The church office has left the building. The question is: what do you do about it?
For most church leaders, remote work happened to them — a pandemic-forced experiment they never asked for. But for Stadia Church Planting, virtual officing isn’t a crisis response. It’s the entire model. Fifty-plus employees. Twenty-plus states. Zero central office. In this episode of The Church Digital Podcast, Jeff Reed sits down with Janie Mehaffey (VP of Culture Development & Teamwork) and Heidy Tandy (Associate Director of Bloom) to pull back the curtain on how Stadia actually makes it work — and what church planters and ministry leaders can steal from their playbook right now.
Stadia Didn’t Pivot. They Were Already There.
When COVID hit and churches scrambled to Zoom their staff meetings, Stadia kept moving. Why? Because they’d already built the infrastructure, the culture, and the rhythms for distributed ministry. That’s the first lesson: virtual officing isn’t a feature you bolt on during a crisis. It’s a culture you build on purpose.
Stadia exists to plant churches, and they plant them across the country. Centralized office space was never logical for that mission. So they designed around their mission instead of defaulting to tradition. Church leaders, take note — your office setup should serve your mission, not the other way around.
How Do You Keep Vision Aligned Across 20 States?
This is the question that keeps distributed leaders up at night. And it’s a real one. When your team isn’t bumping into each other at the coffee maker, vision drift is a genuine threat.
Stadia’s answer isn’t magic — it’s intentionality. A few practical things they lean on:
- Regular async communication. Not every update needs a meeting. Use tools like Slack, Loom, or even voice memos to keep team members informed without bleeding hours from everyone’s calendar.
- Rhythmic video touchpoints. Weekly or bi-weekly video calls aren’t optional. They’re the campfire everyone gathers around. These aren’t status-report meetings — they’re relational, vision-reinforcing moments.
- Documented culture. When you can’t absorb culture by osmosis, you have to write it down. Stadia is deliberate about articulating values, expectations, and “the way we do things here” in formats people can actually reference.
If your team is scattered — even across two or three campuses — these same practices apply.
Leading People You Can’t See
Remote leadership exposes every weakness in a leader’s management style. If you’re used to managing by presence (“I can see them working, so they must be working”), distributed teams will wreck you.
Janie and Heidy are honest about this. Leading virtually requires a shift from managing activity to managing outcomes. You stop asking “Are they at their desk?” and start asking “Are they hitting their goals?” That’s actually a healthier leadership model — but it demands clarity on what those goals even are.
Concrete step: Before your next team sprint, define what “done” looks like for every role. Not tasks. Outcomes. If someone can’t tell you what winning looks like in their position this month, that’s your problem to solve — not theirs.
Boundaries: The Thing Nobody Wants to Talk About
Here’s the friction point Janie and Heidy name directly: when home is the office, the office never closes. Burnout sneaks up on remote workers because the physical separation between work and life collapses.
Stadia builds explicit boundary structures into their culture — not because people are lazy, but because people are human. A few things worth implementing immediately:
- Set hard stop times and communicate them to your team. “I’m offline after 6pm” isn’t slacking. It’s sustainable.
- Create a physical workspace, even a small one. A dedicated corner, a specific chair, a room — the brain needs spatial cues to switch modes.
- Protect Sabbath like a policy, not a suggestion. Proverbs doesn’t say rest is nice. The rhythms God built into creation aren’t optional upgrades — they’re load-bearing walls.
This Isn’t Just for Coronavirus Season
Jeff, Janie, and Heidy recorded this during the thick of COVID — but the conversation is evergreen. The church planting world was already moving toward distributed models before the pandemic. The pandemic just accelerated the timeline for everyone else.
If you’re planting a church, you are building something that may never have a traditional office. Your volunteer teams are already distributed. Your discipleship is already happening in living rooms and DMs and group chats. Your organizational infrastructure should reflect that reality — not fight it.
Virtual officing isn’t a compromise. For mission-first organizations, it might be the most faithful structure available.
Listen Now and Then Take Action
Hit play on Episode 055, then do one thing: audit your team’s communication tools this week. Are they built for presence or built for outcomes? Make one change — one new rhythm, one documented expectation, one hard boundary — and see what shifts.
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