Matching Pastoral Candidates and Churches

A Guide for Search Committees and Candidates

Joseph L. Umidi

• Publisher: Kregel Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780825477676
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

A guide to both sides of the candidate process With humor and insight born of experience, Joseph Umidi helps candidates approach a selection process by clarifying their personal vision for ministry, connecting heart to heart with decision makers, and asking the right people the right questions. Search committee members will find guidance in analyzing a church's readiness for change, determining what is most needed, and evaluating a candidate's strength in meeting those needs. Eleven appendixes provide key model documents that will help the decision-making process.

PART

ONE

A TIME FOR RELATIONSHIP RENEWAL

CHAPTER 1

MATCHES NOT MADE IN HEAVEN

John was one of our best students. He already had a dozen years of pastoral experience before he came to seminary to complete his degree. The other students seemed to gravitate toward him, especially after they heard him preach in homiletics class. After graduation, he accepted a call to a growing church in Georgia. This church was a pastor’s dream come true: an influential radio ministry, a thriving Christian day school, large and sophisticated facilities. We were all certain that John was about to step into the fullness of his career. After all, he was one of our best graduates.

One year later, I got the all-too-familiar phone call:

I’m quitting the ministry. This church isn’t what I thought it was when I agreed to be its pastor. My wife and I just can’t take the pressure anymore—we’re tired of serving people who only want to be served. Can you recommend me to a teaching position somewhere?

Twenty years ago, sociologist John Norval of Notre Dame claimed that one in four Catholic priests and one in eight Protestant ministers quit the ministry each year.¹ More recent estimates suggest that the number of Protestant ministers who quit each year has grown to one in six, which equates to more than fifty thousand of the nation’s total of three hundred fifty thousand ministers. If these numbers are accurate, more pastors quit the ministry each year than attended the historic 1996 Promise Keepers pastor’s conference in Atlanta. Imagine each of those forty thousand leaders deciding to leave the ministry on the same day and then emptying the Georgia Dome en masse, and you can begin to see the enormity of this critical situation. Sadly, some of our most able pastors, like John, have joined this massive exodus from the clergy.

What about those who stay in the ministry? Research shows that the most effective and enriching church ministries are those that are led by pastors who have invested at least six years in the same church community.

Church researcher George Barna notes an alarming trend over the past twenty years: The average tenure in the same church for senior pastors has decreased from seven years to four years.² Worse yet, Barna reports that six out of every ten senior pastors surveyed say that what they have experienced at their present church has not increased their passion for ministry. When our leaders are not growing in spiritual passion, is it any wonder that the fire of God is lost in the lives of the people?

Clearly, many church leaders, though faithful to their calling, are disillusioned with the ministries they were once certain would bring them many fruitful years of service. A significant part of this crisis stems from an incomplete and often haphazard approach to matching a church’s needs with a pastoral candidate’s strengths and calling. The resulting disillusionment on both sides, from unfulfilled expectations, has become an unbearable source of stress on pastors and churches in every city and town in America. This book is designed to help churches and potential leaders avoid the painful experience of “mismatching.”

Toxic Churches: The Terminators

Many churches today are being inundated by dozens of eager, freshly ordained young men and women applying for limited positions. I interviewed a pastoral candidate in November 1996, who told me that three months prior he had been one of 380 applicants to a particular church in Pennsylvania. While the laborers may be few, the leaders are standing in long lines waiting for doors to open. Unfortunately, what they find once they walk through the open doors may not be what they expected.

It’s no secret that far too many churches and Christian ministries have earned horrendous reputations for unfairly terminating staff members or—worse yet—inflicting upon them painful pressure to resign. John C. LaRue Jr., former research director for Christianity Today, revealed that up to one-third of the churches he studied that were conducting a pastoral search had forced the previous pastor to leave, and up to one-fourth of all current pastors have been forced out at some point in their careers.³ Unfortunately, four out of every ten who were forced out have not yet returned to pastoral ministry.

The shocking part of this phenomenon is that 62 percent of the ousted pastors were forced out by churches that had already done this to one or more pastors in the past. These “repeat offender” churches comprise at least 15 percent of all U.S. churches! They have contributed to the development of a “victim” mentality among a significant number of wounded leaders and their families.

Although a majority of the pastors in the survey were terminated for biblically sound reasons, such as moral or financial compromise, a significant minority (43 percent) were forced out by conflict with a small but influential faction within the congregation, or by one or two members of the church’s governing board. According to LaRue, it typically took only seven to ten people (which equated to a mere three or four percent of the congregation) to push the pastor out the door. A significant number of leaders were fired simply because their style conflicted with some small power clique. The majority of these pastors felt that the church’s leaders had been deliberately dishonest during the interview process about the history of such conflict patterns within the church.

Pastor Bill sat in the back of our church one Sunday. After the service, he shared with us that he had recently been terminated in a coup led by a small group of leaders who were all family related. After he was fired, he discovered that this church had followed the same course with three other pastors over the years. Bill is now in a national restoration ministry called Pastor in Residence, which mentors wounded leaders back to full confidence in their calling.⁴ A good pastor is a terrible thing to waste. We cannot afford to lose even one.

