The first problem is that we have been too quick to answer the question, for the answer usually runs like this, “Well, if a pastor needs five to seven years to really begin to affect a church and the average pastor is only at a church three to seven years then the average pastor – church relationship never has an opportunity to reach fruitfulness. Therefore, the problem is short tenures for pastors. The solution is to equip pastors and churches to enjoy longer relationships.”
Let me say that I am in favor of long pastorates. I admire pastor – church relationships that celebrate twenty, thirty and fifty year anniversaries. I believe that a shepherd is to stay with his or her sheep over the long haul. Yet, I must modify the foregoing statement due to the environment of the North American church with the words, “whenever possible.” A shepherd stays with his or her sheep over the long haul whenever possible. Unfortunately, as studies indicate, all too often it is not possible for the shepherd – church relationship to continue. Even if we factor in those pastors who are always looking for something bigger and better, those of us on the football field know that many a player is carried off the field due to a blindside hit by a diaconate, vestry or a congregation. Then there are those times when the ending of a pastor – church relationship is akin to what happens on a baseball diamond when the right fielder, center fielder and second baseman are all chasing the same fly ball and collide into each other at vicious speeds, thereby knocking all three players out of the game, pastor, diaconate and congregation.
Having said that I admire long-term pastorates and that I believe it is the Biblical model because of the shepherd – sheep paradigm, I want to suggest that what we think the problem is is not the problem. This is not to say that short-term pastorates are not a problem; it is to say that they are not the problem. Short-term pastorates are a symptom.
Permit me to venture onto some thin ice in terms of the potential for misunderstanding. There is much debate in the pastoral community over leadership paradigms. I wish I could say that there was comparable debate within congregations and sessions and diaconates but there isn’t. In fact, I’m not sure that there is any debate within congregations about pastoral leadership paradigms, and as you’ll soon see, this is another symptom of the problem, just as short – term pastorates are a symptom of the problem.
The leadership debate within the pastoral community boils down to whether a pastor is a CEO striving for greater productivity or a shepherd with a rod and staff to make people lie down in green pastures and to lead them beside still waters.
With all due respect to my peers who hold to the CEO paradigm, I believe that it is utilitarian and without Biblical foundation in terms of pastoral ministry. There may be other components within the Body of Christ to which it approximates but I do not believe that it is the pastoral component. I need to make my position on this clear in order to say what may appear at first reading to be contradictory and that is that no other organization of which I am aware could tolerate having its primary leader join it and not have that leader reach significant effectiveness for five to seven years. Virtually all other organizations would simply cease to exist.
I have used a term in the above paragraph that I seldom use in regard to the church and that is the word “organization.” I seldom use it because I view the church as an organism and so here we have perhaps another contradiction, but in this case I think “organization” is the best word for purposes of comparison between collections of individuals who presumably have a common purpose. The very idea that a collection of individuals, be it the board of directors of IBM, the leaders of your local bank, or the high school PTO, would vote a person to be their leader in the knowledge that he would not reach his leadership potential for five to seven years is ludicrous. The directors of IBM would surely have short tenure were that to be their approach to leadership recruitment.
This brings us back to the identification of the problem inherent in the pastor – church relationship. It is not that a typical pastor only reaches significant effectiveness in five to seven years juxtaposed against the statistics that most pastorates don’t last that long; it is rather that we accept the fact that five to seven years is a given and that we structure our approach to pastoral and congregational development around this given fact. In other words, the cornerstone of our building states, “Our goal is to facilitate longer pastorates in order that parish ministry may be more fruitful and that congregations may be healthier.”
As I have suggested above, no other organization, no other collective of people assembled for a given purpose, could long survive with such a cornerstone. We are working with the wrong benchmark when we accept the notion that five to seven years for effectiveness is what it is.
An organization living within the five to seven year paradigm is an organization that may be chronologically fifty years old but only ten years old in terms of maturation, if even that mature. The math is simple. If the organization changes leaders every five years then it will have had ten leaders within fifty years, but if each leader does not broach effectiveness until somewhere around year five, then each leader has only had a few months’ significant fruit with the organization. I grant you that this is absurd but it is the pastor – church paradigm that we have accepted as a construct within which to work.
We have a dance of partners in which no one ever finishes the musical piece with the partner with whom he began. Every few bars of music someone will shout, “Change partners,” and we dutifully do so, never wondering whether the dance makes any sense.
Is the current pastor – church relationship pattern in North America any different than serial marriage? (With apologies to those denominations who reshuffle pastoral assignments periodically). Those of us who deplore serial marriage in our society, those of us who insist on extensive premarital counseling, those of us who pour our hearts into saving marriages, do we approach the pastor – church relationship in the same fashion or do we simply look at the three to seven year average tenure in our churches and conclude, “It is what it is and we must work within that construct”?
Furthermore, do we accept the description of significant pastoral ministry not normally occurring until year five or so as a prescription, as a given, or do we say, “This shouldn’t be. It may be descriptive but it need not be prescriptive”? Once again, what other collection of people could survive as a people within this paradigm? The best they could hope for would be survival, the maintenance of the group, making it from one leader’s tenure to the next. Is it any wonder that so many churches have a survival mentality?
Why do pastors leave churches? Burnout? Conflict? New opportunity? Financial pressure?
When conflict occurs its flashpoint is usually either an issue of the church’s direction and priorities or one of control, the latter usually being between the pastor and an individual or a power family. It is not uncommon to have all of these elements in a conflict for they are often interrelated.
Common goals and an understanding of possibilities to achieve those goals lessen the likelihood of conflict. Mutual understanding as to the nature of a collective of people, or in now popular parlance “DNA,” also lessens the possibility of conflict because there is an acknowledgement of “who we are.” Furthermore, an understanding of the roles members of a collective are to play mitigates the possibility of conflict. These roles are understood in the context of both DNA and goals or mission. Roles should exhibit the nature of the collective and should be focused on achieving the mission of the collective. When members of a collective are focused on DNA and mission their eyes are off themselves and on the higher calling and the greater good.