Transition

Question: Receiving a new pastor can feel a little unsettling. Do you have anything in mind that might help ease the transition?

Response: In graduate school I wrote a lot of papers. Most of them I don’t even remember, but one stands out. The paper assigned in my introduction to pastoral leadership class was, “What Every Pastor Needs to Know About ____________.” Every student filled in the blank with whatever they wanted to research. I chose stress.

I don’t know if it was because it was my first semester of seminary or because I was studying something I wanted to study, but I went all out on the topic. Not only did I comb the shelves of our library, but I used our interlibrary privileges with the University of Kentucky to spend hours in their medical library studying stress. I learned a lot.

One of the things that astonished me was learning that stress was produced not only by unwanted change, but wanted change as well. Prior to the paper, I would have thought only “bad” change produced stress. While your question uses the word “unsettling”, a pastoral transition, good or bad, is certainly a time of change and therefore a time of stress.

Most of the research on pastoral transitions focuses on a pastor’s decision, or a church’s decision, for the pastor to leave. There is also a fair amount of writing focused on how a church should function and call a new pastor during an interim period between pastors, but there is very little written how a church and pastor should proceed once a new pastor is selected. Still, having been through a few pastoral transitions, both as a pastor and as a person who was impacted by the transition, I do have some thoughts that will be helpful.

1. People and pastor have to be as clear as possible about who they are, their hopes, their dreams and their expectations. Choosing to be appropriately open, vulnerable, and transparent will help foster good communication and dispel any fear of the hidden or unexpected while building an atmosphere of trust.

2. It’s hard to trust someone when you don’t know someone. While we know a lot about each other, we do not yet really know each other. While we’ve talked a lot about what I will or won’t do as your Senior Pastor, what you really need to know is who I am. That can only come through personal experience. Therefore, we need to invest a lot of time in creating opportunities for us to get know each other, informally. I’m confident that as you get to know me, and I you, any unsettled feelings we might have will be replaced with joyful expectation of what God is doing.

3. As I already mentioned, change creates stress. Only 15% of the American population embraces change. The remaining 85% refuse to go along with change with varying degrees of resistance. As we work on our ministry design, building, and other critical issues, we must be strategic and careful not to overwhelm people with change nor frustrate others with a lack of progress. That’s one reason why a team approach to leadership will be important. A team is in a better position to strike this balance.