Director of Engagement

Description

Classification: Exempt

Status: Regular, Full Time

Reports to: Senior Associate Pastor

Location: Chicago (Hybrid, in office 3 days a week)

The Director of Engagement provides strategic leadership to help people move from initial connection with Fourth Presbyterian Church into meaningful participation, relationships, service, spiritual growth, and leadership. This role designs and oversees an integrated engagement pathway that welcomes newcomers, strengthens connection among members and regular participants, expands volunteer involvement, and equips people to contribute their gifts to the life and mission of the congregation.

Reporting to the Senior Associate Pastor, the Director of Engagement works across ministry areas to create clear, hospitable, and sustainable systems for connection. The position supervises the Director of Volunteer Ministry and collaborates closely with pastoral staff, program staff, communications staff, Chicago Lights staff, and congregational leaders.

The Director of Engagement combines strategic planning, organizational leadership, data-informed decision-making, theological reflection, and a warm personal presence. The successful candidate will convey that engagement is not merely attendance or recruitment but the cultivation of a diverse Christian community in which people are known, growing, serving, and participating in God’s work in Chicago and beyond.

• Oversee systems that ensure visitors and prospective members receive timely, personal, and appropriate follow-up.
• Strengthen processes for welcoming, orienting, and integrating newcomers into the worshiping and serving community.
• Partner with pastors and ministry leaders to plan and evaluate membership exploration, new-member welcome, and opportunities for relationship-building after membership.
• Create opportunities for newcomers and newer members to meet staff, lay leaders, peers, and ministry representatives in settings that encourage genuine connection.

• Oversee a Sunday morning community time (coffee hour) in which worshipers and program participants are actively welcomed and invited into meaningful connection.
• Develop practices that foster connection among online participants in worship and ministry programs.
• Support engagement initiatives that are attentive to the realities of church membership, including varied schedules, commuting patterns, online participation, and changing patterns of religious affiliation.
• Encourage accessible and inclusive participation for people of different ages, abilities, family configurations, cultural backgrounds, socioeconomic circumstances, and levels of familiarity with church life.

• Establish reliable systems for tracking engagement activity, follow-up, volunteer involvement, attendance or participation patterns, and movement through key pathways.
• Establish reliable systems for tracking engagement activity, follow-up, volunteer involvement, attendance or participation patterns, and movement through key pathways.
• Develop dashboards, reports, and regular review practices that give staff and lay leaders an understandable picture of engagement health and emerging needs.
• Partner with Communications to ensure that invitations, registration pages, emails, digital content, and printed materials provide clear next steps and reflect the church’s hospitality.

• Build and equip teams of congregational leaders who can welcome, connect, mentor, host, recruit, and accompany others into deeper participation.
• Provide consultation, resources, and training to ministry staff and volunteer leaders on…