Episode Transcript
Ed Short, welcome to my podcast. I'm so glad to be able to hang out with you this afternoon. Privileged to hang out with you, Bart, really. Ed, as I introduced you in the introduction of this podcast as a ministry colleague, that's what we are. That's what we have been. I'd also consider you a friend and someone that I look up to in ministry. You've, well, you've been around the block a little bit. A couple of laps, actually. A couple of laps around the block. Why don't you start by sharing with our audience a bit of your ministry background and how you ended up doing what you're doing today? Okay. I am super passionate about the local church and seeing it be effective. Been a lead pastor for about the twenty five years, been an executive pastor before that and a youth pastor before that. If you cut me, you will find that I really value reaching lost people. um growing christ followers because not only are they learning the word they're living the word and then equipping people to do the work of the ministry I really think that the ministry of a church ninety percent of it ought to happen outside of the building ten percent in the building and I work with a lot of pastors do a lot of coaching do a lot of consulting help churches find uh their next pastor and uh so I've been doing that for the last uh twenty years Yes, which is a big part of the reason I wanted to have you on the show today. You and I, we partner together in a lot of our ministries, partnerships with churches that are going through a season of revitalization or refreshing or even replanting. And one of the things that we've been tasked to do with a number of churches over the course of the last number of years is help them find new pastors. And When you joined our team, that was one of the highlights for me because I knew that you'd had years and years of experience of coaching churches through a search process, finding candidates, vetting candidates, and even preparing those candidates for what they were in for when they started in a new church. So let's talk a little bit about some of that experience. I've got some bullet points that I shared with you earlier, and I know that we might stick to a few of those, but let's start with this question. When a church is losing or has lost a long-tenured pastor, let's say somebody for fifteen years or longer, What are some of the unique challenges that the church faces in their search process that another church that burns through pastors more quickly might not face? Well, I think that one of the keys there is they probably don't realize how much of the flavor of the church is really their former or retiring pastor. He's had a major influence on them. For some of the people probably on the search team or the screening team, they've never had any other pastor. And so their grid's a little bit narrow. So I think just to understand that, I would call timeout if I were in a situation like that and say, hey, what we have to do is we've got to assess where we are as a ministry. Because I think churches, like if you've had a pastor for thirty plus years, you haven't hired a newly pastor for thirty plus years. You have this idea that you just go to Walmart, go down aisle thirty seven on the left hand side, halfway down. There's the stock of pastors. You just pick one. And probably if you really like your current pastor, he looks a lot like him. If you don't, he's on the opposite side of the store. He's way over here. So I think you call timeout and you do an assessment that says, hey, how effective are we? What are we doing really well? What are we not doing well? Every church that I work with pretty much wants to skip that portion and get right to, let's go find the guy. So I think it starts with assessment. Then you got to take the time with the leadership team and begin to dream about where you want to go. So now you understand where you are, the good, the bad, the ugly, and where we want to go. And we ought to go out and find a pastor that can help us get from point A to To point B. If you don't do that, what happens is he comes in and he thinks you're here and he wants to go here. You want to go east. He wants to go west. Your pastor is going to last two years. Now, if you do the homework, if you assess, if you set the vision, you put that then in the posting so you understand the flavor that you're looking for, more than likely you can find somebody that's going to be a fit. There's a saying, which I'm sure you're familiar with, which is the guy after the guy is never the guy, right? When you've had that guy for thirty plus years who you love, who maybe was even your church planter, right? And you go to replace that person. Oftentimes it's it feels like a match made in heaven for about five minutes and then it can go south very quickly. Why do you think that is? Why do you think the guy after the guy so often has a difficult time being the next guy? I think it goes back to the vision piece. I don't think the leadership team has determined we are going north and they sell north to the congregation before we find the guy that's going to help us go north. Because if there's adjustments that are going to be made in the vision, it's going to appear they're being made because of the new guy. where it ought to be the elder team, the overseer team, the deacon team, whatever your leadership structure is. It ought to be those individuals that are determining the direction. And oh, by the way, we found a guy who wants to go in the same direction that we want to go. Now, one of the things that