Effective Church Administration (with Jamie Dunlop)

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0:00:00 – (Jamie Dunlop): You need to think about the elders vision. Their leadership is spiritual and spiritual leadership will involve administrative leadership. You don’t want to create two different bodies of power within the congregation. The elders lead and administration should follow.

0:00:25 – (Matt Smethurst): Welcome back friends, to the Everyday Pastor, a podcast on the nuts and bolts of ministry from the Gospel Coalition. I’m Matt Smethurs.

0:00:32 – (Ligon Duncan): And I’m Lig Duncan.

0:00:33 – (Matt Smethurst): I serve here as a pastor in Richmond, Virginia. Two hours north of me in our nation’s capital is a brother and friend of both ligs and mine, Jamie Dunlop. Jamie is an associate pastor at Capitol Hill Baptist church in Washington, D.C. where he oversees administration and adult education as well as several nonprofits based at the church. He’s the author of several really helpful books, the Compelling Community, Love the ones who drive you crazy, Budgeting for a healthy Church and more.

0:01:05 – (Matt Smethurst): And today we wanted to talk with Jamie, in light of his nearly 20 years of experience in church administration, about this topic. Jamie, thank you for coming onto the podcast.

0:01:17 – (Jamie Dunlop): Oh, it’s a delight. Thank you so much.

0:01:19 – (Matt Smethurst): As I alluded to, we want to talk with you about something that causes many pastors, many everyday pastors, to resign, and that is church administration. Admin is important for a healthy church, but it tends to creep in and kind of crowd out other important work if it’s handled in a merely reactive way. So we really want you to help everyday pastors listening in think creatively and efficiently about effective church admin.

0:01:49 – (Matt Smethurst): So Jamie, can you just start by describing a biblical foundation for good church administration? Why is this a spiritually important conversation to have?

0:02:01 – (Jamie Dunlop): Yeah, I think the passage I would go to most quickly is Acts, chapter six, because I think you see the spiritual goals for administration well laid out there. People, I think are familiar with this passage. It’s really one of the first instances of conflict within the church. We see after the church in Jerusalem was founded, there’s a complaint by the Greek speaking widows, so they would have been Jews, but Greek speaking, that they were being neglected in what it says is a daily distribution.

0:02:36 – (Jamie Dunlop): So some kind of benevolence that they were doing this is probably a majority Hebrew speaking or Aramaic speaking congregation. So you’re looking at a natural fault line. We know from contemporary historians that these two groups had lots of challenges getting along. There were political differences, cultural differences, linguistics differences. And so the apostles say, you know, gosh, this is a really big deal.

0:03:09 – (Jamie Dunlop): And it says they call the full number of disciples. So you’ve got a members meeting here that presumably includes every single Christian on the planet.

0:03:19 – (Matt Smethurst): It’s history’s first megachurch and history’s first members meeting.

0:03:23 – (Jamie Dunlop): There you go. Yes. Yeah. Maybe 5,000. Maybe just 5,000 men, not including women and children. So a large group here. And it’s interesting, the apostles don’t solve the problem. They don’t say, hey, here’s the problem, here’s what we’re going to do about it. They don’t even tell the congregation who’s going to solve the problem, what. All they do is they give the congregation the number of people who will solve the problem.

0:03:49 – (Jamie Dunlop): They say, pick out from among you seven men of good repute, full of the spirit and of wisdom, whom we will appoint to this duty. And the congregation does that. It’s interesting how much there’s a unity problem in the church. And the apostles put the problem back in the lap of the church because they say we need to devote ourselves to the prayer and the ministry of the Word. We don’t want to be distracted from our job as the apostles, I think, are essentially serving as elders in the church, though everything’s kind of the primordial soup of the early church. So you don’t want to be too definitive on who’s serving in what role.

