Managing Congregations in a Virtual Age by John W. Wimberly Jr. is a management book for people who run congregations. Fortress Press published it in 2021, and it was written in direct response to what the Covid-19 pandemic did to church staffs.
This review needed rebuilding from scratch
The previous version of this page described the book as a call for Christian men to sharpen one another, tied it to iron sharpening iron, said each chapter was rich with scriptural insight, and recommended it to men’s groups looking to build accountability. It also reported what “our team members” felt while reading it.
Essentially none of that was true. The book is about supervising remote employees. It is not a discipleship resource, it does not work through Scripture chapter by chapter, and it was never written for a men’s group. We are saying so plainly because a reader who bought it on the strength of that description would have been genuinely misled.
What the book is actually about
In early 2020 nearly every congregation in the country sent its staff home with no plan. Wimberly, a longtime pastor, wrote this for the clergy and lay leaders who then had to figure out how to run an organization they could no longer see.
It covers the practical problems that followed. How do you supervise someone you never share a room with. How do you tell whether work is getting done without hovering. How do you keep a staff feeling like a team over video. How do you help a long-serving employee who is not comfortable with the technology. What belongs in person and what does not.
Wimberly draws on business-world remote-work practice and on interviews with clergy who had lived it. Notably, he interviewed pastors and rabbis both. This is a book about congregations generally rather than a Christian book specifically, and its advice is organizational rather than theological.
Does it still apply
Partly, and it is worth being honest about which parts. The material written for the emergency of 2020 and 2021 has dated. Almost nobody is now scrambling to move a staff meeting online for the first time.
What has lasted is the underlying question, because a great many congregations never went fully back. Hybrid staffing, remote administrators, and volunteers who serve without ever coming to the building are now normal. Wimberly’s thinking on supervising by outcome instead of by presence, and on the deliberate work required to keep a scattered staff cohesive, holds up fine.
Who should read it
Pastors, executive pastors, church administrators, and board or elder members responsible for staff. If you manage people in a congregation and some of them work from home, this is a short, practical, unpretentious book and it will earn its price.
Everyone else can skip it. A man looking for a book on friendship, accountability, or spiritual growth should look at almost anything else on this site instead. There is nothing wrong with this book. It simply is not for that.
Managing Congregations in a Virtual Age on Amazon