June 18, 2015

From Secretary to Administrator

A few weeks ago, I finally got caught up on compiling the time-sheets our church’s parish administrator fills out every week. I know it doesn’t sound like much, nor does it sound very exciting, but it’s all part of a larger shift we’ve been at work on at St. George’s, Valley Lee. I wonder if it’s a shift happening elsewhere in the church. And, if so, I wonder where we’re going with this.

When I was called as rector, now nearly eight years ago, this congregation had only recently celebrated the end of the ministry of a part-time secretary. She was a parishioner, and she had had the job for about ten years. Prior to 1997, that is, they’d never had a secretary or anyone in the office. That was the rector’s job. He produced the bulletins and the vestry, for the most part, ran the business of the parish.

With her departure, and during the leadership of an interim priest, they decided they needed someone in the office. There was no one in the congregation they could hire. Looking back, actually, that was a good thing, and an inadvertent beginning of our current policy that parishioners cannot be employees and vice versa. They went to a local temp agency and had a string of employees, some good, some not so great.

When I came to St. George's, the last of the temps resigned, and we had the opportunity – though I didn’t necessarily see it as such, coming as it did in the first two weeks of my ministry – to work with the vestry and hire a church secretary. We put together a modest job description and were fortunate to interview and hire our current parish administrator.

Over the past eight years, as I’ve grown into my ministry and position, she, too, has grown into hers. By her service and leadership, in fact, she’s helped us change the position from secretary to parish administrator. The church where I served previously as curate had a full-time administrator, and she functioned very much like one; such was my first lesson in the significant gulf between those congregations who’ve long had administrators/secretaries and those who only recently have. In the interview phase at St. George’s, eight years ago, I asked the vestry whether we should have been advertising for a parish administrator, but they all said no. One member of the vestry at the time said that I, as rector, was technically the parish administrator.

At St. George’s, we currently have a very high-functioning parish administrator and, over time, her office hours and compensation have increased, mostly because she has created a notably vibrant and effective ministry. It’s also because the general aging of the church, itself, means that a lot more things lay leaders used to do – and do well – are being dropped and handed off to lay employees and clergy.

Which is what brings us back to the beginning of this post, specifically the time I spent compiling her time sheets and figuring out where we are, now halfway through this year. We used to say she’d work 20.5 hours/week. This year, however, we increased her hours, but we stipulated that she’d work “no more than 25 hours per week on average.” Given that she needs more time to function as an administrator and given that more and more people are quick to hand off to her their previous duties, the danger could be that the church, as employer, will fail to honor our side of the commitment and will keep asking for more and more. The “25 hours/week on average” allows her to do a lot more work off site, or on her own time, or when the office is not technically open. For that very reason, we’ve also reduced significantly the official office hours; now the office is only, again technically, open twelve hours in a given week. That means she has 13 other hours in which she can work remotely or work in the office without the need to play receptionist and/or secretary and/or general greeter.

I suspect that no matter how many hours we add to her schedule, and no matter how great the compensation becomes, the church, in general, is going to struggle, and struggle for a long time, with what exactly the role of the person in the office is. I think we’ve successfully moved away from the secretary/greeter model; St. George’s, Valley Lee is one example of a small(er) congregation which has done that successfully. But even the parish administrator model doesn’t have as much clarity as it once did, and there is much work the church needs to do to help move forward this conversation.

There’s still much we need to do in this area, and perhaps it’s evolutionary work more than revolutionary. It’s a good thing, for instance, that the Church Pension Group is encouraging us to consider parity in terms of financial compensation and benefits for our lay employees. But I’m not entirely sure that that conversation – money, benefits, job descriptions – will get us all the way there. I think it’s going to come from a grassroots movement of congregations and congregational leaders, both lay and ordained, willing to think outside the box and do the next big thing, together.