0:04:26 – (Jamie Dunlop): But what that means is that the first deacons who were selected by the congregation were there to serve as protectors of unity in the church through good administration. And they were there to protect not just the unity of the church, but the teaching of the apostles. And so very much, I think it’s a good way to think about administration. Good administration of the church has spiritual benefit, and its spiritual benefit is to protect the unity of the church along whatever natural fault lines your church may have, and to protect the teachers of the church from being distracted from the important ministry they have as ministers of the Word.

0:05:10 – (Jamie Dunlop): And one thing I love About Acts Chapter 6 is how you see success in both of those realms. So why seven deacons? I’ve got to assume it’s simply because it’s a nice number. It’s an odd number, which means that the apostles were depriving the church of the most obvious solution to the problem, which is a balanced committee of Hellenists and Hebrew deacons, they say you got to figure out who’s in the majority.

0:05:38 – (Jamie Dunlop): And when you look at the seven names that Luke gives us, and Luke is very careful in the material he chooses, it’s interesting and notable that the seven are Greek names, which doesn’t mean they were all Hellenists, but it seems likely that this majority Hebrew church so valued unity that they entrusted their widows to the Hellenist minority to say, we do think that our unity on Christ is of preeminent importance.

0:06:11 – (Jamie Dunlop): And I love how Luke describes the outcome. He says, and the word of God continued to increase and the number of disciples multiplied greatly in Jerusalem. He gives credit to the Word, which is again, the second goal of these deacons, unity and the word that they’re protecting. And so you see success in both those areas. So if I were to say, okay, what’s the spiritual goal of administration? It is to protect the teaching of the Word and to protect the unity of the church, which should be shaped by the teaching of the Word.

0:06:45 – (Jamie Dunlop): So you think about, you know, protecting the church as a mirror of God’s perfect, unified character and as a messenger of the Gospel.

0:06:53 – (Matt Smethurst): That’s good. Mirror and messenger. And of course, administration is also listed as a spiritual gift in Paul’s list in 1 Corinthians 12:28. There’s an article Trent Hunter wrote years ago at TGC called the Spiritual gift. You don’t notice until it’s gone. He does a good job of comparing church administrative work to being like an orchestra. He says an orchestra without a conductor, a building site without an architect’s plans, and an airfield without an air traffic controller.

0:07:32 – (Matt Smethurst): That’s the church without administration. And, Jamie, you’ve already spoken about deacons. It also reminds me of what Peter says in First Peter 4, where he talks about First Peter 4, 10 and following as each has received a gift, use it to serve one another as good stewards of God’s varied grace. And then he says, whoever speaks as one who speaks, oracles of God, whoever serves as one who serves by the strength God supplies. So gifts of speaking, gifts of serving, which don’t exactly map onto elder like gifts and deacon like gifts, but they also kind of do.

0:08:16 – (Matt Smethurst): Lig and I have talked before about how Jesus was described as being mighty in both word and deed, and how he continues to minister mightily in word and deed through the respective offices of elder and deacon. So I think you’ve well established the administrative. The administrative capacity and importance of deacons. But a lot of pastors, when they think about church administration, they’re thinking actually about a pastoral role, what’s often called an executive pastor. So how would you encourage churches to think about hiring pastoral staff for administrative work?

0:09:00 – (Jamie Dunlop): Well, I am the executive pastor at my church. The elders wanted to make the name of my position. I asked them not to. So for all executive pastors out there, I don’t want to offend you, but I think for my Congregation that was going to give the sense that I was the one to execute the vision of the elders. And that’s not my job. You know, Ephesians chapter four. I remember Lig your wonderful talk at T4G quite some time on this passage that our job as elders is to equip the saints for works of service.

0:09:35 – (Jamie Dunlop): They execute the vision not of ours, but of the Holy Spirit that we see in Scripture. And so I want to whatever stand on the executive pastor. I want them to understand I’m a facilitator, I’m not the executor. And you know, a church’s need for an executive pastor varies tremendously, both based on its size and based on the type of ministry it has. Some churches have lots of programs and you need a full time pastor just to kind of be the chief operating officer of the church.

