How can male senior pastors have better relationships with the women on their ministry teams, where everyone shares complementarian convictions.
In those contexts - there are stories around that suggesting that relationships between some senior pastors and the women on the teams have been strained and have sometimes broken down completely.
There’s been massive cost to the individual, the team, the churches and to gospel work.
Clare Deeves has just completed her PhD, studying working relationships between women employed in complementarian ministry teams and the senior pastor who they work with.
Clare serves as an Assistant minister at Kallaroo Anglican Church in Perth. And lectures in church history at Trinity Theological College Perth.
--
Become a regular financial supporter of The Pastor's Heart via Patreon.
How can male senior pastors have better relationships with the women on their ministry teams, where everyone shares complementarian convictions.
In those contexts - there are stories around that suggesting that relationships between some senior pastors and the women on the teams have been strained and have sometimes broken down completely.
There’s been massive cost to the individual, the team, the churches and to gospel work.
Clare Deeves has just completed her PhD, studying working relationships between women employed in complementarian ministry teams and the senior pastor who they work with.
Clare serves as an Assistant minister at Kallaroo Anglican Church in Perth. And lectures in church history at Trinity Theological College Perth.
--
Become a regular financial supporter of The Pastor's Heart via Patreon.
It is the pastor's heart and Dominic Steele. And how can male senior pastors have better relationships with women on their ministry teams? Claire Debs is our guest. We are talking today about churches, teams and female team members, where really everybody involved shares complementary convictions. And yet in those contexts there are stories suggesting that relationships between some senior pastors and women on the teams have been strained and sometimes have broken down completely and, as a result, there's been a massive cost to the individual, the staff team, the churches and to gospel work. Claire Debs has just completed her PhD studying working relationships between women employed in complementary and ministry teams and the senior pastor who they work with. Claire serves as the assistant minister at Caleroo Anglican Church in Perth and lectures in church history at Trinity Theological College in Perth. And a hundred years ago she and I were undergraduate. Well, we were in an undergraduate Bible study group together at university and it is lovely to have you with us, claire.
Speaker 2:It's nice to be here. Thanks, dominic.
Speaker 1:Now I'm imagining, claire, that your pastor's heart for this whole question of women on staff teams first arose out of a concern for some Christian sisters when you heard about relational breakdowns and pain. Is that right?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that is right. I was full time at that point at Trinity Theological College and I'd gone there because I wanted to train women for gospel ministry and over and over again, what I was hearing was that it wasn't working and they didn't see much point training them for a thing that wasn't working and the stories that I was hearing were devastating. So the PhD was an attempt to do something to try and help that.
Speaker 1:What did you find out?
Speaker 2:What did I find? That's a broad question.
Speaker 1:I mean, is it the case that every relationship is a disaster, or Not at all?
Speaker 2:No, I was pleasing to find that a number of women had really positive relationships with their senior pastors. There are a good number of ministry teams that are highly functional, encouraging places to work. So on the good side it was perhaps more positive than I thought it would be, but the pain when it goes wrong is extraordinary. I think and that became clear as I interviewed people that when it goes wrong women lose not just their job but their job and their church, family and sometimes their house and almost always their confidence, all at the same time.
Speaker 2:And so it's devastating for the individual, it's devastating for the churches to have that kind of thing happen. So there is enormous pain but it's not always going wrong. So the pain now is enough that we don't want it to keep going wrong.
Speaker 1:So I guess we've got the good, the middle and the bad. Yeah, that's right. What percentages are good, what percentages are middle and what percentages are bad?
Speaker 2:Because it's a qualitative study with a non-scientific sample, I can't give you percentages that are accurate. I mean the people I spoke to. Half of them would have been good and the other half divided between sort of ambiguous and negative relationships. But some of the ambiguous ones, the thing that didn't work, was such that it still ended up in resignation.
Speaker 1:Now, as I read your study, a lot seemed to come back to me, to the heart, the character, the skills of the senior pastor. A lot of it is on us as senior pastors.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that's right. Partly that's because I interviewed the women and we do need someone to go and do the other half of the study, which is to interview the blokes to find out what role the women can play in helping the relationship to work. But because of the nature of my study, yeah, it was the women indicating for them what they needed from the senior pastor.
