(I purposely did not ask two people very important to me for input into this. Our daughter-in-law Julie is the outstanding administrative assistant to our terrific pastor and friend, Dr. Mike Miller. To solicit their input might put them on the spot. So, the first time they see this will be when we post it.)
Originally, we called them secretaries. I’ve often wondered if it was because they were “keepers of the secrets.”
Then, seeking to magnify their work in their own eyes as well as to impress upon the church members their importance, we began calling them administrative assistants. Some call them “ministry assistants.” All of these are good.
They’re almost always women.
I used to be a secretary. For two years after college, I worked in the production office of a cast iron pipe plant doing everything that secretaries do for the production manager. I took dictation, typed his letters, ran the teletype, typed up production work orders from the purchase orders, and emptied the spittoon. Mr. Clyde Hooper, my boss, chewed cigars. He would cut one into three pieces and slip a section into his jaw. That practice, he told me, resulted from the 1920s in a chemical plant where no one was allowed to smoke. At any rate, having grown up on a farm where I mucked out cattle stalls and hog pens, emptying that spittoon was nothing.
There’s possibly no better training for being a supervisor than having been a lowly employee. In the church office, I never minded asking my “assistants” to fetch coffee in the morning, because at least they didn’t have to clean out my spittoon! (I clean it out myself.)