0:10:06 – (Jamie Dunlop): My church doesn’t have as many programs and so my administrative jobs as a pastor is actually pretty low. When things are going normally, I spend probably 15% of my time on admin because our deacons do so much and so much of the ministry of this church is more relational than programmatic in nature. And yet I do think it’s helpful that one of your elders be administratively minded. And I do. As you said, it’s a spiritual gift.

0:10:37 – (Jamie Dunlop): You know, that whole section 1 Corinthians on spiritual gifts finishes at the end of chapter 14 says, but all things should be done decently and in order. That helps you understand why administration is a spiritual gift, because order in the congregation is honor into God.

0:10:53 – (Ligon Duncan): And I also think it’s hard to know exactly all the Dynamics of Acts 6. The apostles don’t say we don’t have administrative gifts. Therefore let’s get guys that do. They do say, if we were to take the time to do this, we would neglect the things that God has called us to do. So these things are important enough that there need to be people that are spending time on that to translate that into the area of church administration.

0:11:27 – (Ligon Duncan): It’s certainly true that a pastor does not have time, especially in a multi staff setting, to do the things that need to be done administratively. But it also may be true that he does not have the gifting to do that. I’m thinking right now of a man that was tremendously used in my wife’s life. I think she looks at him as an older brother in the faith in the way that he spiritually invested in her as a pastor.

0:12:00 – (Ligon Duncan): But administratively he was a disaster. And I think he knew it. He knew that I am not good at this. But there were people on staff at that church that could do it. And so I do think there are some people that have more administrative gifting now. It is something, I mean, there’s a part of delegation is administration, right? So the apostles are actually showing a lot of wisdom and administrative gifting in delegating to that sort of proto diaconal body there in Acts, chapter six.

0:12:37 – (Ligon Duncan): So there is that, but there are people that are really good at it. And I think the very fact that you’re an elder, you’re a staff pastor, you’re on the same theological wavelength, you’re committed to the same vision, and you’re doing in the administrative, that’s huge because so many pastors experience people who have administrative authority that are not on the same wavelength with the eldership, with the pastors of the congregation.

0:13:10 – (Ligon Duncan): And there’s this power thing going on between them. I have a friend who was just terrorized, but they did not have an executive pastor. They had a church administrator. And that church administrator was the czar of that congregation. And I could tell you horror story after horror story where the people that are in control of the administrative functioning of the church are not on the same spiritual wavelength with those who have been given spiritual authority in the congregation. And it results in God.

0:13:47 – (Ligon Duncan): Great difficulties. I’m thinking right now of one of the most famous evangelical ministers in Christendom in the last half of the 20th century. And the trustees of his congregation that had administrative authority wouldn’t even put heating in his office in a northern city. And so he would go into his office in two overcoats, freezing, because he had administrators that didn’t care about him the way that they should have. And so it’s a real blessing to have somebody that has that administrative responsibility that’s on the same wavelength with the elders and the pastors of the church and is simply trying to, as Matt was just saying, serve the ministry of the congregation by administration.

0:14:37 – (Ligon Duncan): That’s a huge gift. And I’ve been blessed with that in my own life. People that were really gifted in that area, and it just makes everything better.

0:14:46 – (Matt Smethurst): Yeah. Jamie, what are some practical tips you would give for how a church can assess whether its current structures are serving people well and what are some maybe systems that you think every healthy church should have in place, regardless of size?

0:15:03 – (Jamie Dunlop): Well, some church structures are, I think, in the scriptures, obviously, different Christians are going to disagree over, you know, what things are normative and what things are more descriptive.

0:15:20 – (Matt Smethurst): Jamie and I don’t disagree. So who are you Referring to.

0:15:24 – (Jamie Dunlop): That’s right, our Presbyterian brother.

0:15:26 – (Ligon Duncan): My guess, everything with us, my guess is at the local church level, we’re going to be pretty close.

0:15:31 – (Matt Smethurst): Probably not.

