Easter 2024: Churches Are Often Two-Faced (And It Loses Them People)

A 2024 story of mine.

Let’s quickly meander this story.

I didn’t start working for the church I was recently at until early December of 2023. I think I first heard from them in July about an open position they had. There were any number of red flags in that early discussion, but in July 2023 I was bartending and making some money from writing, so I was in an “any port in a storm” narrative in my brain. Ironically, I’m now in that same place because of this story I’m about to tell.

By “any number of red flags” I mean that the lady who first reached out, who is a very nice woman all-in, told me they had “hired for this position before” but “multiple people hadn’t worked out.” I think she even told me “We’ve had issues filling this position.” I should have probably dropped out there.

Instead, at the time I was still in LinkedIn Jail and we were communicating via Indeed. Months passed and I bartended at a few places, then I got a sales job with a company out of Seoul/Austin, so I started doing that while I bartended. Things were looking up. In October, around Halloween or so, the church got back to me and wanted to do some interviews. I did one Zoom interview with the original lady and a retiring minister, and I thought it went OK but not great. I was surprised to get an in-person interview a few weeks later at a coffee shop.

That interview I felt was OK but generic. It was with a retiring minister and the person who’d be replacing her. I got the sense neither of them really liked me that much, but probably via a similar “any port in a storm” narrative, I somehow got the job offer. I debated it for a few days, in part because of the whole “We’ve had problems successfully finding someone for this” angle, and then eventually took it and overlapped it with that sales job.

Quick pause here to say this church was immediately adjacent to TCU, and my last employment experience in that geographic region was not, how you say, amazing.

Still, I trudged over there on December 6th and met new people and everyone seemed nice and away we go.

Quick pause again to say that almost every organization under the sun is bad at onboarding, and this church was no different. They were pretty bad at this. I was given some passwords and that’s really about it. I had almost no context for who did what, how the church functioned week-over-week, or even who did what on my own team (had some direct reports in this role).