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Why is the Transitional Period So Important to the Life of the Church? · The Church Renewal Podcast

• 0:02
  Speaker 1: I bet you weren't expecting another bonus episode from your two favorite Flourish voices, were you?
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: That's okay, we're full of surprises.
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: Today we're giving you a big picture, yet short conversation.
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: We're talking about why the transitional period is so critical for the church.
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: It might seem obvious, but, like I said, we're full of surprises.
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: Thanks for joining us again for this bonus chat.
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: Cheers.
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: Welcome back to the Church Reel Podcast.
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: I'm Jeremy Seferati and I'm sitting here with Matthew Bolling.
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: Hey man, how are you?
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: Hey Jerry, how are you?
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: I'm doing well, I'm good man.
• 0:31
  Speaker 1: We are continuing to put out these episodes answering the question what's a transitional pastor?
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: Why are they useful?
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: What are they used for?
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: Where can you find one?
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: Do they come in a Cracker Jack box?
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: They're a little large for a Cracker Jack box.
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: Fair enough, but sometimes you should still turn the box over and try to find it.
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: Question for today why is it so important?
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: Is it important for a church that is transitioning between one lead pastor to a secondary or to another lead pastor?
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: Why is it important to have a good transition period built in?
• 1:14
  Speaker 2: So a good transitional period between long-term pastors is important because it sets up the next long-term pastor for a profitable ministry, for a fruitful ministry.
• 1:21
  Speaker 2: If a church has taken that time to be intentional and thoughtful in the transition period, then there's a much better chance that the next pastor is going to be able to stay a decade.
• 1:32
  Speaker 2: That's what we shoot for and we'll have a fruitful ministry as a result.
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: Have you seen that happen?
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: Well, do most churches approach this from an intentional point of view?
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: No, unfortunately.
• 1:44
  Speaker 2: That's why we're doing these podcasts and why Flourish is focused in on helping churches have good transitional periods and even providing men who can be on the ground there.
• 1:52
  Speaker 2: For a church in transition Most churches get well, the word that comes to mind is anxious.
• 1:59
  Speaker 2: As soon as the family loses its dad, then, yeah, it's a very anxious period.
• 2:06
  Speaker 2: There's grief in the beginning and then you enter into this middle state where it's very disorienting.
• 2:11
  Speaker 2: One of the features of grief is that it's disorienting.
• 2:14
  Speaker 2: But you get into this stage after you pass out of disorientation into ambiguity, uncertainty, and people want to pass through that stage very, very quickly.
• 2:23
  Speaker 2: And the easiest way to pass through that stage quickly is just well, get yourself a public committee and start looking for pastors without having done the work that is needed and important and profitable in a transition period.
• 2:37
  Speaker 2: Jared's smiling.
• 2:39
  Speaker 2: You, dear listener, can't tell that Jared's smiling, but he is.
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: When I start to smile like that, that means I thought of something that's probably at best adjacent, possibly inappropriate.
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: Well, which is it, jared?
• 2:53
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it is, that's correct.
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: So I was watching an episode of the TV show Psych with my oldest son last night and maybe this was a couple nights ago, don't remember, it doesn't matter when in this episode, the protagonist, who's dating one of the main characters in the show, finds out from his girlfriend that she has an estranged relationship with her father.
• 3:18
  Speaker 1: Okay, and here's the girlfriend say you know, I just got got this birthday card from my dad.
• 3:26
  Speaker 1: And he responds says okay, wonderful, I will add him to the invitation list for your party.
• 3:30
  Speaker 1: And she says no, I don't want to be there, please don't.
• 3:33
  Speaker 1: I told you already this topic is off limits.
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: And he turns and walks away with his best friend and says clearly she wants me to invite him.
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: My friend says were you not listening to what she just said?
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: And he said the classic thing, which is it was written so well.
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: He said um says gus, don't you know that when a woman tells you her problems, she does not want you to just listen, she wants you to do something about it.
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: As you talk about the ambiguity and the discomfort the churches walk through.
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: I can laugh at that line in psych, but I also recognize there is an impulse and I think it does hit guys, especially when they're in leadership that says if we're in a place of discomfort, if we're in a place of question marks, we need to fill that box.