0:15:33 – (Ligon Duncan): There may be some semantic differences and slight differences in emphasis, but especially in my tradition, because we believe that the property of the congregation, the material resources of the congregation, belongs to the congregation. Functionally, my kind of Presbyterian and your kind of Baptist are going to operate in a super, super similar way at the local church level.

0:15:59 – (Jamie Dunlop): That’s true. And the point there is begin with the Scriptures, because you don’t have an empty whiteboard. When you think about church structures, Lord has already, you know, put a lot of stuff on that whiteboard and you want to start there. And then as you, as you think about, you know, how well you’re, you know, the stuff you’re right on the whiteboard is serving you, I would think about that.

0:16:21 – (Matt Smethurst): Well, Jamie, before you go there, can you just spell out what God has written on that whiteboard? I assume you mean, for example, the office of deacon or what other things do you have in mind when you say that there are biblical church structures?

0:16:34 – (Jamie Dunlop): Yeah, I would think the offices of the church. So if you’re one of those churches that thinks you have a wonderful kind of workaround, that you have created your own offices so you don’t have to have the ones in Scripture, I would implore you to take what the Lord gave you. Elders with the qualifications that we see in Scripture, deacons with the qualifications we see in Scripture. Those are normative. We know they’re normative because we have qualifications laid out in the epistles.

0:17:03 – (Jamie Dunlop): And just because you don’t like some of those qualifications doesn’t mean that you have the privilege of kind of creating your own offices. So the offices are certainly there. The structures of membership, church discipline that we See in Matthew 18 are part of the administrative structure of the church that we want to pay close attention to.

0:17:22 – (Matt Smethurst): And just note, I would say here I go where angels fear to tread in criticizing committees, there can be a place for committees. I want to be clear about that. Although it’s been said committees are where minutes are kept and hours are lost. Just note that committees are not a biblical category. The Bible prescribes two offices for the local church. Elder and deacon and flower committee. Don’t forget that third office and flower committee.

0:17:57 – (Matt Smethurst): There we go.

0:18:00 – (Jamie Dunlop): Sorry.

0:18:01 – (Matt Smethurst): Continue, Jamie.

0:18:01 – (Jamie Dunlop): Yeah, so in my church, we have committees. They serve the elders, but the elders lead. And I think that’s what you see in Scripture. I think another kind of section that’s already colored on the whiteboard the financial principles that you see in places like 2 Corinthians 8 and 9, first Timothy chapter 5, for how we should take care of money in the church. So those would be a few examples. How do you evaluate all the other stuff you’ve built?

0:18:31 – (Jamie Dunlop): I would take Ephesians 4. Do we see that the structures we built are enabling the teachers of the church to equip the saints for work of ministry? Sometimes we build structures that actually help the church to abdicate their responsibilities. Sometimes we build structures that complicate the church’s ability to. To take care of the needs of the church. And then I think Acts Chapter six, you know, is the trellis of the church, so to speak, serving the unity of the church, and is it protecting the teaching of the church?

0:19:08 – (Jamie Dunlop): I’m sure we could come up with more if we thought about it longer. But those two passages, I think, are a good biblical scorecard for how well those structures are serving the church. And you asked, what should every church have, regardless of size? I would think benevolence. That’s obviously the first administrative structure that we see in the Jerusalem church. It’s interesting. Deacons administrate in Acts chapter 6, and yet in 1 Timothy 5, you see instructions given to Timothy, the pastor, the elder, on who qualifies for that widow’s list. I think if you put those two together, it’s a great example of how elders and deacons work together and how you see responsibilities given to each one of them.

0:20:01 – (Jamie Dunlop): And I think the other thing that every church has to think about structurally is financial accountability. So, you know, when Paul is talking about his goals for the collection made for the poor saints in Judea, he says he wants to raise the money. And I’m paraphrasing here, but in a way that is right, not only in the sight of God, but also in the sight of man. And we want to do the same thing. We want to make sure that there is no question but that money is handled with integrity in our churches.