happens often, Ed, when you and I are working with churches that have lost or are losing a long time tenured pastor is that there really isn't anyone in the church that has the visionizing and leadership capacity to even envision anything new or different from where the church is. You've had one pastor who's been there, who sort of set the course, the church has gone that course, And the idea or the prospect of going in any different direction is anathema. Like, why wouldn't the next guy just want to come and pick up the baton and go exactly down the same lane, running on the same track that our previous pastor was? What do you do in a situation when the church simply doesn't have the leaders in place. They don't have qualified elders. They don't have those visionary people, but they, they, they know that maybe the church has been in decline or they've been stagnant for some time. How, how do they go about finding this guy who can help them? That's a great question, Bart. I think the answer is, um, you got to bring in an outside person who doesn't have any bias one way or the other. Who's going to ask a lot of hard questions and, and uh before you bring that guy in by the way you better make sure that you're on the same page with him at least you know you want to go north he wants to go north now it's safe now you bring in somebody who's going to ask a lot of hard questions go back to that assessment piece and you're going to all of a sudden discover we're still going to go north but but the way we went north was route we're going to take i-neighty-five And we're going to bring in a guy who's going to have new ideas. If a guy's been your pastor for thirty seven years, for instance, he probably has some ideas that are thirty seven years old. And he's still doing this, which maybe worked back then, but might not work very well today. So an outside source coming in could really greatly, greatly help you. So tell me a little bit about what a search process would look like for a church that's going through a transition or has gone through a transition. They've got a pastoral vacancy. Maybe it's been thirty years since they've found a new pastor. The last time they searched for a pastor was, you know, we're recording this in twenty twenty five. It was nineteen ninety five. A lot of things have changed. What does a search committee, what does a search team need to think through? What do they need to do? What's the process they need to follow in order to go and find a new pastor? Yeah, well, I think they need to after they've taken the time to assess after and they wouldn't be the screening team, but the leadership team, after they've taken the time to assess after they've taken the time to dream of the future. Now they've got to say, Okay, what kind of guy do we need to go from here to there? That's what I would call the posting. You and I put out hundreds of postings, and most postings are very generic, and that's a mistake. I want that posting to be so clear that when somebody reads it, they go, that's not me. You mean it has to say more than he has an MDiv and he meets the qualifications of elders? He's an expository preacher. He's a this preacher. He loves Jesus. He's been this, that, and the other thing. That's not it. You know, like if a church really has been good but not great, then I'm looking for a pastor that is a next step guy. He can help us take that. So he has to be somewhat of a risk taker. He has to be driven to a point. Now, if you bring in a guy that's hyper-driven when a guy before him was a typical shepherd who went incredibly slow, that guy's going to last two years. because the people aren't ready for the pace. He thinks he's going thirty miles an hour. The people think he's going eighty miles an hour. When you have a situation like that, what can a search team and or a leadership team do to prevent putting unrealistic expectations on their new pastor when their new pastor comes in? Well, I think one of the things would be it is not bad to be without a full time pastor. An interim guy could really help a lot because it allows everybody to come up for air. The new guy's not going to his preaching style is not going to be compared so much to the former pastor that's been there. Thirty five years is preaching style. So to to wrestle that piece through. And then four, it goes back to who's really going to lead the church. So if you're in a church of fifty seven people, it's a lot different to being in church of three, four, five, six hundred. Right. The larger church probably has some capable leaders who really could. And they have credibility with the congregation. They're the ones that share the big picture components of the new vision so that when the guy comes, people go, wow. He does seem to be the guy, and he wants to go north. We want to go north. Let's see if it's a match. The other thing that goes along with that, it's not just we got a match of a guy that his theology is our theology, and his philosophy of ministry is our philosophy of ministry, but you got to find a guy that's a fit, and I talk to churches a lot about picture yourself in a small boat on a lake fishing with one person all day. If you don't fit, that's going to be a dreadful day. And you're hiring someone that you better like to be in a small boat with them fishing all day. There's a fit. I mean, when you're with them, it's enjoyable, right? So if your grid is this and the new guy's grid is this, even though he might be amazing at doing that, that's... probably going to become annoying at some point. Well, let me ask you a