Latest / The Church Renewal Podcast / Will My Church Need a Transitional Pastor? Part 4

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Will My Church Need a Transitional Pastor? Part 4 · The Church Renewal Podcast

• 0:02
  Speaker 1: Welcome to the Church Renewal Podcast from Flourish Coaching.
• 0:05
  Speaker 1: I'm Jeremy, I'm Matt.
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: This is the final installment of a four-part series called Will my Church Need a Transitional Pastor?
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: In this episode, we're going to look at some much more difficult and painful situations that you need to be aware of Gross moral failure or betrayal, the last pastor leaving under duress, tragedy within the congregation, ongoing gossip, duress, tragedy within the congregation, ongoing gossip or backbiting within the church, and a church controlled by a small group of long-standing families rather than the leaders.
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: As you listen, think about your church.
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: Are we describing your church?
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: If so, and if you would like to talk to us more about the process of doing your own internal deep dive, we want to help you.
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: So after you finish listening to today's podcast, please email us.
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: You can email info at flourishcoachingorg and if you haven't already listened to the first three parts in this deep dive, they're all linked in the episode description below.
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: Matt, we're going to deal today with some of the more difficult situations that a church faces when going through lead pastor transition.
• 1:10
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: And I think it's necessary to highlight some of these things because they deal with the harder issues, whether it's sin or pain, or grief or loss.
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: Sure, and this is real stuff that you and I have both watched churches and friends walk through a number of times, both watched churches and friends walk through a number of times.
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: So, at the outset, I guess I just want to say my heart both goes out to and is burdened for God's people, because the fact is, we live in a world that has been rocked by sin and that is rocked by my sin, and that is always painful, no doubt.
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: So, with that in mind, let's start with an easy one.
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: Let's just talk about the church.
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: There are easy ones in this one, backbiters and gossipers.
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: Yeah, what does a transitional pastor have that is uniquely beneficial to a church that's dealing with this kind of issue?
• 2:04
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so one of the strongest tools that any transitional pastor brings in his backpack is not any of the tools that we've invented here at Flourish, that we have and we use them in churches.
• 2:14
  Speaker 2: It's not his own experiences though the prodigious and he's well-suited to that particular church.
• 2:19
  Speaker 2: None of those things are the most.
• 2:22
  Speaker 2: It's not his intellect, it's not his teaching ability, it's not anything that he brings.
• 2:27
  Speaker 2: The strongest thing that the transitional pastor brings with him, strongest two?
• 2:32
  Speaker 2: Well, one's a thing and one's a person.
• 2:36
  Speaker 2: The strongest thing that the transitional pastor brings with him is the gospel, because Paul says the gospel is the power for salvation and, given that he's saying it to people who are already in the professing church, we take that to mean that the gospel is the power for salvation.
• 2:54
  Speaker 2: Past, right, I was saved.
• 2:57
  Speaker 2: It's the power for salvation present, I'm being saved in my sanctification.
• 3:01
  Speaker 2: It was justified and I'm going to be saved in my glorification, and so the gospel is the power of God for salvation.
• 3:08
  Speaker 2: The strongest thing that the transitional pastor brings with him is the gospel, but the gospel gets applied by the Holy Spirit, who convicts people, convicts people of sin, convicts people of righteousness, of their need for Jesus and their need to repent and where there's gossip and backbiting, it has to be talked about, it has to be confronted and it needs to be repented of, because unrepented of is just like yeah, I think I'm out of here and that is serious.
• 3:40
  Speaker 2: That's why it gets confronted in the scriptures and if that's been the history of a church, it's got to be dealt with.
• 3:46
  Speaker 2: With a caveat Okay.
• 3:50
  Speaker 2: Sometimes the reason that that has happened is because the leadership has failed and the people have amped up their volume.
• 3:58
  Speaker 2: They've amped up their intensity Jeremy and I were actually talking about this at lunch in relationship to marriage relationships, sometimes that we've worked from where one spouse will amp up the intensity to try and get the attention of the other spouse and sometimes congregants.
• 4:11
  Speaker 2: I'm not saying it's not unwise, I'm not saying that it's not sinful, but what I am saying is that sometimes, if leaders haven't been paying attention and the congregants ramp up the intensity in order to try and get their attention, and so that can happen sometimes, and we're willing to call that out in either case, because it may be that you have people that are very strong opinions, they're very proud of themselves and they think they know better than leadership, but we look at the leadership and we go now they're being wise and diplomatic and they're handling hard things and they don't actually deserve all this.
• 4:41
  Speaker 2: And other times, frankly, they do.
• 4:42
  Speaker 2: They don't actually deserve all this and other times, frankly, they do.
• 4:46
  Speaker 2: And the backbiting, the gossip, it needs to be called out and the leaders need to be called out.