0:20:35 – (Jamie Dunlop): So I would pull benevolence and financial accountability as two things that every church, no matter their size, needs to consider structurally. You want to add more, either of you?

0:20:48 – (Ligon Duncan): No, I think that’s good. Again, it’s a good habit in this area to go to the Scriptures and look at what the Bible says about handling money responsibly in general, and then make sure and extract from that general principle of the word how we’re to operate in the life of the local congregation. And there’s a lot there. The Bible just has a lot of wisdom about how we’re to handle resources.

0:21:15 – (Matt Smethurst): Lig how did you see effective church administration accelerate the spiritual ministry of the church at first? Pres.

0:21:24 – (Ligon Duncan): Well, one thing was there were so many things I did not have to worry about. So because, for instance, there was a good administrative process on budgeting, I didn’t have to come in and help them create something ex nihilo. It was already there. And it meant as pastor in the budget process, really the only time I had to come in and speak about the process with a group of elders or deacons that were working on the budget was to talk about what our personnel needed.

0:22:02 – (Ligon Duncan): Do we need to increase what we’re paying those that are serving us in the church? And then what are my recommendations in the area of benevolence and mission and church planning? They wanted my input in there. I wasn’t a czar. I was one of the elders speaking to my fellow elders about that. But they genuinely wanted my opinion. And so there was an enormous relief on my part that that wasn’t on my shoulders to come up with.

0:22:32 – (Ligon Duncan): They viewed that this is our obligation. We wanna know what the pastor thinks. We want to present this in a way that the budget is balanced, that the budget is reasonable, that the way we’re deploying our resources is wise. We want his input, but this isn’t on his shoulders to come up with by himself. That was incredible. And they were on board with what we were trying to do in the ministry. There wasn’t somebody in administration that was trying to fight what the rest of the elders wanted. And that’s what sometimes can happen in a church. You can have somebody that feels a little taste of power in administration, and they can decide that they are unilaterally going to frustrate what the elders, together with the congregation, have decided.

0:23:17 – (Ligon Duncan): This is the direction we’re going here, and that’s a curse. But having somebody that facilitates that vision and makes sure that it’s done decently in order, 1 Corinthians 14, that it’s done in a manner of good stewardship. Another principle in First Corinthians, that’s a blessing, because that person is thinking about details that I might forget because I’m up at 30,000ft. I’m looking at the big picture, that there’s little foxes can spoil the vine. Another biblical principle there. So this person is thinking about now, what might happen here? What might happen here? What’s the best way to handle this?

0:23:59 – (Ligon Duncan): So that the vision of the elders in the congregation can be furthered. And that’s a huge blessing. And thankfully, I’ve had that everywhere I’ve been. But I’ve had plenty of friends in ministry that didn’t have that. And when they were able to move from not having that to having that, it made their ministry happier. They didn’t feel like they were having an internecine warfare going on inside the leadership of the church.

0:24:28 – (Ligon Duncan): It alleviated fears. Oh, no. What happens if what we’ve agreed upon as an eldership and in a congregation is undermined by this person in administration who thinks that he has the unilateral right to determine how we’re gonna do these things? It’s just an enormous blessing to have a competent person who exercises authority not for the sake of being our overlord, but for the sake of being the servant of all the brothers and the fellow elders.

0:25:04 – (Ligon Duncan): So it’s a joy, and it’s been a joy for me. Now, having come to the seminary, it has more become my obligation to present a good budget to my board. And I kind of miss the way it was in the local church where it was more on the elders and deacons to do that. And I was just one of the fellow elders in that. So pastors enjoy that in a good environment. And then if you don’t have that good environment, by God’s grace, just like you would work to see the people sanctified in other areas, work to see the system sanctified in that area.

0:25:44 – (Jamie Dunlop): If I could add one detail to Ling’s comment about internecine warfare in the congregation. You know, elders in scripture are overseers, and that’s a word with administrative connotations. An overseer was the manager of, you know, that first century household. And so what that means is that administrative leadership is going to come from the elders, not from a business office. A business office could be helpful to the elders, but you need to think about the elder, the elders vision, their leadership is spiritual, and spiritual leadership will involve administrative leadership.

