staff hiring

One of the biggest decisions a church will make is in the selection of staff.
The first important decision will be what is the proper order of staff hires? Do I add a youth Pastor, or a small groups Pastor?, etc. I have found that there is no hard and fast rule. They are all important, but since funding is always limited you need to determine which staff position is MOST strategic for the big picture of your church's vision. For us, It was me and a part-time worship guy until we reached about 200 in attendance. Everyone else was a volunteer. Even the secretarial duties at that point were all volunteers. We then added a very part-time children's person, and then we hired a full time Associate Pastor position (which basically was someone who did everything that I couldn't or didn't want to do. We hired a part-time position for a couple of other things after that. When we reached about 400 hundred we began to be more intentional about hiring because we began to grow extremely fast. Right now we average about 1200 people on Sundays and we have a pretty lean staff. We are going to add 2-3 more staff positions by the end of the year. I will try to talk more about hiring tomorrow.