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Growth never comes without challenges. As a pastor, you’re faced with an ever-changing landscape that may have caused you to rethink your calling as it becomes more difficult to meet the needs of your congregation. You’ve done your best to survive these challenges by learning new tactics and strategies to adapt to the complex and changing world around you.

But developing your pastor skills shouldn’t feel like a secondary priority. Skills are learned through study, refined by experience, and perfected through dedication. Whether you’ve pastored for ages or are just getting started, you should always be investing in new ways to make your work more relevant, impactful, and fruitful.

But what are the most needed skillsets for pastors today? Let’s take a look!

Pastoral skills to be a more effective leader

Pastors demonstrate how much they value their leadership roles by how much they invest in developing their skills. A survey of 1,000 pastors revealed four skills pastors say are needed to overcome today’s challenges and lead a healthy church. Let's take a look at each of these, why they’re important, and the resources that are available for improving those skills.

1. Intentional disciple-making

Discipleship is the lifelong process of becoming more like Jesus. For over 2,000 years, it’s been at the core of the Church’s mission to fulfill the Great Commission—so why is it such a challenge today?

First of all, discipleship takes time. Jesus dedicated nearly all of his earthly ministry building up his disciples by teaching, traveling, and doing life with them. Today’s pastors often struggle with time management. Between writing sermons, counseling, and other (often unplanned) ministry duties, pastors often have limited time left over for one-on-one discipleship. Refining your pastoral care skills allows you to shift away from managing spreadsheet data and move back toward authentic relationships.

Secondly, discipleship requires engagement. Discipleship won’t happen all by itself. Effective discipleship requires providing your congregation with engaging discipleship resources to increase understanding and retention. 74% of Christians say that churches would benefit from a digital hub that could provide more discipleship resources, such as event reminders, encouragement, blogs posts, pastoral messages, and more!

Lastly, discipleship requires relationship. Jesus provided the ultimate example of how to build disciples, and it was centered around relationships. Spending one-on-one time with a person at a coffee shop, on a walk, or just hanging out will provide many more insights about that person, identify potential areas of growth, and also build trust in the relationship between disciple and leader.

2. Strategic technology use

One year before the pandemic, pastors reported that their lowest priority was "keeping up with the latest digital and technological trends.” However, the pandemic shutdowns reversed that as it forced churches to quickly adopt digital tools such as websites, live streaming, and online giving.

However, technology often brings unnecessary complexity, which quickly steals your time and energy. Trying to learn and maintain six different standalone platforms for social media, giving, and membership data can easily overwhelm a small staff. Investing in your pastoral leadership skills means recognizing when a fragmented stack of tools is actually draining your church’s momentum. 

Having a unified platform such as Subsplash One brings together all of these digital tools on one single platform, simplifying and organizing technology for you and your teams.

3. Healthy visionary leadership

Every pastor is called to leadership, but not every pastor is properly equipped to lead. Developing strong pastoral leadership skills requires a commitment to humility, execution, and continuous learning. As an aspiring high-capacity leader, you should focus on these six foundational practices:

  1. Vision casting: Create a vision that inspires and challenges your staff and volunteers to reach new levels of excellence
  2. Strategizing: Establish a clear strategy based on your vision with S.M.A.R.T. goals (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound)
  3. Team building: Recruit and build up a team of amazing people that align with your vision and are dedicated to implementing your strategies
  4. Critical thinking: Objectively analyze and evaluate your team’s performance and discover where improvements can be made
  5. Innovating: Work with your team to come up with creative solutions that improve your processes and bring more results
  6. Self improving: Part of being a good leader is taking time to study about leadership, developing your sense of self-awareness, and seeking honest feedback from people around you

4. Clear multi-platform communication

Have you ever said something that was misunderstood? Or sent a text that someone misinterpreted? It’s one thing to say something; it’s another thing to say something in a way that clearly communicates your message.

As a pastor, communication is an essential skill that can either enhance or diminish your effectiveness in preaching sermons, counseling people, and leading your teams. Poor pastoral communication can lead to missed deadlines, hurt feelings, lower morale, higher turnover, and less productivity. 

On the other hand, healthy communication directly enhances your pastoral care skills by ensuring your people feel seen, known, and supported. To communicate clearly in a digital world, you must use tools that directly reach your congregation, including in-app messaging, text messaging (SMS), and timely push notifications.

Tools like Pulpit AI by Subsplash support this effort by taking your sermon video or audio and generating 20–25 pieces of high-quality discipleship content in minutes. This allows you to quickly share daily devotionals, discussion guides, and social media clips across your digital channels. Keeping your message accessible throughout the week naturally fosters the deep engagement that drives sustainable church growth.

Everyone has their own communication styles and preferred methods. To successfully communicate in the modern world requires you to learn how to use technology such as texting (SMS), push notifications, podcasts, and live streaming.

Give yourself more time to develop pastoral skills

Complexity is the enemy of effectiveness. Managing multiple separate accounts for church management software (ChMS), digital giving, and communication tools can quickly exhaust your staff and volunteers, steal away your time, and add to your frustration.

For example, perhaps you’re using a church management system (ChMS) for membership information, two or three services to send messages (like text messages, Facebook Messaging, and Mailchimp), and several calendars to coordinate events (like Google calendars, Facebook events, etc.) Trying to manage all of these separate tools is difficult with a large number of full time staff, yet alone if your staff consists of yourself, your spouse, and maybe one or two volunteers.

Unifying your tools gives you and your team more time to invest in your own pastor skills, laying a foundation for lasting ministry fruitfulness.

Subsplash One is the unified platform that engages your congregation, lets you know who your people are, communicate effectively, and encourage generosity with a suite of powerful digital tools such as:

If you’d like to see how these midweek discipleship tools look on a real platform built for the local church, we’d love to walk you through it. Take a moment to [.blog-contact-cta] book a free demo [.blog-contact-cta] with our team today, and let’s discuss how we can partner together to help your church.