 Okay. Good morning. Welcome everybody to this class VC310 on church and ministry administration. We're going to have two hours today and learn some good things. Let's pray and then we will get started. May I request somebody just to lead us in prayer and then we can start. Anybody can pray? Alright. Go ahead Charles. I think you're going to pray. Dear Heavenly Father, we thank you so much. Again, that you are allowing us to meet, to study your work. We thank you that because you chose us, we can take it for granted that we are doing this. Therefore, Lord, as you promised in Ezekiel, that you are giving us a heart of flesh. Lord, you pray that you will give us a heart that is able to be permeable enough to absorb the information that you want us to study. Pray for our Lechchala that you will bless him, give him the right words and the Holy Spirit's action that you'll be able to deliver what you wanted him to do and that even those that are yet to join that you'll be able to join a prayer for connectivity for internet and everything, batteries and gadgets that they will be charged will be able to study when Jesus name we brand believe. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Thank you. Thank you everyone for joining the class today. I'm just going to quickly review what we talked about last week as we continue in this journey on learning about church and ministry administration. So what we said in the very beginning is that God is a God of order organization and so we are actually following God and we organize when we do things properly and if we combine the spiritual ministry that we are all called to do with good administration, good organization, then we will be more effective in serving people. We can serve people well. And so with that we began our journey. We started talking last week about the first step which is to form a legal entity for your ministry or a church so that from a civil or a government perspective we should be clear. So it shouldn't be that we are doing things that be legally not entitled to do. So it's always good whenever you're ready when you're about to start your ministry and get things going, whether it's a local church or whether it's some other type of Christian ministry to form a legal entity in your country, give it a name and so then you can do things properly legally and of course the government backs you up when you are a legal entity or you have certain privileges in the country or in the place where you're operating. There were some things I just wanted to finish up from that chapter which we will do now and then move forward from there. So I'm sharing that chapter 3. Now church trust, the word trust actually it's what we call it in India but in other countries you may be using a different word. For example in the US they talk about a non-profit organization or religious non-profit but here we call it trust or religious trust. So either you, it's important to form this legal entity. We talked about it last week and when you form a legal entity you need your initial core group of members, they would be the founding members or the trustees or the office bearers or the board of directors or directors, whatever different places they call it different but you need to select people who are aligned to your vision. The articles of incorporation or what we call as trust deed basically gives what this legal entity is about and what can be done and what cannot be done. And what I suggested was that try to make it as broad in scope as possible because even though initially when you start out you may be starting out with just one area of work and ministry. You should be able to grow in the years to come. You should be able to add many different kinds of ministries to what you're doing. So try to keep it broad so that in the future when you want to start something under that same name or under that same legal entity you should have the freedom to start. Now of course when you form a legal entity we also need to follow the government regulations. What are the regulatory filings are in your country or in your city? You need to do that. And annually they will usually tell you to file your income report. So all the funds that came in you file it you show where the money came from and how much money came and where it went. And if you are having staff then you would most places you would have to deduct income tax. If you're paying them salaries you pay that tax to the government so you show them that you're doing those regulatory filings. So these kinds of things. Now usually if you engage a chartered accountant they will handle all of this for you. An accounting firm as part of your, you hire them for their service they will take care of all this for you and make sure everything is good. But the point is when you form a legal entity there are obviously regulations, government regulations that we must follow. The last thing I just want to point out is that in addition to the office bearers, the directors the people who are legally named on that entity people on the board you could also have additionally and I'm not saying this is necessary but I'm just giving this as a suggestion you could also have an additional advisory board or a group of people who are advisors they're not legally responsible for the organization because their names are not on the legal entity but they can provide guidance to the people who are responsible. So you call them an advisory board or advisors or board of advisors and so on. So that's something you know it would be nice to have if possible. Now when we started APC for a long time we didn't have an advisory board. One reason was I mean we were very small nobody bothered about us you know we were just unknown. But then later on I think just a couple of years ago a few years ago you know when we kind of were more or less established and there were more people settled as part of the church and intentionally I chose to have people who were from within the church as opposed to from outside the church so you know there are pros and cons to do that some churches or organizations would have an advisory board of people from outside the church and I've heard of very large organizations who would have members in the advisory board who would be from different parts of the world because they're a global organization I mean you have people like that on the advisory board of course they can give you input that is very global in nature but then you need to have access to those kinds of people. So now but what I chose to do a few years ago was to you know once we had some good people settled within the church to pick out a few people from them and invite them to be part of the advisory board