Church Staff and Ministry Roles
Southwood Baptist Church published a staff page, and its later About page carried the full roster. This archive reconstructs that roster by role only. The people who held these positions are living private individuals, so no names, photographs or biographies are reproduced here. What is preserved is the structure — which is, for anyone trying to understand how a congregation of this size actually worked, the more useful half of the record.
The church is no longer meeting; these roles are described as they existed while the congregation was active.
The six positions
The roster listed six: a pastor, a business administrator, a worship leader, a senior adults minister, an administrative assistant, and facilities management. That is a small paid staff by any measure, and every one of the six is a load-bearing position rather than a specialism.
Pastor
The preaching and teaching office, and the church's public voice. In a self-governing congregation the pastor is called by the members rather than appointed by any denominational body — the Baptist Bible Fellowship that Southwood was affiliated with cooperates in missions and training but does not govern its churches. The weekly load ran to three services, plus visitation, weddings, funerals, counselling and oversight of the ministries. That work is described in more detail on the pastoral ministry page.
Business administrator
The role that keeps a church legal and solvent. A congregation owning a property with an auditorium and a separate fellowship center has a budget, payroll, insurance, utilities, contractors, missions giving to disburse and annual reporting obligations to meet. Churches in the United States are subject to specific federal rules on employment, payroll withholding and tax-exempt status, and a mid-sized congregation needs someone whose actual job is to attend to them rather than someone squeezing it in between other duties.
Worship leader
Southwood's music programme was among the most developed things it ran. The archived pages describe an adult sanctuary choir, a teen praise ensemble, a praise band, an orchestra, and audio, video and projection teams. Every one of those needed rehearsal, scheduling, repertoire selection and people willing to turn up on a weeknight. The worship leader carried all of it, and also carried the weekly obligation that the music be ready by Sunday morning regardless of who did not come to rehearsal.
Senior adults minister
A dedicated position for ministry to older members, which not every church of this size funded. Southwood ran a senior adults group and, separately, ministries to shut-ins and to people in nursing homes. That is visiting work above all — sustained, unglamorous, largely invisible from the pews, and concentrated on precisely the members least able to come to the building. The church also ran a deaf ministry, so accessibility was evidently a settled commitment rather than an occasional gesture.
Administrative assistant
The office. Bulletins and a monthly newsletter to produce and mail, a calendar to keep, correspondence, records, and the day-to-day traffic of a building in near-continuous use. In practice a church office is also the first point of human contact for anyone who walks in or telephones, which makes the role considerably more pastoral than the job title suggests.
Facilities management
The property. Southwood's campus held an auditorium, a fellowship center with a gymnasium, and enough classrooms for a fully graded Sunday School running from a baby nursery through the school grades to adult classes. A building used on Sunday morning, Sunday evening, Wednesday evening and for open gym, camps, socials and a fall festival needs cleaning, setting up, resetting and repairing on a continuous cycle.
Six paid, and a great many unpaid
The important thing about the roster is its size relative to the programme. Six people could not have run what the site describes. Behind them stood the volunteer body: Sunday School teachers for every grade, nursery and toddler workers, choir and orchestra members, praise team and drama ministry participants, audio, video and projection operators, youth workers, visitation teams for the GROW programme, and the members who assembled Thanksgiving and Christmas baskets, ran the fall festival and staffed the camps.
The paid staff, in other words, were mostly enabling other people's work rather than doing it themselves. That is the normal shape of a congregation of this size, and it is worth stating plainly because a roster of six job titles can otherwise give a misleading impression of a small operation. The programme was not small. The payroll was.
It also explains why the church's own pages returned so often to the theme of service. The pastoral letter encouraged both visitors and members to consider serving and noted there were numerous opportunities to do so; that letter is reported on the pastor's welcome page. A congregation running this many ministries on six salaries depended on it.
A note on names
The original staff page and the later About page both carried names, and in the case of the Sunday School roster the archive also preserved volunteer teachers' personal mobile numbers. None of that is reproduced. The congregation's own identity is kept in full — Southwood Baptist Church is named throughout this archive — but the private individuals who worked for it are not. The reasoning is set out on the about this archive page, and the wider About section is reconstructed under about Southwood.