Church Administration Course Series

Online For Alumni For Church Staff For Clergy

If you’re a pastor who feels more comfortable preaching a sermon on Leviticus than crafting a budget, you may have found yourself saying “No one ever taught me how to run a church.” If you’re a lay leader wondering how to apply your management experience to the ministry team you’re leading, you may have found yourself saying something similar: “No one ever taught me how to run a church.”

Whatever you emphasize when you muse about your lack of preparation for the church administration responsibilities you now hold, this specialization is for you.

Program Details

In this self-paced online course series, you’ll learn how to engage the work of leading management theorists and business leaders on strategic management, finance, HR, and other foundational topics while—crucially—maintaining a theological focus that situates these practices within the church’s mission of discipleship, worship, and witness.

You’ll also develop practical skills, including how to steward your time more effectively, cultivate a clear sense of vision and mission, conduct performance reviews, and implement sound finance practices. And if (as we strongly recommend) you complete this series together with other key leaders in your church, you’ll also build invaluable shared understandings and convictions about the management of your church that will set the table for effective collaboration for years to come.

By the end of this series, you will be able to:

Explain what is (or ought to be) distinctive about church leadership and administration.
Draw upon management excellence and know-how in a theologically appropriate way.
Develop a plan to steward your time more effectively.
Implement key practices of strategic management in your church.
Execute basic staff stewardship practices, including hiring processes and performance reviews.
Establish financial policies and procedures that enable your church to use financial resources wisely.
If completing the series as a team, develop shared understandings and convictions about some of the core operational issues faced by churches.

Theology and Time Management

Estimated time commitment: 15 hours | CEUs awarded: 1.5

This course draws on appropriate management excellence and know-how to serve as a tool for achieving theological goals. You will learn how to utilize management principles and techniques to make your church a more faithful church, rather than turning it into a secular enterprise.

This course is designed so that it can be taken by a single individual or with multiple members of your church leadership team. We suggest that you use this course as an opportunity to begin building your church’s foundational theology and practice of church admin with your leadership team as a whole.

The majority of the course activities will utilize a workbook that will allow you to reflect on your pastoral stewardship of church admin. Our hope is for you to walk away from this course with a clear plan that will help organize your work in the months ahead.

Strategic Management for Churches

Estimated time commitment: 15 hours | CEUs awarded: 1.5

In this course you will learn how to approach strategic management theologically as strategic stewardship for your church. Organizations widely use strategic management (or strategic planning) to define their future strategic direction and how to achieve it. In contrast, strategic stewardship for churches seeks to reappropriate strategic management by discerning God’s direction for the church and pursuing God-centered ways of realizing it.

This course will focus on select key elements of strategic management: vision, core values and culture, goals and objectives, and metrics. We will first explore how each key element functions as a useful management tool. Then, we will reappropriate the key element for theological ends of our church stewardship to God; hence, strategic stewardship. Moreover, we will unpack what pastoral leadership for strategic stewardship should entail. Lastly, we will provide exemplar stories from Duke Divinity School alums, who will share how they each approached and implemented a key element in their church setting.

Human Resources Stewardship for Churches

Estimated time commitment: 5 hours | CEUs awarded: 0.5

Church leaders are often surprised to find out how much of their time is spent managing staff and volunteers and handling personnel issues. This course is designed to enable clergy and lay leaders serving the church in congregational settings or in other church-related venues to develop healthy frameworks and practices for human resource management. While as church leaders you rely first and foremost upon God to successfully perform your ministries, this work is accomplished through human resources—staff and volunteers. It is your responsibility, as one entrusted to minister in God’s name, to steward those human resources in the best manner possible.

In this course, you will connect human resource management to theological principles, and we will provide real-life examples and case studies of what to do and not do as a manager, all while learning the basics of human resource management in a church-related setting.

Financial Management for Churches

Estimated time commitment: 5 hours | CEUs awarded: 0.5

This course, part of the Church Administration Certification series, is not designed to teach the “nuts and bolts” of accounting, financial reporting, or financial management. Rather, this course provides an overview of church financial administration and management for professional ministry staff.

It is also designed to provide pastors with enough knowledge to ask the right questions of their staff and advisory committees, and an intuition of common pitfalls of church financial management, to help guard against imprudent financial practices.

This knowledge and intuition can help pastors and ministry staff to be faithful stewards of the resources entrusted to them by their congregants, so that they can be prudently used to help build and advance the Reign of God in the congregation and in the community.

Courses

Learn more about the individual courses in this series below.

Theology & Time Management

This self-paced online course introduces a theological approach to church administration, showing how administrative work can serve the church’s call to discipleship, formation, witness, and worship while equipping leaders with practical tools for faithful stewardship.

Strategic Management for Churches

This self-paced online course explores how strategic management can be approached as strategic stewardship, helping pastors and lay leaders discern God’s direction for their church and lead their communities in God-centered, theologically grounded ways of realizing that vision.

Human Resource Stewardship for Churches

This self-paced course connects human resource management to theological principles, and provides real-life examples and case studies of what to do and not do as a manager, all while learning the basics of human resource management in a church-related setting.

Financial Management for Churches

This self-paced online course is designed to help pastors and ministry staff identify important management considerations in order to be faithful stewards of the resources entrusted to them.

You may register for any number of individual courses in the course series for $59 per course, or you may register for all four courses for a discounted price of $189. In order to get the discounted price, you must register for all four courses in the same transaction.