question then. What do we do in the actual search process, the interview process, the candidating process that gives us the best chance to see if this is a good chemistry fit? I mean, that's the word that you're looking for there, right? It's relational, it's chemistry, it's cultural. What are some of the things that we can do to make sure that we've got a right match? so after you have put the posting out somebody's a lot of somebodies have responded and some of them are pretty easy to go no no this might be an interesting person this might be an interesting person so after you have walked through some of that process maybe they've filled out a questionnaire or two maybe you've zoomed with them you think you know them at that point you don't so what I would do after I narrowed that process down maybe fifty people threw their name in the hat and twenty were berries ago no no no no no thirty might have gotten some kind of uh questionnaire and uh fifteen made the cut to get the next question there and seven made the cut to zoom with them now we've narrowed the seven down we got a top three and we go let's pick the top one we're not going to candidate him yet but let's bring him and his wife in to hang out with us for three four days And yeah, it's an expense, but you're saving yourself a lot of hassle. So come in. And it's not a three or four day interview. It's come in. Let's just do life together. Let's hang out. Let's go bowling. I don't know why anybody would want to go bowling, but let's go bowling. The advantage of bowling, if you really think about it, is it's pretty boring. So what do you do? You talk the whole time. If you're not throwing a ball, you're talking. So it's that talking. It's like, did I leave the conversation filled up? Did I leave the conversation drained? Was I neutral? Will he relate not only to the people we have, but the people we want to reach? Like, I'm pretty passionate. I know you're pretty passionate about reaching unchurched people. Like if he doesn't relate to unchurched people, he might be a great preacher, at least in my church. He can't be the guy because you cut him and he's not going to bleed the blood of evangelism. So when I'm with him, I can begin to sense that. And I think the team can begin to sense that. That time is far more important than any kind of Q&A thing that you're going to have with him. Yeah. I think one of the things that we experience often is a sense of urgency with churches. Oftentimes when a pastor is leaving or has left, or in some cases has passed away, there's an urgency to backfill that position. Now you've addressed that already in one way by finding an interim pastor, Let's be honest. You and I both know this. It's really difficult to find interim pastors. There are ways of doing it and there are creative ways of going to fill the pulpit for a season. It's not the end of the world if you don't have the same level of preaching in that interim season that maybe your previous pastor had. But I think if I call out a mistake, I'll call out two mistakes and then you can address them. One you already sort of have. One is a rush, being in too big of a hurry, feeling like we need to have someone yesterday. And so we don't slow down enough to take the time to date, to court, to get to know each other so that we see if this really is a good match. The other side of that is... We're not willing to spend money to make the process all that it needs to be. We're not willing to spend money on assessments. We're not willing to spend money to fly the candidate and his spouse to the city where we're doing ministry. I actually talked to a pastor just a few weeks ago who a church was offering to bring him out. He found out at the last minute that they weren't bringing his wife out. which was like a huge red flag to me, a huge red flag, right? So a pastoral search process is going to cost you something. You can go to an agency and you can pay an agency that's an expert in this, and that will cost you a lot more. But at the very least, you've got to expect a pastoral search process to cost you something. Why don't you talk a little bit about those things? Well, there is going to be a cost one way or the other. So if you're cheap on the front end, they go, you know what, we're not going to bring the guy in until we're ready to candidate him or we're going to bring him in, but not his wife. We're going to save five hundred bucks for a flight. You find out later that was a mistake. So it is going to cost you and it's going to cost you a lot more because you're going to be doing a new process two, three years from now. So to bring the person in, invest in them. You know, you talked about resources that are after the working genius profile. Great profile helps you to understand. Like if when you do that, half of the responsibilities guys going to have are not in his wheelhouse. He's not the guy. When you look for somebody, if you're looking for somebody that needs to be more low key and he is a massive high D, he's not the guy. Those profiles, they cost you a few bucks, but they're going to save you in the long run. Let me just pause you there. We typically, when we're screening candidates for positions, prospective churches that we're working with, we have them do the working genius, which is a, it's a business assessment. So we'll call it what it is, but it is really, really good. It really gives you, let's face it, being a pastor is a job and it has job responsibilities. And what that working genius assessment does is it gives you an indication of what that person is going