Book Review: Effective Staffing for Vital Churches

As Grace Fellowship Church grows and plans for the future I am eager to read outside my normal diet of books and authors in order to harvest wisdom where it can be found. That is what led me to take a look at Bill Easum and Bell Tenny-Brittian’s new work.

In my mind the most helpful chapter was the sixteenth of the seventeen included. That chapter on Staffing Basics gave some good advice. There were a few other nuggets sprinkled here and there throughout the book, but not as much as I had hoped.

The major flaw of the work was a theological one. That error was stated in various ways throughout:

“No matter what size it is, the number one reason a church plateaus or declines s because of staffing issues.”

Sigh. And here I thought it might have something to do with the sovereignty of God and whether or not the Word of God is ably preached.

At a foundational level, this is just another book that operates under the false assumption that Big=blessed and that the way to get Big is to manage well. For a far more helpful paradigm under which to understand church, read David Wells’ No Place for Truth.

(This book was provided courtesy of Graf-Martin Communications and BakerBooks in exchange for an honest review.)