• 4:51
  Speaker 2: Does that track?
• 4:52
  Speaker 1: That tracks and you know, I guess I don't want to, at the risk of sounding like I'm critiquing the answer you just gave you said it doesn't mean it's not sin it.
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: I I wonder if it, if it doesn't necessarily mean that it's sin, because I think there's times when in a church relationship, because you have we'll talk about this later but because you have a power dynamic, right uh, walking through a matthew 18 kind of confrontation, especially when it's from lady to leadership, can be completely halted by leadership.
• 5:29
  Speaker 2: Yes.
• 5:29
  Speaker 1: And when that happens, the only thing that?
• 5:31
  Speaker 2: is left Unrighteously, unrighteously, absolutely yes.
• 5:34
  Speaker 1: And when that happens, the only resort that's left is either leave, shut up or talk about it with other people.
• 5:40
  Speaker 1: And I think in the situation where a person is committed so they're not leaving, it's true, so they're not shutting up then I think Jesus absolutely uses that person as a mouthpiece to raise the temperature, to cause more pain, in order to allow the church to hear him more clearly in order to allow the church to hear him more clearly.
• 6:06
  Speaker 2: So this is one of the reasons Jeremy's background is in non-denominational churches.
• 6:10
  Speaker 2: My background is in Presbyterian churches, and one of the reasons that I like Presbyterianism is that what we like to say in Presbyterianism is, at least, is that there's always three options available to God's people in a Presbyterian church.
• 6:21
  Speaker 2: If they try and address an issue and it does not receive satisfaction, they don't get satisfaction.
• 6:28
  Speaker 2: When they try and get an issue addressed, there's three options available to them.
• 6:30
  Speaker 2: They can choose to submit, they can choose to decide.
• 6:34
  Speaker 2: This actually is not that important.
• 6:36
  Speaker 2: It doesn't seem like it's going to get traction.
• 6:38
  Speaker 2: I'm going to happily submit to this, even though it's not my cup of tea.
• 6:41
  Speaker 2: Right, they can withdraw, they can just decide.
• 6:45
  Speaker 2: Okay, I didn't get satisfaction and that means this church isn't satisfactory to me anymore and so I'm going to withdraw my membership and I'm going to go somewhere else.
• 6:54
  Speaker 2: Or if I think that there is sin going on and I made that very particularly sharp there's sin going on.
• 7:04
  Speaker 2: They can go above the local church elder board what we call a session and they can go to Presbytery and they can say, hey, I think my session is doing wrong and they can ask the Presbytery to look into it.
• 7:17
  Speaker 2: Because if a congregant thinks that the elder board is sinning, that's a really, really serious matter and that does happen sometimes.
• 7:29
  Speaker 2: That the elder board is sinning, that's a really, really serious matter and that does happen sometimes.
• 7:30
  Speaker 2: That the elder board is sinning and that they need to be called to account for it.
• 7:31
  Speaker 2: It happens regularly in the denomination that I'm in the Presbyterian Church in America and that's good when it does happen, because they should be called to account and if they won't listen to a congregant, hopefully they'll listen to the people that are above them.
• 7:45
  Speaker 2: Many times, however, what's happening is the leadership is not sinning.
• 7:47
  Speaker 2: It's that the people, the congregants, have different opinions, they have different perspectives, they have different preferences and they can elevate that among between them and other congregants and them in leadership.
• 8:01
  Speaker 2: They can elevate those and, frankly, out of their pride.
• 8:06
  Speaker 2: Pride is behind.
• 8:07
  Speaker 2: If you go through the logic in first Corinthians and I think Tim Keller's freedom of self-forgetfulness does this masterfully and we can link to it in the show notes but what sits behind pride is that someone thinks that their viewpoint should win out and when it doesn't, their pride is injured and they want to make a stink because their pride is now injured and they don't have a security in Christ that can support them when their perspective is not adopted by anyone else.
• 8:37
  Speaker 2: Their concept of self is now lost.
• 8:39
  Speaker 2: That's what sits behind conflicts and divisions Desires within your heart.
• 8:44
  Speaker 2: James says right.
• 8:45
  Speaker 2: So here's what I like to say Now.
• 8:47
  Speaker 2: This is super blunt, but I'm the New Yorker and most people are used to that with me.
• 8:51
  Speaker 2: If you know me at all, you know that I can tend to be entirely direct.
• 8:54
  Speaker 2: Here's what I like to say.
• 8:56
  Speaker 2: It can be said gently or not as gently.
• 8:59
  Speaker 2: I'll try and do it gently this time.
• 9:01
  Speaker 2: How's that?
• 9:01
  Speaker 2: Is Jesus as animated about this as you are?