to be enthusiastic about and what is going to make them basically want to quit the job over. And so you have to look at that. The second thing we do, we do a disc profile, a disc analysis, which is a personality test. We also do a spiritual gifts assessment. I think it's really important to do a spiritual gifts assessment because not all pastors are gifted in the same way. And especially if you are comparing your new pastor to your previous pastor, and there are certain things that made that previous pastor gold in your church community, having a new pastor who has similar spiritual gifts might be necessary. Even if his personality and his ministry style is different, having similar spiritual gifts might be important. Sorry, jumped in there on you. I'm totally with you, a hundred percent. It makes sense. You got to know what you're buying and that's super important. Yeah. Okay. Speaking of what you're buying, let me shift the conversation. This is another conversation that you and I often have. It's a very sensitive one. And so with all due respect, Ed and I joke around a lot. And sometimes we get funny and we try to say funny things. We laugh with each other. We actually think we are funny, Bart. We think we are. And a lot of times people, while we're laughing with each other, everyone else is looking at us like we have three heads. But here's the... Here's the thing. One of the struggles that we often have with churches is helping the church prepare an offer for the pastor that they finally decided is the right guy. What do we pay him? What kind of benefits? What does this look like? It's going to obviously be very different in every church's context, in every church's setting. What are some of the baseline things or some of the bullet points that you walk a church through when you're trying to help them figure out what they need to offer the next pastor? other than simply saying, we're going to offer him exactly what we were offering the previous pastor, because that's not always appropriate. Talk through that. Well, you know, I think it depends if, you know, if you're a church of fifty, you're going to look at this different than you're a church of a thousand, right? There's a range there, right? And you have to, churches tend to be cheap. We used that word earlier. You know, they're thinking, okay, what's the... I don't think we were recording when we used that word, but now everybody knows we were talking about cheap churches. Okay, okay. so you know we tried it we tried to low ball and I'm going you know If this guy's a second-round draft choice, you can't pay him the same amount you pay a sixth-round draft choice. I don't think anybody ought to be in ministry to make money. I don't buy that. It's a passion. I want to hire a guy that would do it for free if he could. That's what I'm after. But if a guy is a . three-hundred hitter and has defensive skills and can catch a ball and can run, he's worth more than a guy that can hit . . . and I know that like it or not um there's a bit of a competition now I think sometimes for I don't know what it's been like for you bart I've been in seven churches in my forty year career And sometimes God tapped me on the shoulder and it's like, you're going there no matter what. And I've signed on to go before I even talked about what the finances were going to be. God was in that thing. But sometimes it's like I could go here or here or here. And I just have to think about like what's going to be the best fit. I have never gone someplace because I made more money there. Right. But when you think about it, like what is this guy really worth? What do we need to do to take care of him and his family? What kind of a situation is he coming from? Like if he's making a hundred and twenty thousand in Ohio and he's moving to California, that's not a hundred and twenty thousand over there. Right. But if he's making a hundred twenty in California and he's moving to Pennsylvania, well, I probably don't need to pay him a hundred twenty thousand. He might think I do. But you have to understand where he's coming from and what how effective he is. I think we tend to look at guys and go, well, You know, he has a bachelor's, he has a master's, and he has a doctorate. Honestly, I don't care about any of those things. I want to know what can the guy do. And the way you look at that is you go back and you look at what he's been doing. And it's really easy to come up with all kinds of excuses why it didn't work here or there or everywhere else. But really, you look at somebody's track record, and that's pretty much what you're going to get the next time. So if he has a good track record, I have to be willing to be, quote, unquote, competitive in how I'm going to look at that. Let me share with you some of my thoughts on this. For starters, I'd be the guy that you'd wanna hire because I've been in three churches and two of them I said, yes, with zero salary, I'll figure it out. And one of them I said, yes, and it was barely above zero. So, and I think part of the reason that the perspective I'm about to share I have is because of the ministry experience that I've had. When I'm looking at bringing in a guy, if I really believe he's the guy who God has appointed for this ministry opportunity, I never want finances to be a reason for him to not be fully focused on the ministry that we're calling him to do. I have heard elder boards say, well, this is a livable wage. Being a livable wage isn't necessarily making life easy or less complex for the pastor. So I want to look at what it's going to