The registration deadline is 11:59 pm ET on April 17, 2026. Registered learners will gain access to their courses hosted in Duke University’s Canvas system on April 23, 2026. You will have until October 20, 2026 to complete any and all courses you have registered for.

What to expect during registration:

Register online for the course(s) or full series, as desired, using a debit or credit card with our secure, real-time registration system. Add the course(s) to your shopping cart and follow the instructions for checking out.
You will receive an email with next steps almost immediately upon registration. Check your spam or junk folder if you don’t see this.
At the end of the registration window, your course access account will be created. At this time, you will receive an email to activate your account from Duke OIT, and you must complete that process within 72 hours of receipt.
On your course access date, you will receive an email letting you know when you can log in and begin coursework in Canvas.

Email learnmore@duke.edu if you have technical difficulties with registering or paying for your course(s).

Questions?

If you have questions about the content of any particular course or about the course series as a whole, contact us at divinityonline@duke.edu.

Interest List

If you are interested in the Church Administration course series but are unable to register for the Spring 2026 session at this time, join our interest list to be notified when registration opens for the next session.

Join the Interest List

Additional Information

All registrants must meet the following requirements:

Be at least 18 years of age
Possess word processing and internet browser skills
Be fluent in the English language (including reading and writing)
Have reliable internet access and a valid email account (Please note that personal email accounts are preferred to business emails, as they are less likely to be blocked by firewalls and spam filters)
Meet the minimum technical specifications below

In order to earn a non-credit Certificate of Completion from Duke Divinity School for this program, learners must successfully:

Pay fees in full upon registration for all four courses in the program,
Complete the four courses in the program within the six-month access period (beginning on the course access date for a given registration window), or re-register/pay and complete in a later registration window,
Complete all assignments in each course with a minimum score of 80% (learners have unlimited attempts at all graded assignments and tests).

Learners must submit the information about their digital badges (for courses) or Certificate of Completion (for the series) to their denomination to obtain CEUs, awarded as follows, up to a total of 4 CEUs for the entire series:

Church Administration Theology and Time Management - 1.5 CEUs
Strategic Management for Churches - 1.5 CEUs
Human Resource Stewardship for Churches - 0.5 CEUs
Financial Management for Churches - 0.5 CEUs

In order to successfully participate in this course series, participants’ technologies must meet the following minimum requirements:

Operating System:
- Windows XP SP2 or newer
- Mac OS 10.4.11 or higher
- Linux/Unix (any recent version)
Hardware
- 1 Ghz or faster CPU
- 512 MB RAM
- Video card
- Sound card and headphones or speakers
Software
- Any modern Office suite: Microsoft Office, Apple iWork, OpenOffice (free download available at openoffice.org), or LibreOffice.
- Latest version of Adobe Reader/Acrobat Reader (free download available at adobe.com)
Web Browser
- The latest version of Chrome, Edge, Firefox, or Safari. (Other web browsers may work, but may not render all features of the course).
- Cookies and JavaScript must be enabled.
Internet
- Reliable internet connection.
- E-mail account, preferably a personal rather than business email account (to be able to register and to receive e-mail from the system regarding registration, course status, etc.)

Refunds (minus administrative fees) will be provided only if a course or bundle cancellation request is submitted in writing to learnmore@duke.edu at least five business days prior to the course access date (by 11:59 pm ET on April 15, 2026).

Administrative fees:

$10 per course for individual courses,
$30 for the course bundle.

No refunds will be issued for cancellation requests received later than five business days before the course access date.

No extensions will be granted. Students who require additional time to complete the course(s) they registered for will be responsible for re-registering and paying for the course(s) a second time.

Course fees and expenses are sometimes tax deductible. Please consult an accountant concerning this matter. Non-credit programs from the Duke Center for Teaching and Learning do not generate 1098-T forms, in accordance with the following IRS guideline:

Instructions for Forms 1098-E and 1098-T published by the Department of the Treasury, Internal Revenue Service, states “You do not have to file Form 1098-T or furnish a statement for: Courses for which no academic credit is offered, even if the student is otherwise enrolled in a degree program…”

Registrants are not matriculated Duke University students, and university student privileges do not apply to registrants in this program. All programs are offered on a non-credit basis and are not transferable to a degree.

This program is offered exclusively by the Duke Divinity School in coordination with the Duke Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL). The CTL or Duke Divinity School reserve the right to withhold registration or require withdrawal from the program of any learner or registrant.

The materials used in this course are copyrighted and are intended for individual use by registered learners. Unauthorized or illegal use, or attempted use, of these materials will result in a suspension and/or cancellation of the user’s account.

While these courses were designed by and the video content is presented by Duke faculty, the courses do not include any live interactions with these faculty.

Church Administration Course Series

Program Details

Theology and Time Management

Strategic Management for Churches

Human Resources Stewardship for Churches

Financial Management for Churches

Courses

Questions?

Interest List

Additional Information

Contact Us

Directory

Church Administration Course Series

Program Details & Outcomes

Program Details

Series Outcomes

Courses in the Series

Courses

Registration & Enrollment

Questions?

Interest List

Additional Information

Eligibility

Certificate of Completion Requirements

CEU Requirements

Technical Requirements

Refund Policy

Extension Policy

Tax Deductions

Disclaimers