In beginning an enterprise, given one or more leaders plus persons with whom leaders are to work, a leader leads the co-workers to consider the functional areas in the order presented here. First, they consider their purpose and objectives. Once these are discovered and determined, they develop a program (or ministry plan) the implementation of which is to move them toward fulfilling their purpose and objectives. The program or ministry plan has implications for designing the organizational pattern or patterns needed. When the organizational design is completed, leaders then know the scope of the task of maximizing human resources to staff the structure. People (human resources) often require physical resources. These must be provided. Human resources and physical re-sources generally call to mind financial resources. These are to be provided and husbanded. And in all of these functional areas there must be control. Control must be maintained to assure that the financial resources will be used appropriately to provide the physical resources for the human resources who staff the organization designed to implement the program or ministry plan. The leader leads down the list of functional areas while planning. He leads up the list in implementing the plans. The action would flow as in the chart.

Purpose

Objectives

Program (Ministry Plan)

Organization

Human Resources

Physical Resources

Financial Resources

Controls

There is Dynamic Movement Among the Functional Areas

Completeness, logic, and sequence should be apparent in this “framework” of administration. But in operation there is dynamic movement among the functional areas. Church leaders do not complete their work in each functional area and then move on to the next functional area, never to return to an area previously considered. Feasibility concerns might surface as leaders survey avail-able human, physical, or financial resources. Insurmountable the list to alter the organization pattern, the program plan, or even the objectives and purpose. Leaders might “yo-yo” up, down, and around the order of the functional areas, now functioning in one, then in another. Occasionally they might be concerned with several functional areas related to various interests at the same time. Even so, the direction of the sequence, both in planning and implementing, serves as a base to which leaders may go to resume their movement.

The List of Functional Areas Provides as Orderly Checklist Administrators use the orderly list of functional areas as a checklist to determine whether they are giving attention to all the major functional areas involved in a given enterprise or endeavor. The framework can be useful when applied to al-most any situation, from planning and implementing a Sunday School picnic to administering the most serious and sophisticated enterprise. Some have contemplated its use in analyzing and ordering the direction of their individual lives and families.

Variety of the List of Functional Areas

1. Ideas, people, and things: There are some dissimilarities on the list of functional areas. Some functional areas have to do with ideas, or even ideals, more than with persons per se. The area of purpose and objectives is an example of the preponderantly idealogical functional area. Human resources is an area that is clearly personal. Physical resources is just as clearly the area of things. The administrator is aware that the eventual concern in all the areas is persons. It is vital to distinguish between persons and things, lest one make the error of treating persons as things. The leader is always an enabler, an equipper of persons. They are the focus of ministry.

2. Ends and means: There are ends and there are means on the list of functional areas. Ends are those items of ultimate . value toward which the church strives and works. Means are the tools and techniques by which the church moves toward ends. Purposes and objectives are areas which qualify as ends.

Program or ministry plan, organization, physical resources, financial resources, and control are means to be used in reaching ends. Persons (who are part of the area of human resources) are not means in any insensitive way, though it is by means of persons that the church does its work under Christ. The training of persons is a part of human resources as an area, and training is a means. Some leaders have erred in their leadership through a confusion of ends and means. They have made ends of that which should be means and vice versa. Neither program nor ministry plan, nor organization, nor physical resources, nor financial resources, nor control is worthy to become an end in itself. Administrators who either operate or appear to operate with-out discernment between ends and means produce undesirable and unchristian consequences, the hurt of which lingers almost infinitely. They suffer from end-means inversion. They risk what Albert Einstein phrased in characterizing this age, “a perfection of means and a confusion of goals.” Such confusion is a threatening hazard which portends ill to the administrator who is its victim or its perpetrator, and to the cause of Christ and His church. This inversion has no place in church administration.