take to compensate the pastor from a salary, housing allowance, benefits standpoint. so that he can fully commit to the work of the ministry without going to bed at night, worrying about being able to pay his utility bill or pay his student loans for the MDiv that he got, that he borrowed the money to do, or to fix the car that stopped running the other night or repair his wife's minivan, whatever it is. I don't want that to be a stressor for him. So I think that for me, that's sort of a starting point. Where do we need to be so as to not create an additional burden for this pastor? Here's a pet peeve of mine, and I've seen this two or three times recently on position postings, where the church decides what they're going to pay the pastor based on the size of his family. Well, if he's got five kids, if he's married and has five kids, we're going to pay him more than if he's married and has one kid. To me, that is anathema. Like that should never happen. If he is called for the responsibility and he's. The skilled person that you need to do the job, it shouldn't matter the size of his family. You don't reward someone by paying them more. To me, that is the goofiest thing I've ever seen. You wouldn't see that. In fact, it's probably illegal. I don't know that for sure. But in the secular marketplace, that's probably an illegal thing to do. I don't know why churches think they can get away with that. Yeah. Yeah, I get it. And I think in fairness to churches, hopefully they're looking at it from the opposite end. They're going, well, this guy does have seven kids compared to two, so we'll pay him more. That's what I'd like to believe. I don't know if that's true, but it doesn't make sense to me. Again, I'm hiring a guy based upon his ability to move us from point A to point B. Yeah, I agree with you on that. Now, again, I know that that was a sensitive topic and maybe we ruffled some feathers there. I hope that what churches will think through when they're putting a salary package together is that they're thinking generously. There's a lot to be said as we read through scripture about the way that God has been generous to us. I've never known, I've never seen a generous church suffer. I've never seen a generous person be unhappy. So I think if we take that posture as a church community, as a spiritual family and say, we're gonna be generous to the pastor that we call, I think that the Lord will bless that. Now, there might be limited resources. There probably are limited resources. If you're listening to this podcast, which is Revitalize My Church, you're probably looking at your balance sheet and going, well, we don't have enough to pay him what we would like to be able to pay him. Find other ways to be generous so that if you are paying him less than what maybe he's worth, he doesn't feel that added pressure. I recorded a podcast back in the fall of twenty twenty four. I'll link to it in the show notes here. On co-vocational and bi-vocational ministry, my friend Eric Hoke wrote a book. He runs a company called I Help Pastors Get Jobs, where he literally helps pastors who want to be bi-vocational or co-vocational find a job outside of the church so that they are not a financial burden on the ministry that they're trying to lead. If you haven't listened to that episode, you can, like I said, check that out. Just a moment. There's certainly an advantage of that. Here's the advantage. The guy that has a quote unquote real job besides being a pastor, he understands what his neighbors are really like versus the guy who hasn't had a secular job in a long, long time. And so that's an advantage. The downside of that is it takes time, right? Pastor only has so much time. Do you want him to put thirty hours into your deal or do you want to put fifty hours into seeing the thing move forward? Yeah, that's very true. I mean, as you know, I'm planting a church and I am co-vocationally planting the church right now. So I have a full-time job and I guess we'd call it, for lack of a better way of putting it, a church planting hobby. And I'm trying to make it work. And it's tricky. It's tricky getting up really early in the morning to write sermons. It's tricky and tiresome sometimes to have time in the evenings and the weekends to actually minister to the people that God has brought to be a part of our group. And so I understand the challenges of that. It's not impossible. And there are certain situations and circumstances that it's necessary. And there are certain situations and circumstances where it's actually desirable. And so Eric Hoke speaks a lot to that in that previous podcast episode. Can I just put one more thought in and then we can move forward? I think that one of the issues you want to look for is drive. Does the guy have the drive to do it? Like if he has to work twenty hours over here and he can give you thirty hours, you might not be getting thirty quality hours unless he has the drive. Now there's some pastors that, you know, they're pretty driven and that can get in the way. That could be messy too. I get that. But drive and passion that doesn't come out in drive. is pretty much a waste of time. I'm looking for a guy who is going, you know what? I'm going to own this thing and I'm going to put my time into it. I'm going to do my share of the movement and I'm going to try to galvanize people to move forward with me. Okay, I'm gonna shift gears and we're gonna hit one more topic before we wrap this up. One of the things that you have a fair bit of experience in is walking churches through that transitional period