Unlike Pastor Bill, who is on the way toward healing, many terminated pastors carry their pain and disillusionment with them to the next position or to a vocation outside the ordained ministry. Here is what one of them said to us about his termination:

I felt stunned by what they did and how they did it…. [I was] told at the church door after the service that I was through and not to come back. I felt such a sense of sadness for Christ’s church that a congregation would be willing to act in such a heartless way; even secular businesses do not treat their leaders with such contempt. My emotions felt like they had been dumped on a pile of scrap metal called shame. I knew that I would be the subject of discussion down at the local donut shop that week. After I ran out of “what do I do now, Lord?” cries, I found that my ability to trust in others had been shattered. I even had a difficult time entrusting myself to my wife. I felt like a failure as a provider to my family and an embarrassment to my boys. They were forming their ideas of what a “man” is by watching how these people treated their father and how I was responding…. And then came the loneliness. Former associates and friends distanced themselves from me because “he’s in trouble,” “he’s involved in something,” “where there’s smoke there’s fire.” What I needed was their love, their trust, their support…. I have personally witnessed abandonment in combat in Southeast Asia and I clearly recall the aloneness of the troops who had been isolated through no action of their own. The same could be said for pastors who’ve been squeezed out. Believe me, the abandonment is one and the same.

What about their families? Think of the upheaval at home when a spouse is pressured to leave a ministry. LaRue discovered that three-fourths of these terminated pastoral families had to move out of the area, and two-thirds of the pastor’s spouses had to change jobs. One in ten of these pastors experienced a major illness within twelve months of being forced out.

But it is not only the banished pastor and his family who suffer. Toxic churches also pay a price. Almost ten percent of the congregation will leave a church that forces a pastoral departure, many of them following the terminated pastor to his new position.⁵

Toxic Pastors: Conditional Lovers

Because toxic relationships between pastors and churches are often caused by the pastor himself, today’s generation of churchgoers have learned to question authority. They ask some tough but legitimate questions, like whether a pastor’s faith and commitment is nurturing his own “wholeness.” In other words, does the pastor “walk his talk”? Is the pastor’s physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual life integrated and healthy, or is he as fragmented as some discredited secular leaders who have crashed and burned in our culture? Leaders who lack balance or wholeness often have a hard time receiving and giving God’s unconditional love and grace. The people in the pews begin to wonder whether the gospel being preached will really work for them when it doesn’t seem to work for the pastor himself.

“Physician, heal thyself” is the cry of churches whose leaders have self-defeating personality traits; physically destructive lifestyles; addictions to drivenness or other neurotic patterns; or a leadership style rooted in unhealed insecurity, anxiety, or control issues.⁶ Too often, a toxic minister finds faults in his parishioners that he is not owning up to in his own life. In Matthew 7:3, Jesus talked about this “splinter and beam” syndrome: “And why do you look at the speck in your brother’s eye, but do not consider the plank in your own eye?” (NKJV). Of course, this admonition cuts both ways.

What do churches that terminate toxic pastors cite as the reasons for choosing this painful path? Regrettably, one of the top reasons for a congregation firing a minister is the feeling that they are unliked or conditionally loved by him.⁷ The most common expression of conditional love by a minister is his inability to accept parishioners as they are and where they are.

A second reason that churches become disillusioned with their pastors is when they continually hammer home a “pet doctrine,” or get stuck on a single emphasis, or preach around their own particular blind spots. This malady has sometimes been called the “hobbyhorse” syndrome, because some pastors get on a particular theme and can’t seem to get off. Vocational ministry is a potential breeding ground for a subtle form of idolatry, particularly theological or doctrinal idolatry. Some unbalanced ministers worship their theology of God rather than God Himself.

A third reason for disillusionment is the unexpressed expectations that go with the job. Louis McBurney’s list of unrealistic expectations of the average pastor are: He must be sinless, he must be constantly available, he must be capable of meeting any need, he must have no spiritual needs or emotional problems himself, and he must never let on that he has a material need.⁸

Pastors also have unrealistic expectations. One is for them to assume their parishioners will respect them simply because they have the title or office of pastor. Without earning credibility through the way they exercise their authority, these leaders are relying on the limited authority of position rather than the long-term authority of relationship. Ultimately, this will prove as destructive as the man who continually demands his wife submit to him because he has the position of husband, while ignoring his responsibility to love her as Christ loved the church.

Most people simply want to know that their leaders can be trusted and that they know where they are going. Building trust and sharing the vision must be addressed clearly in the “courtship season” before a leader is called. By following the guidelines in this text, churches and candidates can greatly minimize the chances of relational “divorce.”

CHAPTER 2

LEAVING AND CLEAVING

The first step in a successful leadership transition is the development of an effective strategy for dealing with the past. Saying farewell to the departing leader and his or her fa...