When a Pastor sees it’s Time to Move on…

Another great reason to pause between pastoral tenures is that, if the previous pastor left after a fruitful 10 years, the congregation will probably wish to replicate him/her. But what if the outgoing pastor left because they felt that they had made their contribution and could see that a different kind of contribution would be required to meet the needs of the church’s next season? In that case replicating – or just getting a younger version of – the previous pastor would be to hobble the next stage of the journey.

Viewed another way, if the previous pastor arrived in 2011, then looking for another-pastor-the-same would be to recruit for the needs of 2011 and not for the very different landscape of 2021.

For these reasons it is helpful for a church to pause between pastors and allow an Intentional Interim to work with the people towards a keener awareness of today’s pastoral and missional environment, and so align the selection criteria to 2021 and not 2011.

MINISTRY BY THE PEOPLE OR FOR THE PEOPLE?

When a Group’s Culture Shifts while its Values Stay the Same…

Assessing the season in lives of the congregation’s members is another vital aspect of the kind of time-telling a pastoral search team needs to do.

In 2016 Riverside Family Church had 10 core families in its number who were pioneers, generators and leaders of ministry. The couple newly married in 2016 now has a baby. The couple with one child in 2016 now has two plus a new baby. The parents who in 2016 had young kids is now responsible for teenagers with Sunday morning sport fixtures and three evenings a week booked for team commitments. The mum who in 2016 was a classroom teacher may now have the greater responsibility of a department leader etc. The leading elders may have now be off all the rosters as they follow the grey-nomad trail, holidaying around Australia “spending their kid’s inheritance!”

For all those kinds of reasons people who were previously driving and generating ministries, and who still love and identify with the church, may now be frequently absent, only semi-present when they do attend and/or needing to receive ministry themselves!

Clearly the culture (meaning the patterns of behaviour) of Riverside Family Church has shifted. Patterns of participation and attendance have altered. The ministries the core people previously generated have lost the collaborative, all-in-this-together, grassroots vibe and have become more consumerized. However even though the congregation’s culture has shifted the people’s values have actually remained unaltered. The people of Riverside Family Church love the “grassroots, amateur, all in this together” kind of vibe and are ill at ease with more consumerized or staff-led ministries. So there is a dissonance.

The 10 core families long for the collaborative family-feel they had enjoyed before – even if they can no longer be the ones to generate it. They now look to the small staff team to create an energetic environment that in 2016 was generated by 20 or 30 people.

The story of Riverside Family Church illustrates how the leadership and pastoral needs of the church can shift very dramatically in a very short time. Such changes directly impact both the PD and selection criteria for any new pastor. So it’s important to have the measure of them. Not to take a moment to “tell the time” in that way, or simply to wheel out the PD from 3 years ago clearly is going to miss the mark. If a search team reads the time wrong it will not only miscalculate how much leadership energy the new pastor can bank on from among the people – but will also misdiagnose what shape the new pattern of ministry will need to take.

Churches sometimes read the fall-off of corporate energy as a symptom of the concluding phase of a pastor’s tenure or as an affect of the interregnum between pastors. However the opposite is often the reality. Often it is as they sense participation-fatigue in the congregation that pastors make the call to conclude their tenure. Sometimes it’s that way round. And in reality, within the most common time-frame of a pastoral search, participation levels usually lift as members of the congregation pull together to get through and offer the healthiest environment for the new incumbent. So it is important to read the signs right.

If a church optimistically assumes that any participation-fatigue will simply fix itself when the hopeful new pastor arrives, it will be setting itself up for a significant disappointment – a disappointment it will be the new pastor’s job to communicate. Not the best way to begin a new chapter.

THE ONLY WAY IS UP…OR DOWN

What season is it in your church’s life-cycle?

To recruit successfully a church will need to have a good gauge if what cycle of life it is in. With a high participation rate it maybe in a growth cycle. In a season of maturation it maybe in a stall or a decline in terms of numbers or participation. In a later season of maturation members may find themselves with more time and energy on their hands to participate, others may join the grey nomadic lifestyle and pillars of previous generations may step back.

These changes impact what ministries are retained or started and how they are led. They also impact the financial needs of the church – and therefore the new pastor’s remit. More than once I have been appointed to churches which had successfully used deficit financing to fuel growth. Each year a deficit would be budgeted for, offset by anticipated growth. In a church that I was involved in planting in the UK we financed growth that way for five years in a row. Successfully. A certain kind of pioneering leadership is required for that season, and it can be an exciting period in a church’s life cycle. However if a church is using deficit financing during an extended period of decline it will only push itself faster into even deeper trouble. If the church’s debts exceed the value of is assets the trouble may be terminal.