• 9:06
  Speaker 2: And if you think he is as animated about this as you are, let's open our Bibles and I'd love to see where you show that to me.
• 9:17
  Speaker 1: Okay.
• 9:19
  Speaker 2: Because many times what people are animated about is something that Jesus is like.
• 9:23
  Speaker 2: I mean, if you want to do that, that's fine, it's not sinful to do that, but it doesn't matter that much to me.
• 9:31
  Speaker 2: But many times, to church people, things that don't matter all that much to Jesus, they matter quite a lot to them.
• 9:39
  Speaker 2: Here's what I mean.
• 9:40
  Speaker 2: In Presbyterian churches we baptize children and when we do so we take vows to assist the parents in the Christian nurture of this child.
• 9:47
  Speaker 2: So covenant children are exceedingly important to us.
• 9:50
  Speaker 2: The way that we demonstrate that covenant children are exceedingly important to us, the way that we demonstrate that covenant children are exceedingly important to us, doesn't matter that much to Jesus.
• 9:58
  Speaker 2: You can do Sunday school, you can do children's church.
• 10:00
  Speaker 2: You don't have to do either one of them.
• 10:01
  Speaker 2: You can do youth group.
• 10:03
  Speaker 2: You can do not do youth group.
• 10:04
  Speaker 2: You can do Juana.
• 10:04
  Speaker 2: You can not do Juana.
• 10:05
  Speaker 2: You can do VBS.
• 10:06
  Speaker 2: You can not do VBS.
• 10:07
  Speaker 2: Jesus is not animated by any of these things.
• 10:10
  Speaker 2: He is animated that we're serious about those vows that we take and we let the little children come.
• 10:15
  Speaker 2: But the manner in which the container so I'll give a distinction here the container in which we place that heart for our children.
• 10:26
  Speaker 2: That must be evident.
• 10:29
  Speaker 2: But the particular container doesn't matter to Jesus, but it begins to matter very much to people.
• 10:35
  Speaker 2: That's what tends to divide in churches, right.
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: That's what tends to divide.
• 10:40
  Speaker 1: That's helpful, alright.
• 10:42
  Speaker 1: So mark number one is the church has a bunch of backbiters and gossipers, which I know never happens.
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: So let's just be honest.
• 10:50
  Speaker 1: That one was theoretical.
• 10:51
  Speaker 1: That's a throwaway.
• 10:52
  Speaker 1: That's just to warm you up.
• 10:52
  Speaker 1: Let's talk about situation number two.
• 10:56
  Speaker 1: We have a church that has a few longstanding families that wield a great deal of power.
• 11:02
  Speaker 1: You see this as a problem.
• 11:04
  Speaker 1: You say this is a place where a transitional pastor would be useful.
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: What is the underlying?
• 11:08
  Speaker 1: Is there an underlying situation that needs to be addressed in a situation like this?
• 11:12
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so we talk about the difference between paper leaders and unofficial leaders.
• 11:18
  Speaker 2: So paper leaders are the ones that you can read on the website under the leadership tab, or they're on the back of the bulletin.
• 11:24
  Speaker 2: If you use a paper bulletin, somebody says you know who are the elders here.
• 11:27
  Speaker 2: Right, that's the paper leaders.
• 11:29
  Speaker 2: It's the ones that are written down on the paper as the leaders.
• 11:33
  Speaker 2: But what happens sometimes when you have a few influential families in the church is that although there are paper leaders, they're not actually the leaders.
• 11:41
  Speaker 2: Okay, it's these few families that actually control the show.
• 11:46
  Speaker 2: And here's how you know whether this exists or not.
• 11:50
  Speaker 2: Who do you have to ask someone's permission of, either before you start something new or before you see something?
• 11:56
  Speaker 2: And if you have to ask permission of people that are not the official leaders of the church, then you've got unofficial leaders, and many times that's invested in a couple of families.
• 12:07
  Speaker 2: Why is it a danger?
• 12:08
  Speaker 2: Because Jesus aims to exercise his leadership of the church through his ordained leaders.
• 12:14
  Speaker 2: The flow comes from Jesus down through the leaders to the people.
• 12:18
  Speaker 2: That is the biblical model, and so when we elect elders, sometimes we get the idea that church works like our representative republic here in America.
• 12:34
  Speaker 2: Well, we're the constituents.
• 12:36
  Speaker 2: We elect the elders.
• 12:37
  Speaker 2: They represent us to the elder board and the scriptures are actually the absolute inverse of that.
• 12:44
  Speaker 2: That's why elders are under shepherds of Jesus, underneath the great shepherd.
• 12:50
  Speaker 2: The flow of power, control, authority comes from Jesus through his ordained leaders to his people, not the other way.