• 4:23
  Speaker 1: We need to figure this out.
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: Having open tabs as a leader is a really scary and possibly undercutting position to be in.
• 4:32
  Speaker 1: It's compromising because people are looking for you to have the answers.
• 4:36
  Speaker 1: They're looking for you to have an understanding of what's going on, where it's going, what the process is going to be, how long it's going to take, what they should expect.
• 4:42
  Speaker 1: Set my expectations for me, yeah.
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: And unfortunately, as Moses and Abraham and David and Joshua and Caleb and Samson and Elijah and Samuel and Solomon, and I can keep on going.
• 4:59
  Speaker 1: What they will all tell you is God did not give me the plan ahead of time.
• 5:05
  Speaker 2: Or in the timing that I wanted it in, or sometimes ever.
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: Sometimes I just screwed it up and found out that I was going to have to die and not enter into what he called me to do.
• 5:17
  Speaker 1: Or sometimes he just told me yeah, you're not going to do that, someone else is going to do that.
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: With very little explanation, and that is really hard for us to walk in.
• 5:28
  Speaker 1: Speaking as a leader, speaking as a husband, a father, a pastor, a counselor, a coach, a friend.
• 5:34
  Speaker 1: It is hard to walk with someone who is struggling and not have an answer to give them, and the only thing worse than that is feeling that overwhelming need to give an answer.
• 5:46
  Speaker 1: Just so that I've said something, this is when you get into the territory of being job's friends, and that that post we said we gotta pay air quotes around around that job's, friends job's friends yeah as counselors, as wise and sagacious whatever that word is sagacious.
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: Thank you those guys who did their best counseling in that first seven days when they shut up it was their best counsel.
• 6:13
  Speaker 2: It's interesting.
• 6:14
  Speaker 2: I think you bring up a great point, because I think that we receive an expectation from congregants as church leaders as to what we should be doing instead of setting an expectation, and so this is one of the reasons why, when we work with churches, we're trying to help elder boards communicate well.
• 6:36
  Speaker 2: We're trying to help them say, hey, when was the last time we talked to the congregation about this?
• 6:40
  Speaker 2: Because what we have found is that congregants can be patient, they can put their anxiety in check if they know there's a plan, if their elders are communicating about the plan and that we're headed somewhere and how this all fits together.
• 6:55
  Speaker 2: And when they don't do that well, it is definitely a problem.
• 7:00
  Speaker 2: It makes the work of our transitional pastors a lot harder if elders have not said here's a plan and we're working it and we'll keep you updated.
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: Something that really resonates with me.
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: In all this and I'm sorry to Bigfoot here, so I'm just speaking off the top of my head, you can tell me to edit this out later there's a double ditch that leadership can fall into and there is an expectation that comes from the church.
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: I think there's also an expectation that we take on ourselves because of the Western culture that we live in that describes what a leader should be, describes what his characteristics should be and how an organization should be run.
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: And we carry these things into the church and, on the one hand, we run the risk of either running an organization like an organization and in a top-down fashion that says look, I have all the answers.
• 7:56
  Speaker 1: Come to me with the answers.
• 7:58
  Speaker 1: And the danger there is that until we have the answers, we just hold the cards close to our vest.
• 8:04
  Speaker 1: We don't share in the struggle, we don't share in the journey.
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: But the biggest thing that's missing we don't lead the congregation to seek God in the midst of confusion, in the midst of discomfort, in the midst of the storm, to stop and say to the congregation we don't know, we think he's possibly leading us in this direction, we're not sure.
• 8:27
  Speaker 1: So we're going to stop right now and we're going to turn to him, we're going to seek his face and we're going to wait on him to hear his answer and we want you to come along with us.
• 8:37
  Speaker 1: Or they can go to the other ditch and parentify their congregation and say basically, hey, we don't know.
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: So you guys figure it out and come tell us what we should do.
• 8:49
  Speaker 2: Yeah, abdicate Absolutely.
• 8:50
  Speaker 2: I think that it's interesting.
• 8:52
  Speaker 2: You know, in working with a couple hundred churches over the years, I think my consistent plea always when I sit down with a group of people that are leading into churches, the most important thing you can possibly do is pray.