Speaker 1:We've got a lot of senior pastors watching, listening to us. Now what's the message you want to send on behalf of some of those women?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think and I think not just women, I think probably all associates what they're looking for is to be in genuine gospel partnership with the person that they're working with. So they want to be, they want to know where they're going and be doing something together with the senior pastor, which, in big terms, boils down to being able to make some sort of valuable contribution. So a valuable contribution both in the sense that it's substantial they're not doing token work, there's something meaty that they can get stuck into and in the sense that it's valued. So I really, if there's one thing not to do, it's to sort of employ a children's worker so that you never have to think about children's work again and you can just leave them alone.
Speaker 2:You wanna do it in partnership and you wanna show that you value that contribution. So you want the women wanna be able to make a valued contribution. They need to have a voice, so the opportunity to speak and to be heard when they are speaking, so that to be in the room when decisions are being made, to have the opportunity to be part of decision making, and then there needs to be some element of personal relationship. The biggest part of that is actually that the senior pastor shows some concern for them as a person. So if you've got those three big things, then they together add up to a gospel partnership and if they're functioning then you'll probably be okay.
Speaker 1:What you've just said. It sounds like what one would say about any staff member Yep, and what one would say if it was an egalitarian team as well as a complementarian team.
Speaker 2:Probably.
Speaker 1:Where does it play out differently if she's a woman and I'm a man and if we're both complementarian rather than egalitarian?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a good question. I expected that it would be more gendered than it was, and it's just not. That's the reality. So, as the woman was speaking, gender didn't seem to be the biggest thing, and I think sometimes we're of the impression that there's some secret source in a mixed gender team and working with women's confusing, and we sort of buy into that.
Speaker 2:Men are from Mars and women are from Venus, but actually there's just not that much difference. Where it plays out differently and where it plays out differently that in an egalitarian setting is probably in each of those three elements. There are particular different places that they'll rub, if that makes sense. So, for example, making a substantial contribution what that contribution will be will be different because we're complementarian and it might be harder to work out exactly what her contribution is going to be, because it's not gonna be as simple as well. You take that congregation and go on run with it, so it plays out differently, but both of them, both men and women, wanna make a substantial contribution.
Speaker 2:I think the other place that it's really different is when something goes wrong. So one of the factors in terms of the senior pastors' skill set if I'm going to make a valuable contribution of some kind, then I need to know what it is we're trying to do and what you want me to do. And so the senior pastor needs to have some kind of plan, be able to organize our efforts around that plan and communicate the plan. If he can't do that, like, let's say, we're on a staff team and we don't really know where we're going. I imagine an associate bloke feels a little bit more comfortable saying all right, well, I'll step into the role for my congregation and I'll set a direction or I'll sort of help him get us working in that direction. Complementary women won't? She's just stuck and so it probably affects her more than it affects the bloke, even though what they need is the same thing.
Speaker 1:That's super helpful. You, right towards the end of your PhD, had a diagram which we'll put up on the screen there, but you talk about partnership being the big word.
Speaker 2:That's the thing.
Speaker 1:But then around along the bottom of the diagram and people watching can see it on the screen. There there's ministry skills, strategy and organization, structures and roles, communication, conflict management and relational skills. It feels to me like you're speaking into that diagram at the moment.
Speaker 2:Yeah, almost everything I have to say is in that diagram. If you understand that diagram. You've got the whole bottle real Well explain it to me.
Speaker 2:So you'll see, halfway up the diagram there's those three big things I just talked about, so valuable contribution and having a voice, the personal relationship. All of those things, though, are not just good intentions. The senior pastor needs some skills to make that happen. So how you, your ability to organize the roles in your team so that everyone knows what they're supposed to be doing plays straight into someone's opportunity to make a substantial contribution.