from a longtime pastor stepping out and a new pastor coming in. Can you walk us through what a healthy transition process would ideally look like when we're moving from that long tenured pastor to that new leader? Sure. One of the things to think about is, is the is the formerly pastor going to stay in the church or not? I would recommend highly that there's at least a transition period that he pulls out for nine months, a year, year and a half, whatever. And I realize that if he's been there thirty years, his friends and family, et cetera, et cetera, he might live across the street from the church for all I know. That's a hard thing to do. But to bring a new guy in with him seemingly looking over his shoulder all the time is a potential issue. The two statements that I encourage pastors that are retiring and staying or coming back to be able to say are these. One, I really love what Fred is doing. Fred's the new pastor. Really love what Fred is doing and really love where Fred and the elders are taking the ministry. If he can't say that, my opinion, he can't stay. It's really that simple. It gets so, so messy. And the other side of that is that I'm a visionary, so I come in and I've always thought, hey, these people have been waiting twenty five years. They hear these amazing ideas that I have and they're just ready to chomp at the bit week two. That is a tremendous mistake that I've made. What I have to realize is they don't care about the vision that I'm going to bring. What they care about is, does he love me? Does he know me? Is he investing in me? If I do that, then down the road, I can share the vision. And they look at me like, well, we're not really sure about what he's saying, but we sort of like the guy and we trust him. We'll go that way. Because twenty percent of the people in the average church probably care about the vision. Twenty percent of the people in the average church probably are never going to buy into your vision, which means they're sixty percent in the middle. They're the target. I'm going to love on them. I'm going to help them to to eventually slowly see the process of where we're going to go. When you do that, you see God doing some cool things. So I talk a whole lot with new pastors coming into a situation and saying, hey, you got to do a lot of front porch conversation. You got a lot of kitchen conversation. Stop in for ten minutes. Don't call and set something up because then Thelma thinks I got to clean the house. You just stop by. I was in the neighborhood and just talk and you get to know the kids names. And before you know it, you're going, OK, this is this is going to work. I think the other thing the former lead pastor or the retiring lead pastor needs to do is on his way out. He needs to celebrate the vision as to where we're going and he needs to be involved if he can in the commissioning of the new guy to hand off the baton is really, really important. And, um, You know, the new pastor needs to do the same thing. He has to talk about some of the great things that the former pastor brought to the table and how he prepared us for today. He gave us this foundation and we're building on the foundation that he gave to us. It's a mutual both way kind of a deal. I have far less experience in this area than you do, but I have enough experience to have seen some things not work well and some things work well. And speed is everything. And there's one thing that I think has to go fast, and that is the passing of the baton. So one of the things that we'll see from time to time is a pastor says, I'm going to retire. We're going to go and find my successor. And then we're going to hire him. And he's going to be my associate for two years. And then I'm going to ride off into the sunset. And ninety nine out of one hundred times, that guy doesn't make it through those two years before he says, this is not working. I'm out of here. And then that church finds themselves back at square one. When a pastor discovers or determines that he's ready to transition and the church is going to bring in the next leader, that handoff has to happen quicker than anything. I mean, it doesn't have to be instantaneous, but you need to have probably whatever amount of time you think it's going to take, shorten that by half or less. And now, on the flip side of that, the new guy coming in needs to expect his... adaptation time to be twice as long as he thinks it's going to be. So you said just a minute ago, people want to hear your vision. They want to follow your lead. They want to charge the hill with you. Not yet. You have to spend far more time investing in relationships, putting marbles in those relational jars so that you can withdraw them later. I'm going to boast on one of my friends, a pastor friend of ours named Tim Wilmetti. who took over a church in Ohio a number of years ago. And Tim and his wife, in the first season that they were there in the church, I think every Friday night or every other Friday night for month after month after month, they had everyone from the church over to their home for pizza. And it was his idea. Maybe it was his wife's idea, Ashley. Maybe it was Ashley's idea. I don't know. Tim's a pretty bright guy, but maybe that was Ashley's idea. But the long-term benefit was they got everyone in their home. They got to invest personally with everyone in the church. These people had called him to be their pastor. But they needed to know before anything else that he was someone who would care for them and shepherd them and love on them. And we looked several years down the road, and