What digital ministry actually costs a church (honest math).

A pastor asked me last year what it would cost to "do the digital thing properly," and I gave him a number, and he went quiet on the call for long enough that I thought the line had dropped.

Then he said: nobody has ever just told me the number.

That is the whole reason for this post. There is an enormous amount of writing about why churches should invest in digital ministry and almost none about what it costs, which is a strange silence in an industry that talks constantly about stewardship. So here is the math, including the parts that make my own work look less attractive.

One caveat before the numbers. I sell one of the three options below, so read the section about my own with appropriate suspicion. I have tried to write it the way I would want somebody to write it for me... which means naming what it costs you and what it does not give you, in the same paragraph.

Option one: hire somebody

A full-time communications director in most of the country runs sixty-five to ninety thousand dollars. That is salary. Add payroll tax, benefits, a laptop, the software they will need, and the real number lands closer to a hundred.

For that you get somebody in the building, in your staff meeting, who knows the family whose son just deployed. That is worth a great deal and I will not pretend otherwise. It is the right answer for a lot of churches.

Two things nobody mentions at the offer stage, though. The first is that you are hiring one person's skill set, and "communications" has quietly become six jobs: writing, design, video, web, social, and whatever the analytics are doing this quarter. Almost nobody is genuinely good at all six. You will get two of them done well, three passably, and one not at all, and which one goes undone is mostly luck.

The second is turnover. Church communications roles turn over fast, and when they do, the institutional knowledge walks out with them... the passwords, the reasons behind decisions, the half-finished redesign nobody else understood. I have inherited that wreckage more than once, and rebuilding it costs more than the gap in salary ever saved.

There is also a quieter cost to the full-time hire that shows up in month four. A communications director with no clear owner of the message becomes an order-taker, and an order-taker in a church means whoever asks loudest gets the graphic. That is not a failure of the person. It is a failure to decide, before the hire, who is responsible for what the church says.

Option two: ask your existing staff

This is what most churches under four hundred actually do, and it is not a plan. It is a series of favours.

Your worship leader edits the video because he is the one who owns a Mac. The pastor's wife runs the Instagram. Somebody's teenage nephew built the website in 2019 and has since gone to college and stopped answering. The cost of this option is not zero. It is paid in Thursday nights, in resentment nobody says out loud, and in a website that quietly tells your city you closed during the pandemic.

Pastor, I ran this version for years and I was proud of how scrappy we were. Scrappy is a lovely word for a team doing four jobs badly because nobody would name the cost.

Option three: fractional

Buy a slice of a senior operator instead of all of a junior one. The person who would cost you ninety thousand full-time works across a handful of churches, and each church pays for the fraction it uses.

The honest trade: you do not get somebody in your staff meeting every week, and you do not get somebody who knows the family with the deployed son. What you get is somebody who has already solved your problem at four other churches and is not learning on your budget.

At a church I work with this has meant no new staff line at all, and one part-time contractor rather than a department. That is the shape of it. I am not going to publish a rate card in a blog post, because the honest answer is that it scopes to the church... a church of two hundred and a church of nine hundred do not need the same thing and should not be quoted the same thing.

The cost everybody forgets

Whatever option you pick, there is a running cost underneath it that has nothing to do with who does the work. Somebody has to decide what the church is saying this month. Somebody has to look at the thing before it goes out. Somebody has to answer the person who replies.

That is pastoral work and it does not outsource, at any price. If a vendor tells you their system removes it, they are describing a church where nobody is paying attention to what goes out under its name.

And it compounds in the direction you would not expect. The favour economy looks cheapest in year one and is the most expensive by year three, because nothing is documented, nothing is repeatable, and every departure resets the clock. The hire looks most expensive in year one and is often the best value by year five... if, and only if, somebody above them owns the message.

So: ninety thousand for a full hire, a real but unnamed cost for the favour economy, a fraction of a senior operator for the third road. And underneath all three, a few hours of somebody's genuine attention every week, forever. Anybody telling you it is free is selling you something.

How to tell which one you need

One question, and it is not about budget. Is your problem that nobody is doing the work, or that nobody knows what the work should be?

If it is the first, hire. A competent person with clear direction will outperform any consultant. If it is the second, hiring will not fix it and I have watched churches spend a year proving that... you will have someone in the building producing things nobody decided on, and in eighteen months you will be having this conversation again with less money.

I am not being romantic about volunteers here either. Some of the best church communications work I have seen was done by somebody who was not paid for it. The problem is never the person. It is that a favour has no succession plan, and churches keep building critical infrastructure on top of favours and then acting surprised when somebody moves to Atlanta.

If your budget genuinely will not stretch to any of the three, do one thing rather than a bad version of everything. Transcribe the sermons. It is nearly free, it is permanent, and it is the only item on this list that keeps paying out years after you stop.

I would genuinely rather you hired well than hired me. A church with a good communications director and a clear plan does not need a fractional anything, and the churches I serve best are the ones who already tried and know exactly which part broke.

So, Pastor, before you price anything: write down who decided what your church said last month. If you cannot name them, that is the problem, and no budget line fixes it. What did you come up with? I would like to know.