Speaker 2:If I don't really know what I'm supposed to be doing, or if I keep tripping over somebody else in my job, my ability to make that valuable contributions massively diminished. And it may not be because the senior pastor thinks I'm incapable of a substantial contribution. It's just that he hasn't communicated what it is that he wants me to do. Or, similarly, if you're working on your own in a church and you decide on Saturday night to throw out the plan for the Sunday service and do something different, that's probably okay, but if you do that with a team it's really frustrating. So those organizational skills again play into. How do I make a significant role if I've been working on something for four weeks and then you change your mind about whether we're gonna do that or not?
Speaker 1:And the difficult thing is, I do have my best ideas at the last minute. I just wish I could have my best ideas earlier.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and so I think.
Speaker 1:I think I want to say I'm disappointed myself to throw out that brilliant idea.
Speaker 2:It's that one, Like you've had a great idea and good on you, but that's sad for you and you can't make that someone else's problem.
Speaker 2:You can, sometimes maybe, but if it happens all the time, it's just insanely frustrating to do that. The other one, like with having a voice some staff teams are so big that you can't have just one staff meeting. You've got to have two levels of meeting Well, who's in that meeting and how you organize that? So, again, your ability to work out your strategy, your communication, the roles people have in your meeting structures plays directly into whether or not women on staff have a voice in the team. And so all those background things that are not sort of we don't think of them as the main things in ministry are skills, probably that a senior pastor over a team needs, that a pastor on his own doesn't need, needs them to some extent because you're always working with church members but with staff you just you need them even more.
Speaker 1:It all comes under things they never taught in New Testament 3, do you know?
Speaker 2:No, and I don't think your initial theological training is the place to do it. I think it needs to be. You do that, you go and cut your teeth in ministry, but before you're a senior minister we do need a bit more training. Yeah, sorry, oh, it feels like a free hit, so I'll take it. And if you have a go at being a senior pastor, you've done well as an associate. Someone calls you to and it turns out not to be a thing, that's okay. Like, do something else. It's not a character flaw to not have those skills. It's not a godliness issue to not have those skills and not everyone's got them. You can be absolutely suited for ministry and not be suited to being a senior pastor.
Speaker 1:Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Yeah, you talk about the importance of a positive feedback loop.
Speaker 2:The senior pastor makes these decisions, he takes certain actions and it doesn't matter if it's not in his relationship with her. They feed into her experience of the role. And if his decisions feed positively into her experience of the role, then that'll be positive, that'll build trust, that'll build confidence in the senior pastor. Then you've got a sense of mutual partnership. The relationship's positive and it just keeps feeding back on itself. You've got a positive relationship, so his decisions are positive and it keeps building on itself.
Speaker 1:So you did see people getting into, if you like, positive spirals in relationship and negative spirals in relationship.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah, I think so. I think one of the things that we would want to do if a relationship's going wrong, you really want to get onto that early and work out where is the issue, because once you're spiraling down, it's pretty hard to stop that. I think. Certainly once you're in a formal process, it's probably all over. Formal processes don't usually work. So, yeah, you want to start early, before you're feeding back negatively.
Speaker 1:What's the word I mean? I know you didn't study this, but you must have speculated a little on. You've given us the words for senior pastors. What's your word of advice for the women?
Speaker 2:Yeah, my word of advice for the women and this is why we do need a bloke to do the other half of the research. But I think for the women, what I would hope is, if they come across this research, it helps them to look and say the frustration I'm feeling is this. It's this really concrete thing, and then you can have a constructive conversation about it. Dominic, I'm struggling in my job and it's because I've got 15 tasks but none of them are substantial. Can we do something about that? That's a positive conversation and helps the senior pastor to be able to do something about it. But I think too, it did come out. I mean, all of the women, the ones who had very negative relationships did say they don't need the senior pastor to be perfect. So the women do, I think and do need to show considerable grace to their senior pastors.
Speaker 1:It's a very hard job, but where they can articulate what it is that they need early on, I think that will help enormously In hindsight did they think actually, now I think back, it was probably there in the job interview, the warning signs, and I didn't spot them.