Tim has done a really phenomenal job at transitioning his church and helping it find a new and fruitful future. And I'm going to say Tim is a very gifted guy, yet I think it was the investment of those relationships early that helped him get the leverage that he needed to take the church where it needed to go. For sure. And I think if you're listening to this, what you have to hear is that's not let's have people over my house so I can personally pitch vision to them. It's not that it's let's just let's just love on them. Let's have them. It's if you invite if you're a pastor and you invite people to come to your home like like they look at that like, wow, that that's really an honor to come. And now we come and you know what we talk about? Whatever. We don't have to do the, hey, ten years from now, we're going to be A, B, and C. Now, if you want to take three minutes and share something, that's okay. But anything longer than three minutes, like, then it feels like it's a bait and switch. And maybe it was, and if that's the case, then don't do that. But have people over to your home. It's gold. It is really gold. Yeah. Now, if you're listening to this podcast, there's probably very little chance that you are the pastor that's about to start in a new job. Maybe you've just started in a new role, or maybe you're listening to this podcast and you're an elder or a board member or part of a screening and search team. If you don't have an outside coach coaching your new pastor when they come in, you need to take that little piece of advice that Ed just gave you, and you need to coach your new pastor on that. You need to tell them that for the first six to twelve months, they don't have permission to start implementing new vision and driving the church in a new direction, but that their first and their primary responsibility is to learn the stories of the people in the church and find out what it is that people love about the church and why they're there in the first place. You know, one of the things that a lot of churches will make a mistake of is they believe we've called this new pastor to be our pastor because he thinks our church is amazing. And that's not always the case. Now, I hope he sees potential in your church. I hope that he sees that between the vision that God has given him for a healthy, vibrant church and what you're starting with, he believes he can help you get there. But by and large, most pastors come into a church with an agenda to change the church shortly after they get there. And what we want to do is we want to temper those expectations on both parts and say, hey, let's just slow down the bus. Let's build relationships first. That's going to get us a lot further down the road. Yeah. So one little side note that you'd be interested, I think, in hearing is if you're in a screening team, any pastor worth his weight is going to say, so what's it really like there? Just give me the real scoop. You're going to feel like, man, if we tell them what's behind door number four, He's not coming. You need to tell him what's behind door number four. Now share the good things, but you gotta, you know, we've got a couple of warts and we're still working on those things. No surprises on either side. Like if I'm involved in the screening team process and we're interviewing someone, one of the first things I'm gonna say is, hey, look, we're committed to be brutally honest with you. You can ask us anything you want. And we're asking you to be brutally honest with us. so if your pastor looking for a position don't sell yourself for anything that you're not don't do that because it will not work two years from now you'll be looking for a new ministry and if you are the screening team or the search team don't sell that your church is this amazing church that is just pretty much if jesus were on the earth he'd be going to our church don't do that just be really honest I can speak to what's behind door number four, just in case you want to know. It's the overhead projector, and it's a whole bunch of plastic flowers waiting to be put out. Because they never wilt. I mean, they have dust on them, but they never wilt. There is a closet in your church building that is full of plastic flowers. I know because I've been there. I've been to all of the churches that have that. Okay, Ed, this has been a... It's been a great conversation for me. It's been a little long. Hopefully our guests have stuck it out to the end. If somebody's listening to this podcast and hey, they are looking for maybe a little additional counsel, advice, some coaching, can somebody reach out to you and just maybe connect with you on a Zoom or a phone call at some point? Absolutely. DevelopingNextLevelLeaders.org. So just get a hold of me. I'd love to chat with you. You could edit AssistCX.org. You could email me there. I'd love to help you in any way that I possibly can. All the ideas are for free, so we can just talk. All right. We will link to your contact information in the show notes of this episode. Ed, I always enjoy hanging out with you. For those of you who did make it all the way to the end of this episode, we thank you for doing so. And just want to remind you that if you haven't yet subscribed wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts, make sure that you do that so you don't miss future episodes. We release a new episode on the first and the fifteenth of every month, and we want to make sure that you don't miss any of this great content. Thanks again for tuning in to another episode of the Revitalize My Church podcast.