• 9:04
  Speaker 2: And I say this to churches because then the next thing that I say is I have absolutely no idea what God's going to do here, and I think that in one sense, it terrifies them because they're like wait, wait, wait.
• 9:16
  Speaker 2: We came to you for the answers.
• 9:19
  Speaker 2: Aren't we paying you good money.
• 9:20
  Speaker 2: Church coach, you can solve our problems and I'm like, nope, I have no idea.
• 9:25
  Speaker 2: Church coach, you can solve our problems and I'm like, nope, I have no idea.
• 9:27
  Speaker 2: And that's the point.
• 9:28
  Speaker 2: The ambiguity is uncomfortable for us because we expect that everything will be rational.
• 9:34
  Speaker 2: We can just figure it out.
• 9:35
  Speaker 2: We can just walk a path and have a process and be done.
• 9:38
  Speaker 2: Yeah, we follow a process, but process in the beginning, the middle and the end has prayer in it, because the process is only there so that you can listen to God.
• 9:49
  Speaker 2: That's what the process is there for to facilitate listening to the Lord, my sheep know my voice, yeah, and so they follow me.
• 9:59
  Speaker 1: My sheep know my voice, which means whoever the baritone or bass preacher is, whose voice we have come to associate with pastor, that's not the voice of Jesus.
• 10:10
  Speaker 1: He could be a mouthpiece for Jesus, hopefully, absolutely.
• 10:13
  Speaker 1: I mean that's his heart.
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: I absolutely give the benefit of the doubt.
• 10:17
  Speaker 1: As a pastor, I know my shortcomings.
• 10:20
  Speaker 1: I've failed there plenty of times.
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: All the pastors I know know that I've failed there plenty of times.
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: All the pastors I know know that they've failed there plenty of times.
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: And I know, because I've walked with them, that their heart is to do that exceedingly well, to be exceedingly faithful to the call they've given them.
• 10:32
  Speaker 1: Yet they also know I'm not the voice of Jesus, right, sometimes it is.
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: It requires some encouragement to remember that in the moment of the ambiguity.
• 10:46
  Speaker 1: We really don't like ambiguity, right.
• 10:50
  Speaker 1: It's like the vacuum that nature abhors, yeah, or the dust that the vacuum.
• 10:56
  Speaker 1: That's probably not a good analogy there, matt.
• 10:59
  Speaker 1: Is there anything else that you want the listener to know about the importance of walking through this transition intentionally and well?
• 11:08
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean I'll say it bluntly from kind of from the opposite direction If you'd like your next pastor's tenure to be short, don't have a thoughtful transitional period in other sections of this podcast that if you don't do a transitional period well, when this situation merits it, your next pastor will be an unintentional interim pastor, which nobody wants, because then you're incurring the cost of a bad hire, which is very costly.
• 11:34
  Speaker 2: So better to take your time between long-term pastors and do it.
• 11:38
  Speaker 2: There's the encouragement.
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: There's the warning.
• 11:40
  Speaker 1: If you think this is for someone else, ask your spouse if it's actually for you, and if she says or he says it is, then go ahead and pass this on to that friend.
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: We'll talk to you soon.
• 11:50
  Speaker 1: Thanks for listening to the Church Renewal Podcast from Flourish Coaching.
• 11:58
  Speaker 1: Flourish exists to set ministry leaders free to be effective wherever God has called them.
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: We believe that there's only one fully sufficient reason that this day dawned, jesus is still gathering his people and he's using his church to do it.
• 12:10
  Speaker 1: When pastors or churches feel stuck, our team of coaches refresh their hope in the gospel and help them clarify their strategy.
• 12:18
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• 12:21
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• 12:26
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• 12:33
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• 12:39
  Speaker 1: Just to say thanks, and a special thanks to Bay Ridge Christian Church in Annapolis, maryland, for the use of their building to record today's episode.
• 12:46
  Speaker 1: All music for this show has been licensed and was composed and created by artists.
• 12:50
  Speaker 1: The Church Renewal Podcast was produced by me, jeremy Seferati, in association with Flourish Coaching, with the goal of equipping and encouraging your church to flourish wherever God has called you.