The Seat Nobody Gave You

You could be in more of the meetings where decisions get made. Copied on more of the emails earlier in the planning process. Carrying a title that signals strategy instead of just production. Those things matter, and if your church structurally excludes communications from leadership conversations, that's worth addressing with grace.

The seat you're waiting for might be one you could already be sitting in, and the reason you're not is that you haven't decided to.

Why won’t leadership include you in strategy conversations?

Leadership in most churches doesn't spend a lot of time thinking about whether the communications director has a strategic voice. They're thinking about the mission, the congregation, the budget, the staff, the next series, the facilities, and the health of the church. Communications is somewhere on that list, but it's rarely near the top unless something has gone wrong or something has gone remarkably right.

This means the communications director who waits to be recognized, who does excellent creative work and assumes it will eventually translate into strategic influence, is waiting for something that probably isn't coming in most church cultures. It's not because leadership doesn't value them, but because leadership is busy, and the translation from this person does good work to this person should be in the room when we make decisions doesn't happen automatically. Someone has to make it happen. That someone is you.

How do you enter leadership conversations before you’re invited?

It starts with showing up where decisions get made before you're asked. Not to insert yourself into conversations that aren't yours, but to bring the communications lens into spaces where it's currently absent. The ministry planning meeting where nobody is thinking about how this event will be communicated to someone who has never heard of it. The staff meeting where a new initiative is being shaped, and nobody has asked what message it sends. The elder board presentation, where attendance data is being discussed without any context about how the communications strategy has shifted.

You belong in those conversations. Not because you have authority over the decisions, but because your perspective is genuinely useful and currently missing. Show up with questions, not pronouncements. Ask what people need to feel or do as a result of this initiative. Ask who the audience is beyond the people already in the building. Ask what the follow-up plan looks like and whether communications has a role in it.

Those questions, asked consistently and without agenda, demonstrate something that a title never can: that you think strategically about the mission, not just about the creative work.

How do you build credibility that earns leadership trust?

There's a version of trying to earn a seat at the leadership table that turns into something exhausting and resentful: doing strategic work with no strategic recognition, indefinitely, while production requests keep piling up on top of it. That's not sustainable, and it's not the goal.

The goal isn't to prove you deserve more by doing more. It's to make the value of your perspective visible enough that leadership starts pulling you into conversations instead of you finding your way in on your own. That happens through a track record of consistent character that builds up over time, whether or not anyone's watching closely, not through piling up more work that nobody's tracking.

You get there by being consistently right about the things you speak into: raising concerns that turn out to be legitimate, asking questions that surface problems while they're still small, noticing issues early enough that they never become the crisis they could have been. Often enough, leadership starts to notice the pattern. This isn't an I told you so moment. It requires keeping perspective and staying humble.

What do you do when church leadership won’t budge?

What actually determines whether someone in your role gets pulled into strategic conversations isn't the org chart. Sometimes it's a leadership style issue. A senior pastor who holds tightly to the narrative and doesn't make decisions collaboratively isn't going to open that process up just because someone asks to be a part of it. A leader who's been burned before may have built a small circle of trusted people precisely because trust feels expensive now, and expanding that circle feels like risk rather than opportunity. And a lot of pastors came up through seminary, which trains them theologically to lead a church but rarely covers how to lead a staff or build a collaborative culture. Whatever the issue, the instinct of a lead pastor to hold control over every decision usually isn't malicious. It's often just the only model they were given, or one that grew out of necessity.

None of that shows up on the org chart. It shows up in how decisions actually get made, and in whether someone in your role has a real path toward being part of the decisions they should be included in.

Those environments exist. If you're in one, the honest question isn't how to force your way into influence you're being denied. It's whether you can do the work faithfully from where you are, and for how long.

What you can control is the quality and integrity of your work, the relationships you build across the staff, and whether you show up as someone genuinely invested in the mission rather than in your own advancement. In a healthy church, that disposition will get noticed over time. In an unhealthy one, it may not. Knowing the difference is part of the discernment this role requires.

Why does church leadership influence actually matter?

The seat at the table isn't the point. Your growth as a leader isn't a destination. It's a journey that won't end here on earth. The mission of the church you serve is the point. The seat at the leadership table matters because it gives you more ability to serve that mission well, and that's the only reason worth pursuing it. A communications director who chases influence for its own sake might get the seat and lose the credibility that made it worth having in the first place.

Go after the leadership seat because the mission of your church needs your voice in it.