just to you know we just go to them on an as needed basis it's not that you know they always have them because they're all busy people it's not that they always have to attend meetings they won't have that kind of time but you go to them as and when needed for some guidance on specific areas so that's the purpose of the advisory board they're there to you know give you input, give you that guidance so there are people who are good in their particular area of expertise so you can benefit from them and what so we have what is called as trustees these are the people who are legally responsible for the entity now what we chose to do here at APC is that the trustees would be pastoral part of the pastoral team now this again a choice we made I'm not saying it should be necessary the reason is the trustees are people who are going to actually you know be a little closer to guiding the organization so we because we are a church we wanted them to give input that is you know spiritual in nature or you know because we are a church so the trustees would hold spiritual, moral and legal responsibility the advisory board again which I mentioned was only done some years ago recently the way we thought of bringing this together is to have about eight people people who come from who have expertise in certain areas legal, accounting, organization development Christian missions or social work technology, operations the creative side, media outside and somebody who is in touch with current trends or from a counseling perspective urban life perspective so we said okay you know here are these eight areas where we definitely from time to time would need different kinds of inputs so if you have these kinds of people around us we could go to them they could give us input and also the other thing was we wanted to balance experience with being in touch with new developments so we wanted some people who are over 45 so they bring experience especially matters that require that kind of experience and we also needed younger people because they would be in touch with what's really happening and so you know this is how we've set up so we don't have like a group meeting all the time but as needed we go to different people for specific inputs so when we need legal we go there so that person would give us legal advice when we need accounting information so these are people available and we go to them for inputs as and when we need as we are progressing they are there to help us and give us inputs and guide us and so on so this is how we structure it you know and I think we can do a lot more here in trustees and advisory board but this is how we have done and you know you in your local church in your Christian ministry you could you know think of what works for you now just to give a side thought there are pros and cons of having people from outside your church or ministry when you have people from outside the advantage is they can bring a very different perspective they can bring in new ideas and thoughts it is that they may not be in touch with what is actually happening and where the church or the ministry is actually going and so sometimes their inputs could be very disconnected from the reality of what's going on or sometimes you know by the time they are able to understand what is happening for them to understand what is happening takes a lot of time and effort so that they are not able to really meaningfully give inputs to what is happening so there are pros and cons in having people from within the church or outside the church there are benefits advantages and disadvantages and so you can decide what works best for you in your given context okay so let me take questions maybe somebody had some questions okay Charles go ahead you have a question I don't know whether I didn't see it but I was looking at the number 8 what happens when it comes to the issue of voting and they are tying they are four and they tie so how is it handled an odd number of help that was my maybe I didn't see the numbering but it was 8 and I was like what yeah good question so remember there is a difference between the trustees or the directors and the advisory board the advisory board serves more to give you input or advice based on their expertise and their knowledge so they are not involved in the voting process or deciding process they would give you input so once they give input then the trustees or that is the legally on the organization the other ones would make the decision based on the input they receive so that the trustees is good for them for that to be an odd number because the other ones are going to make a decision and sometimes you have to vote on something and you have to have people with expertise in different areas who can give you input as and when you need so the advisory board is 8 I just identified 8 areas where we could have we would benefit from having input and we go to these people so that is why it is not necessary for that to be odd number so for example right now we are busy we started this project maybe in 2018 and then of course during the pandemic everything came to a pause now we are back in it looking for land where we want to build mainly for upper bible college campus church hall and all the other facilities so we formed a team from within the church but we also have an external person who advises us so in fact he has been with us throughout the journey and he actually was served with the government for his entire career and he was specially involved in urban development and all this kind of land all those kinds of things with the government so he is our advisor so we go to him and only if he says ok do we go forward so he is our advisor he is helping us in this whole journey we are benefiting from his experience and of course he has access to the government information so he can help us and guide us in this whole process so that is how the advisory board can help the organization as they journey any other questions when is it appropriate to review the advisory board so I would say we give each one a time of two years we ask them for a commitment of two years and after that if they want to step down it is fine and if they want to if they are ok to continue that is also great so usually we keep it like a two year window where if somebody wants to step down they can step down and if somebody wants to continue they can continue so we just kind of leave it flexible but then every two years you get a chance to you know you bring in new people and you replace others so you have the option to do it so two years is a good 10 year is that ok Elisha yes Pasta ok thank you Christopher go ahead yes Pasta I have two questions one is in regards to this the church the