0:26:21 – (Jamie Dunlop): You don’t want to create two different bodies of power within the congregation. The elders lead and administration should follow.

0:26:31 – (Matt Smethurst): I joked at the outset of the episode about church administration leading some pastors to want to resign. But in many cases, it’s really not a joke. I mean, pastors get into the ministry for other things because they have a heart for other things. And then they just end up feeling like all I do is respond to emails and look at financial spreadsheets and try to get enough volunteers for children’s ministry this coming Sunday.

0:27:01 – (Matt Smethurst): So especially to pastors, maybe of smaller churches, who just feel alone, kind of disorganized, unequipped for the administrative side of ministry. What advice would you give them and their leadership teams? Jamie?

0:27:17 – (Jamie Dunlop): Deacons. Deacons. Deacons. I know a pastor in Richmond who wrote a great book on deacons that someone could look at called Deacons by Matt Smethurst.

0:27:30 – (Matt Smethurst): What a title. Doesn’t make it fly off the shelf.

0:27:34 – (Jamie Dunlop): What a blessing our deacons are. We, like you recommend in your book, Matt, have structured our diaconate different than some churches have some churches, the diaconate is 100% focused on benevolence. We have some deacons focused on benevolence, but we have deacons who address different areas of work in the church. So deacons of children’s ministry, deacons of youth ministry, deacons of student ministry, deacons even of parking, because we have 850 people.

0:28:04 – (Jamie Dunlop): Well, we’ve got more than that. We have 1100 people here on a Sunday in a parking lot that fits 45 cars. And so we have unity problems in how we use parking. So we have a deacon at parking who addresses it. But because each of our deacons is focused on an area of ministry that could be a unity problem in the church, they understand, like the deacons of Acts 6, that their foremost goal is not efficiency, but it is excellence in protecting unity.

0:28:35 – (Jamie Dunlop): They protect the pastors in such wonderful ways. So if I were to give any recommendation to those who are thinking, how can I as a pastor, not spend as much time thinking about administration? I would say equip your deacons. We also have term limits on deacons, so you can serve for three years and you’re done. And I think that allows deacons to give themselves more wholeheartedly to the ministry that they’re engaged in, rather than feeling like I have to make this sustainable for the rest of my life.

0:29:07 – (Jamie Dunlop): But I love our deacons. We’re so well served by our deacons. And there are so many things I see other churches of our size having to hire staff to do that. Our deacons do wonderfully. And that serves the pastors so well.

0:29:20 – (Matt Smethurst): That’s a good word. And, Jamie, you mentioned earlier how elders lead ministry. Deacons facilitate ministry, but the congregation does ministry. And whether we’re talking about a deacon or an administrative pastor, they are essentially helping the trains to run on time. Well, they’re laying the railroad track so that the train can run. They’re helping the trains to run on time, often in ways that are hidden and behind the scenes.

0:29:50 – (Matt Smethurst): I liken administrative staff and deacons to a congregation’s special ops force who are often carrying out unseen tasks with fortitude and joy. And a church is impoverished without them and is deeply indebted to them when they carry out those tasks with cheerfulness and with, as you said, excellence. I’d love to end just by hearing from you, Jamie, any ways, as you reflect on the last 20 years at Capitol Hill Baptist, that you have seen faithful administration, any other ways beyond what you’ve already said, that you’ve seen faithful administrative work bear spiritual fruit in the life of the church?

0:30:35 – (Jamie Dunlop): Well, I think one advantage of having one elder who is thinking especially carefully about administration is that he’s going to have pastoral goals in mind. And I think one benefit of having a job like mine in the church, you know, an administrative pastor, is that I am always on the lookout for. For administration to serve pastoral spiritual purposes. And I do think that having an elder in that role has helped protect us from some of the natural tensions between efficiency and excellence that many organizations run into.