On two occasions I have been invited into churches which have been on such a downward curve, trying to maintain a large paid staff on the basis of income levels 7-10 years out of date. They had got used to deficit financing during their growth phase but had not undertaken an exercise of “telling the time” to notice that their church operations were now in an extended period of decline. The decline was not obvious from the pews because in each case attendance was stable. What was declining was participation and income. This meant that on both occasions I arrived at a church where the congregation was totally out of touch with the status of their church’s business life.

PERSONAL CASE STUDY

In the weeks before I began at Hillside Fellowship two significant things happened. Firstly, a major tranche of financially committed and active members left to plant a church. Secondly, not recognizing the loss of income this represented, the board of elders decided to add a full time assistant seniorpastor to the church’s already overburdened payroll commitments. These decisions were made after seven consecutive years of running the church at a loss. From week to week nothing of the financial misfortunes of the church was reported tothe congregation. For this reason when I arrived members of the congregation fully expected me to begin my tenure by hiring another full-time member of staff and purchasing a building with the $1million they thought was in the bank. It was my job to break the unfortunate news to the congregation that it was running at a loss and had been for seven years, that 70% of its savings were gone because of this policy, and that at the current rate of decline it had no more than 30 months of life left before reaching insolvency. The 30 month timeline contracted to less than 24 months when a second tranche of financially engaged members left to plant another church. Squaring the church’s books, engaging with a volunteers transition, and the major payroll overspend became urgent matters of business.

As you can imagine, breaking this news to the congregation was deeply embarassing to the board of elders who had kept these realities hidden from the congregation. What they heard from me was hard to believe for the congregation who thought their church had been doing fine. Needless to say the staff transitions which had to follow were painful for the church to absorb and deeply embarassing to the board as I sought to complement the board’s line up with additional new members who would be more aware of their legal and fiducary responsibilities. The polity of this church was not that of a megachurch where the senior pastor hires and fires his board. This was the other way around where the pastor is the employee of the board. Every change we made had to be decided by the board, the same board which had resisted looking at the books for a straight seven year streak. Yet it was terrirtory we had to journey through together in order to get the church round a tight turn.

As you can imagine, this was a very pressured context in which to minister, and not a charter for popularity. In retrospect it would have been easier fior everybody if, following the departure of the previous pastor, Hillside Fellowship had paused to engage an Intentional Interim, to help them tell the time, acknowledge the church’s real situation, and square the budget before hiring the next pastor. It is far easier for a church doctor such as an archdeacon or an intentional interim, someone with no skin in the game, to facililitate that process. It also helps the board to save face and engage with the kind of professional development that will help them take on board the fiducary responsibilities which are legally theirs.

Credit where it’s due, once they realized the reality of the church’s situation, staff and elders did get to grips with the needs of the hour. Nobody was sacked. Nobody was named and shamed, and in the two years of that assignment we did move through a volunteers transition, staff transition and eldership transition. But the necessary speed of these changes meant that what I had anticipated as a longer tenure proved to be a more surgical assignment, and carrying the emotional angst of a congregation and eldership doing this kind of work through gritted teeth was not a pleasant experience for me personally. I take pride in what we were able to achieve in what we were able to achieve, but in retrospect, had Hillside Fellowship done that interim work before my arrival, my job at that particular church would have been a whole lot less painful. But the call of an intentional interim is a powerful one, so perhaps that’s just how it had to be!

This is the kind of help that the Intentional Interim has to offer, though ultimately the responsibility for observing these trends lies with the board. But where reprofiling is clearly needed its best choice is to bring the congregation into such an awareness, and hire an Intnetional Interim before envisioning the next pastor’s job and issuing a call.

TAKING THE TIME TO TELL THE TIME

Telling the time is an exercise that is not best done by the new pastor – for all the same reasons outlined in my post on Naming Problems and Consensus Decision-making. Some denominations employ Archdeacons, or District Superintendents to do this work with congregations during an interim period. If it is not part of the culture of your network or denomination it is a strategic moment for your church Board to step up and engage the services of an external consultant or Intention Interim. A healthy process will provide your church with an accurate read of the environment in which your new pastor will be operating.

If an accurate telling of the time informs the congregation and the search team as they shape up PD and search criteria then you will have positioned your church well to match the pastor to the new environment – and help the congregation adjust to new expectations.

When congregations are invited into these kinds of conversations they are usually remarkably perceptive and adaptive. Including the whole community in the assessment process – from the youngest to the oldest, and the newest to the longest standing – is a vital aspect of a “telling the time” exercise. It takes a bit of nerve. It means taking time to pause when people might prefer to “crack on!” And it may need a small number of facilitated congregational meetings. But in my experience it is an investment well worth the effort.