spiritual aspect of the way it reaches out to the congregation spiritually and how that sort of balances off with the the way the trustees govern the church and are there any challenges in that and maybe you can talk through your experience and the second one is about the church itself is it considered to be a charity organization and how that is structured around providing financial assistance for example as a charity organization versus trying to build the church in a particular city or across the country good questions so the first question I think it's very important for the trustees that is the office bearers the people who are legally responsible for that Christian church or Christian ministry for them to be spiritually motivated because the local church or the Christian ministry is primarily a spiritual ministry so if the trustees are not aligned spiritually with what the church is supposed to be doing or the Christian ministry is supposed to be doing they can be a real clash and then the trustees could actually become a hindrance to the spiritual ministry that is supposed to happen or if there is conflict among the office bearers the legal directors themselves if there is conflict there it is going to affect the kind of ministry, spiritual ministry that will happen sooner or later it will become visible so that's very important there has to be alignment so that's why what we have done at APC is the pastoral team many of them are also the trustees in fact all our trustees are also involved in the ministry of the church so that way there is a sink there is a connection between any kind of decision which is more administrative, organizational, legal there is a sink with the decisions that are made organizationally and with what has to happen spiritually to serve the people so that's the reason we have intentionally kept it that way and hopefully it will continue that way that all the trustees are also involved in the ministry of the church so of the five trustees three are part of the pastoral team and one is heading up one area of ministry and the other one is part of the church and so on and all of them of course they also need to be organizationally sound that means they all come from a professional background so that's a big blessing that means they are blending both spiritual and the professional, organizational aspect and that's a big blessing but I have seen in organizations where somebody who is on the trust as an office where I was a director who is just a professional in the sense that they are believers but they are not very spiritually inclined then what happens, the decisions that are being made are so disconnected from what the ministry needs to have and is requires what people require and it actually disrupts the ministry and I'm thinking of one huge wonderful ministry that was here in India I saw before my own eyes how the ministry had expanded wonderfully it was under a good leadership, an elderly person, a spiritual person and the ministry had grown all over India he was a little elderly, older so he stepped down and the ministry was handed to somebody else who this person was more interested in I guess his own interests so things went off in a different direction and so then he was forced to step down and then handed it off to somebody who was purely I would say an organization person he had no connect with the needs of the people what the ministry had done and so on and right before my eyes I saw this organization which was at one point was all across India within a matter of one or two years everything was gone so today what was once a beautiful work being done all across India has just come down to almost nothing it's very sad, I don't know how they're going to rebuild or how it's going to come back again but this is what I saw and I heard people tell me from that organization because I knew we used to work I heard them say he doesn't understand, he doesn't know what's happening and he's making decisions that are actually hurting the people so that's the danger there so that's in response to your first question now the second question which is how do you balance charity work with building the organization so that I think will vary from organization to organization depending on what their focus is so for example the local church APC as a local church, so APC as a local church we are a religious organization and we have certain focus areas that is of course planting of churches spiritual equipped people plus our focus would be to equip people for the ministry that happens to the Bible college and our focus would be to support missions work, so these are the focus areas so we are not into feeding the hungry so much, that sort of main area where we are not hungry or giving to what we would consider charitable causes because the focus is here, but we do give so we do, instead of us doing it directly we would give to somebody, some other ministry who is doing that kind of work so we would give to somebody who is an organization that is caring for feeding children or doing rural development or caring for or doing rehab kind of work, so we don't do that directly but what we do is we give to them to help them do the work which they are doing but we stay on our main areas which is to equip people in the word of God and the spirit and church planting and Bible college training and missions, those focus areas another organization may be completely devoted to let's feed the poor or let's help people who are in the slums, so the answer to that question would be what is the organization really focused on? because that's how they will generally use their financial resources so I hope I answered both your questions Any thoughts? Is it okay? Just one really quick follow up question you had mentioned about this number 5 so I think that kind of list back to Charles's question about having a hot number in case of any sort of a vote just also to understand because in some organizations or even councils, I think the UN actually has something like something called a veto power where they can actually stop a particular activity to happen and they have that power to not have some action to take place and I think currently right now I think for example the UN they just have 5 countries that can actually have that veto power, so does that exist in this kind of structure of the trustees and I mean not for APC but for some of the high structures has that always worked well in favor of the senior pastors in that church Interesting, we don't have that at APC like so we don't, no trustee has been given a veto power and I have not heard of such a thing in the Christian ministry circles now generally speaking the senior pastor the main senior