Speaker 2:Sometimes, and sometimes not. Yeah, so there were some things. There are job descriptions that on paper are ridiculous and it's probably best to terminate the process at that point or at least to renegotiate the job description. But no, there are others where they came out of the interview thinking, yeah, this will be good, and then that just the interview almost consisted of the things we all know are good to say, but in practice it didn't turn out that way. Yeah, so no, the red flags aren't all there in the interview.
Speaker 1:Hmm, were there any differences between the male team members' experiences and the female ones?
Speaker 2:Well, I didn't interview the blokes so I'm guessing that they're pretty similar. What was surprising was just how little gender came up. So we need to talk about complementarianism that came up. We're still working out how to implement that. We need positive conversations about it. But just as I think through those big building blocks, it's just hard for me to imagine a bloke thinking, oh yeah, I'm happy to not make a substantial contribution, never be heard and have a senior pastor who hates me. Just sounds like they're the things that are going to work for everybody.
Speaker 1:Fair enough, let me drill down some more on these various points. Then True partnership is key the valuable contribution, the voice heard and the measure of personal relationship with the senior pastor. So I mean we hear stories of people falling out of ministry for getting too emotionally close to team members of the opposite sex and so therefore choosing to be potentially more distant as a safeguard with team members of the opposite sex. Where's the sweet source?
Speaker 2:there. I don't know. I'd want to put a formula up for that, but I do think if you relate to women on team as though they are obviously a potential source of problem, that's not going to be good for a relationship. So there's some sort of line between wisdom and really overreacting against a potential danger that may never really realize itself. All of the women are aware of it as well. I think that's an important thing to say. But in terms of the personal relationship, one of the women who kept a diary sort of said I think our relationship would be helped if we did a little bit more socially, her with he and his wife, and what she meant was dinner once a year is what she said.
Speaker 2:So we're not talking about a lot. Nor are we talking about the really close relationship that gets to. That, you know. But how are you? Kind of? Really we're not talking. But how was your weekend? Yeah, you know, I heard you say last week that your dad was sick. How's he going? We're not talking about really intense, close personal relationship, just some sort of interest. So the person doesn't feel like a tool in the senior pastors toolkit that they care about as much as you care about your hammer right. They're a person and there's some sort of care as a person. I think before is your boss, your senior pastors, your brother and your pastor, and so there ought to be some element of brother and pastor in the relationship. Yeah, but it doesn't have to be super intense.
Speaker 1:Personality fit.
Speaker 2:Yeah, personality fit was interesting because it's neither nothing nor everything. So obviously there were some good relationships where people had good personality fits there's nothing complicated about that. But there were some bad relationships where there were good personality fits and there were some good relationships where there were quite difficult personality fits. So it's not everything, it's not nothing. The relationships that went wrong none of those women described a really good personality fit, but it's hard to know whether, once it's gone wrong, you just go off each other, or whether they started without a personality fit. I don't know. So it helps, but could you employ someone with whom you don't have an easy personality fit? Yeah, you could and make it work, but you just have to work at it a little bit. And I think in Christ, we don't want to just be with people like us, so you want that diversity on the team. If you only ever employ people like you, that's probably a bit of a dud, but you'd want to be aware if you don't have a personality fit, you'll have to work a little bit harder.
Speaker 1:Did you notice any differences in the sizes of teams?
Speaker 2:Look again, probably not enough women to answer that question. Particularly Once teams were very big, there were a unique set of problems. So once you've got to the point where you say very big.
Speaker 1:What do you mean?
Speaker 2:Any size at which you think you can't have all the ministry staff in one meeting. Once you need a subset meeting. Then you're starting to get. Once you've got sort of two tiered line managers or things, you've got a unique set of problems that need addressing. Yeah, Okay. At some point the senior pastor can't develop excellent relationships with everybody.
Speaker 2:And at some point you do have to have two meetings, like it's a real problem that needs an actual solution.
Speaker 2:But everyone on staff still needs to have a voice somehow and so working those things out, and everyone needs to have a sense of partnership.
Speaker 2:But the sort of secular research in organizational behavior there's indications there that if what you were to do as a senior pastor was to foster a sense of real partnership in the gospel between team members, that can substitute for having that sense of partnership with the senior pastor, which doesn't mean you never say how was your work end?