0:31:14 – (Jamie Dunlop): I think that good administration has helped the congregation be more faithful in their giving because they have confidence that there’s competence behind the scenes. At the same time, one of my roles as the administrative pastor is decide how excellent are we going to be if you visit my church, I think we have a beautiful church building and the basement still needs a little bit of work. And that’s because every year, instead of dumping our budget into renovations, we invest in church planting and we do missions work and we train pastors.

0:31:53 – (Jamie Dunlop): And I very much want the congregation to feel the importance of both of those things, the worth of our building, but also the worthiness of spending money outside of who we are as a congregation. And that’s, again, part of the role of administration is deciding what level of excellence is going to be faithful as a congregation as we consider all the different trade offs that we have.

0:32:18 – (Matt Smethurst): That’s wonderful. L. Any final words from you?

0:32:22 – (Ligon Duncan): Just that there is no pastor that can be unconcerned about good administration in the local church. Some of us have more help in that area than others. We need to acknowledge that if we’re in a situation with very little help in that area, then we need to be telling our brothers and sisters in that local congregation about the need that we have for help in that area. And then there are resources. I mean, that’s why we’re having this conversation right now.

0:32:52 – (Ligon Duncan): There are resources outside of our local congregation that can actually help our local congregation grow in this area. Good administration is actually going to help Grow trust in the congregation. Just like Jamie was talking about, having somebody paying attention to parking actually serves church unity. Good administration helps grow trust. And trust is the most precious commodity in an institution. So if we’re in a hundred member church in Paducah or we’re in an 850 member church in Washington D.C. good administration matters. And if we don’t know how to do it ourselves, and we don’t have that gift ourselves, God will probably have put someone in our midst who can help us there. And if he hasn’t, there will be brothers and sisters around us in like minded churches that can help us give us wisdom. This might be the opportunity to bring somebody in like Jamie to talk to your leadership about that. It’ll give them a vision and I guarantee you the folks who are businessmen that are part of your congregation, they will appreciate how important this is.

0:34:03 – (Ligon Duncan): This is important to their lives in wherever they’re serving and so they will instinctively understand why we need to do this well in the church. And it’ll just help build trust.

0:34:16 – (Matt Smethurst): Jamie, you mentioned my deacons book which was kind of you, but are there any other resources on church administration? I actually don’t think I’m aware of a great book on church administration, but I may just be ignorant.

0:34:29 – (Jamie Dunlop): There’s a number of books that are, I think very comprehensive in all the details of church administration. But I think I’m still waiting to see a great book to give sort of that biblical vision for administration. Maybe someone listening can find me at the church and tell me the book I haven’t read yet. I’d love to hear it.

0:34:49 – (Matt Smethurst): Well, maybe it could be the book you haven’t written yet or someone else.

0:34:53 – (Jamie Dunlop): That is a competent writer.

0:34:56 – (Ligon Duncan): I need to get you Jamie, together with my brother. My brother is an elder in his congregation and he’s in charge of administration. So he’s not a pastor of administration, but he is an elder of administration and he’s thought a lot about this as well. And my guess is you all would really click in how you think administration ought to be done in a local congregation. That would serve a lot of evangelical churches to have that kind of a resource.

0:35:22 – (Jamie Dunlop): So maybe this interview will spawn a book somewhere somehow to help us think better about administration.

0:35:27 – (Matt Smethurst): Look at this. Big things can come from just a few everyday pastors talking. Speaking of which, thank you listeners for tuning in to the everyday pastor. We hope it’s been encouraging to you Jamie. Thanks for being with us. We’d encourage you listeners to check out Jamie’s various books, the compelling community. Love the ones who drive you crazy. Budgeting for a Healthy Church and more. Maybe even a forthcoming title on effective church administration.

0:35:54 – (Matt Smethurst): We’ll see. But please do share this episode with a friend so so that we can continue helping pastors find fresh joy in the work of ministry.