pastor's visionary so he would present what he has and hopefully there is a consensus in the decision making and what's going forward, there may be of course discussions like we often have when we have to make important decisions, all the trustees would share their ideas and we try to put everything together and take the best ideas and then go forward with it so that's how it has happened so the vision or the idea may come from the senior pastor and then it goes forward or sometimes from a pastoral side the day to day decisions or the short term which are not of big impact are just driven by the senior pastor and that happens so in that sense the senior pastor is a visionary and he leads and he makes decisions and so on and the trustees hopefully those decisions are more of a consensus or coming together but I have not heard of anyone being given veto power that I think would be very dangerous in a Christian ministry setting it's always better to have checks and balances and even if the senior pastor wants to go and do something especially if it's something huge and it's significant ramifications it's good that the other trustees also are in line with it and otherwise if there's something dangerous they should alert and say don't do it so I think it's good to have those checks and balances Elisha how do you remunerate trustees and advisory board members are completely voluntary so they don't they're not paid they just go to them for advice so that's one thing but if any of the advisory board members are working for the church in some capacity they get paid for the work but just as an advisory board member that's just a voluntary thing they just go to them for example our legal person he's a lawyer so if you're just asking for some advice he'll just share his ideas but then we want him to do some work for us meaning some legal work for us to between the trust and the getting some paper filing and all that we have to pay him or his organization for doing that work so the advisory board role is purely voluntary but when any of them are doing an actual work for us they get paid for it based on their actual professional fees the trustees who are staff so out of the five trustees one to yeah only two are also a staff of the church so the two get paid a salary as staff the other three are not paid they are like voluntary because they have their own job outside they're doing their own work outside professional work and their trustees but they're involved voluntarily with the ministry of the church so if any of the trustees are staff that means full time paid staff then they get paid like everybody else otherwise they are voluntary so you can have a combination of the two okay Pesta thank you very much okay all right good enjoy your questions okay so I'm going to proceed to the next chapter if you have any questions at any time feel free to ask so I'm going to go to the next chapter which is building up on what we've done so far so once you've got your legal entity and your trustees that is your office bearers, your advisory board next thing chapter four is to think of an organization structure for your church and ministry now obviously this is going to evolve over time you know it's very rare that you would be able to start off with the structure in place for example at ABC when we started we you know we didn't have any staff that means I was as a pastor the founding pastor in those years I was not paid by the church I was more like a volunteer pastor because I was I was running my own business so my financial finances were coming to me through my business but I was the pastor of the church and everybody really small so 20 people everybody was just you know doing things so there was no staff actual paid people were paid and so on and I was just one person we would just do things but then slowly we added one person and that one person was actually paid by the company and he was handling some of the administrative work of the church actually a few years later so I would say maybe almost three or four years later and I don't exactly remember but I think it's about three or four years later that we actually started bringing or having full time staff in the church so we had like an administrator we had a youth pastor and so on and then a children's church pastor and so on so we started slowly adding people that when we could you know when we had that need and when we found the right people we slowly started having paid staff for the church but that came three or four years later and almost 14, 13, 14 years later from the time we started I joined full time with the church so that whole period I was not a staff of the church I was just serving leading the organization but not a staff and then about in 2014 is when I moved and I became a staff of the church so the point I want to say is this that the structure evolved over time the organization structure in our case now some people may have a lot of money in the very beginning and they may be able to put a structure in place if that happens well and good but in most cases I would imagine that the structure will restart with nothing and then slowly over time you put in an organization structure right so that is more likely the reality that it will happen over time but it is important for us to understand that as the church and as the ministry grows you need to have an organization structure and that's what you want to talk about in this chapter right so by organizational structure organization structure what we mean is you have a clearly defined set of activities that means you can call it functions or roles or responsibilities that you assign to people and a flow information flow which is who makes decision making the process of how things are going to happen so both the activities and the flow of information within the organization should be clearly defined so that you know whatever the organization is supposed to be doing they are able to do it well ok so the organization structure is very very important so what happens generally in Christian ministry is that there is no clearly defined organizational structure sometimes it's just one pastor who does everything and everybody just goes to him for everything and it's like you know they just make it happen from Sunday to Sunday or from meeting to meeting somehow it all comes together and it's like the pastor is the event manager he used everything you know for the organization and that's not a good way to work because the pastor can get worn out very easily and also the dependence on the pastor is too much you know so it's always good to create a structure where things can happen and things can flow like like they say like a well oiled machine