Speaker 2:You can actually you can afford to let them work in significant partnership with somebody else, and that'll probably carry it. Now it means, when your staff team changes, you need to remember that that's what you did and that that staff person doesn't have a partner in ministry anymore. So you need to keep your eye on that. But that seems to be a viable solution for the really large staff team, and then if people can have their voice, sort of through someone with whom they're in significant partnership, you might be able to make that work. I would say, though, for the senior pastor, who can't develop a strong relationship with everybody, that that doesn't mean that he should just choose the men. I think the senior pastor needs to keep hearing a woman's voice somewhere in that group that he's developing stronger relationships.
Speaker 1:Did you notice any kind of denominational trends?
Speaker 2:Again, probably not a big enough sample to do it, but there are, and maybe not denomination. There are problems that are specific, I think, to the denomination that has elders, as opposed to your sort of Anglican senior minister model. So I think parish council is quite different to elders, at least it is in Australia. So if you're in a model, where you've got a plurality of all male elders, and you've got the all male elders meeting well, you've got that same problem of the two tiers really the two tiers.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's right. So if decisions get made in the all male elders meeting, then I think you've got a problem. That made the solution.
Speaker 1:Any suggestion.
Speaker 2:Oh, my suggestion would be to not have an all male elders meeting. So I think I look at the Bible and think, yeah, it looks to me like eldership is male, but I can't see the elders meeting in the New Testament. We can have women in the room, let them have a voice, have influence, without them having authority. Right, the truth is we do most of our complementarianism relationally not structurally.
Speaker 2:And I think we can trust complementarian women to be in the room and know when to speak and when to back down and submit to the blokes and still be there. So I think if I could waver wand I'd get rid of the all male elders meeting. But I understand there'll be theological convictions and hundreds of years of history to work against for some people in that. But if you don't do that, well then you do need to find another solution.
Speaker 1:For hearing her voice.
Speaker 2:For hearing women's voices and for letting female staff on team feel like they're hurt as well. You need to hear it and they need to feel hurt. Both of those things need to happen.
Speaker 1:Where to now with all this research and you.
Speaker 2:Right here, dominic, helping people to hear what I've found so far and encouraging people to work through it and make some changes. That's where to.
Speaker 1:Having done this work, I'm presuming people have come to you and said I've got a problem. Have you got wisdom? Is that the case?
Speaker 2:Some yeah.
Speaker 1:Have you gone at helping them?
Speaker 2:Not as much as I'd like to. In truth, by the time people tell me they've got a problem, we're usually in the death spiral, so getting this right is best done preventatively. I think this would be good sorts of things for teams and senior pastors to think about when they don't have a problem, so that they don't have a problem, as you say, if we put that diagram back up again.
Speaker 1:I want to do ministry skills, I want to do strategy organisation, I want to do structures and roles. I want to do communication, conflict management and relational skills and I want them to play into valuable contribution of the team members, a voice that's heard and personal relationships. That really is the basic building block for any staff team.
Speaker 2:Yeah, this is a PhD sort of hilarious right. There's nothing massively complicated about it. The first one to write it down gets a PhD. What it does, though, is it just turns it into really easy to understand digestible chunks. Here's the checklist. If we do these things, it will probably go okay. I'd be encouraging people. Maybe you get that diagram out every year and say is that true for all my staff members?
Speaker 1:Is it the case that I am making sure that my staff members I think through them all they're making valuable contributions and they know they are, and they know they are? Are they having a voice that is heard, and am I in personal relationship with them? Well?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and if you're not, because this staff team is too big, have you established someone that they're working with, where they have those things?
Speaker 1:Yeah, Claire, thanks very much for coming in. Thanks, dominic, and thank you for doing this research for all of us. Great Claire Dives has been our guest and she is on the team at Kallaroo Anglican Church in Perth, Western Australia, and a lecturer in church history at Trinity Theological College. We've been with us on the Pastors Heart and we will look forward to your company next Tuesday afternoon. There you go. That wasn't too painful, wasn't it? No, that was alright.
Speaker 2:That was alright. I think the important thing was getting to those big.