think about that now there are different types of organizational structures there could be a structure that's functional in nature that means that is based on various functions example worship team children's church or ministry functions or even administrative type of functions accounting media IT so on so you could have you can create your structure based on these functions or you can have something that's more divisional you know or multi-division so the divisions could be geographic like you could say you divide your country your city your country whatever north south east west and you create you know the northern region team for the southern region so on so forth you could do division like that or you can do division based on department type divisions you know a specific ministry this is a ministry that is geared towards children this is the ministry that's geared towards adults and so on so that those could be divisions or departments in your organization so you could have a structure that's around functions you could have a structure that's around divisions could be different things whether it's demographic or geographic or the kind of service that's being provided the ministry it's being provided or you could have completely flat you know that is everybody's in the same level almost they may be leaders but then more or less it's flat and then you just organize around the work that needs to be done tasks so people are working very fluid or you could have a matrix a matrix is a combination of functional and division so you kind of mix the two that's called a matrix so initially when we started we of course you know began with certain functions like I said it's pastor there was a children's church pastor there was an administrator and then as the functions increased we had more people come in then later on we started doing by division north south east west so now we have more of a matrix structure that has functions and divisions and people kind of also work across that so the matrix structure allows people to kind of move between functions and divisions so example we have a worship team but the worship team is functional but it's also moving across north south east west so on so people move across our division so to speak so it's a matrix structure so there is people moving around but then people the challenge in the matrix structure is people should be very clear whom they report to whom they're going to be answerable to so a worship people in the worship team they are answerable to the worship pastor while but at the same time when they go to a particular location that they go to the north church they're also answerable to the associate pastor at the north church so it's kind of like a dual accountability that means they're ultimately accountable to the worship pastor but when they go and serve at a location that is north they are accountable that in that service they have to flow with the location pastor there right so it's dual accountability but things are very clear who they are finally responsible to right so you can decide and as your ministry as your church is growing you can begin to decide what structure would work best for you and we will get into the details a little later on I will explain it but before we get into the practical side you know I just want to point us to some places in scripture that really inspire us when it comes to organizational structure and design and I've just put a set of passages from the the ministry of King David it's quite amazing how you know David is you know like the Bible says he was a man of God's own heart he was a psalmist, the sweet psalmist of Israel he wrote so many psalms, he was a prophet he spoke concerning the Messiah and of course he was a king and so it's wonderful David was a very deeply spiritual person but yet when it came to administration he was amazing I wanted to actually read some of these scriptures you know if you turn with me to 1 Chronicles 23 we just read the first six verses here then go for a break 1 Chronicles 23 can somebody read 1 Chronicles 26 1 Chronicles 23 1-6 please so when David was old and full of days he made his son Solomon king over Israel and he gathered together all the leaders of Israel with the priests and the Levites now the Levites were numbered from the age of 30 years and above and the number of individual males was 38,000 only 4,000 were to look after the work of the house of the Lord 6,000 were officers and judges 4,000 were gatekeepers and 4,000 praised the Lord with musical instruments which I made said David for giving praise also David divided them into divisions among the sons of Levi Gershon, Kohath and Merari thank you so just think about it now we've just read the first six verses but just think about what David is doing so really he's setting up this this was before Solomon built the temple so at that time there's only a tabernacle which means a tent like structure where people would come to you know worship and sacrifice to God think about what you know how David is organizing this he's got 38,000 38,000 men who are Levites now these are Levites means they're going to serve in the temple they're going to help the priests so he's not talking about the priests he's talking about the Levites they're going to help around with the tabernacle 38,000 men can you imagine 38,000 people serving in a particular local church but that's what's you know that's what's kind of happening here so in this tabernacle in Jerusalem where David is building this thing he's got 38,000 helpers then he actually breaks them down into groups so he's got 24,000 look after the work of the house of the Lord 6,000 were officers and judges more like you would call them as line managers or you know people to make sure things are going fine then he's got gatekeepers 4,000 gatekeepers and then he's got 4,000 musicians so he has organized them 38,000 people he's broken them down into different teams what we would call as teams he says you guys you take care of just all the arrangements in the temple you guys are like the leaders who are going to oversee you guys are the gatekeepers you make sure who's coming in who's going out the flow of traffic take care of that we're going to make sure that there is praise and worship going on in the tabernacle it's quite fascinating this is Old Testament David has not been to any management school he's not got any organizational structure draining nothing like that but he has organized the tabernacle just the administrative side how things should run in the tabernacle let me pause here we will just come back to this after the break think about this we'll go for a quick break we'll come back in 10 minutes and continue thank you