• 13:00
  Speaker 2: That doesn't mean the leader shouldn't listen to the sheep, doesn't know what their concerns are, try and come alongside of them, don't understand.
• 13:07
  Speaker 2: It just means that they'll just have a stewardship from Jesus.
• 13:10
  Speaker 2: That's who they're responsible to.
• 13:13
  Speaker 2: They're responsible to Jesus.
• 13:16
  Speaker 1: Can you talk about the power dynamics in this situation?
• 13:19
  Speaker 1: You've talked about the underlying situation here as indicating that there's an issue of power dynamics that has not been addressed.
• 13:30
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so I think that part of what needs to happen is if people who are the ordained leaders in the church do not actually have the power to lead, then the people who are seeking to lead who are not the ordained leaders, they actually need to be dealt with.
• 13:50
  Speaker 2: They need to see if they're in violation of actually being submissive to their elders, which they're not being, and in some cases they really need to be called on the carpet, and sometimes that ends up in a big power struggle.
• 14:07
  Speaker 2: But better to get that dealt with and done with before you have a new pastor who comes into play.
• 14:15
  Speaker 2: Better to have your main leaders in the church actually the ones leading it, so that the new pastor comes in is leading that group to lead the church forward into fruitfulness, and so that's why we think it's a good time to have a transitional pastor is to get that dealt with.
• 14:32
  Speaker 1: Finally, are there cases that you've seen and that you've heard of where there can be this dynamic, where there's power vested in a few older families, but the situation is in fact kosher.
• 14:45
  Speaker 2: I think that it's possible, but it takes an extraordinary degree of maturity on the parts of those families to say, yeah, we have a church where this has actually been manifest really, really well.
• 15:00
  Speaker 2: So we have a church that we're working with where a man in his family, a guy who used to be an elder in the church, a man in his family, they're like a 20th of the church, of a large church, so a significant chunk of this church are this guy or people related to him, former elder in the church.
• 15:18
  Speaker 2: But when he stepped down from being an elder, he went to his family and he said we make this up, but I'm not serving the elder board anymore and we need to be really careful that we don't try and exert our influence, because that would be wrong.
• 15:32
  Speaker 2: We need to let this elder board, we need to let this careful that we don't try and exert our influence, because that would be wrong.
• 15:35
  Speaker 2: We need to let this elder board, we need to let this transitional pastor lead.
• 15:37
  Speaker 2: That's where it's not a danger, where they don't try and exert their influence in a way that is not righteous.
• 15:43
  Speaker 2: That's when it's not got it yeah, got it.
• 15:46
  Speaker 1: Okay, help me understand.
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: And this episode is going to go a little bit long.
• 15:49
  Speaker 1: So, uh, if you're driving somewhere, you can flip this on to like 1.5 speed if you want to, but this is going to go a little longer.
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: We could talk faster too.
• 15:55
  Speaker 1: We could do that.
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: Yes, I can't.
• 15:58
  Speaker 1: I'm not as New York as you are, I was born in Lewiston but I was raised in Maryland.
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: You describe a pastor leaving under duress as one of these situations that probably calls for a transitional pastor.
• 16:09
  Speaker 1: Sure, what do you mean by leaving under duress?
• 16:12
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 16:12
  Speaker 2: So family emergency.
• 16:13
  Speaker 2: We're working with the church where the pastor died untimely heart attack 48.
• 16:18
  Speaker 2: Right, he left under duress, right, and that leaves the church grief-stricken and it is very hard to recover from that, just like snap to a new pastor.
• 16:27
  Speaker 2: That's a kind of duress of leaving.
• 16:29
  Speaker 2: It could have been because you know one of his kids had trouble with the other kids in the youth group, right, and you've got a dynamic there that needs to be dealt with.
• 16:36
  Speaker 2: It could have been that a minority or even a majority of the elders just came to him and said dude, it's time to move on.
• 16:41
  Speaker 2: And it was, yeah, it was not good.
• 16:45
  Speaker 2: Or the guy had a petition drawn up against him and the congregation or a portion of the congregation made his life so difficult, or the staff did, or whatever.
• 16:53
  Speaker 2: There's all kinds of situations where guys leave under duress.
• 16:56
  Speaker 2: That tells you there's an unhealthy dynamic underneath here that needs to get to a better stability point before they're going to be in a spot where it would be healthy for them to receive a new long-term pastor.
• 17:07
  Speaker 1: Okay, so let's talk about some of the real hard cases Gross moral failure, betrayal.
• 17:12
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: How often have you found that the you know the trigger being pulled on a Saturday night over voicemail or Sunday morning by a note left on the pastor's desk?
• 17:22
  Speaker 1: How often does that kind of thing happen?
• 17:26
  Speaker 2: Um, it happens, but it's the minority.
• 17:29
  Speaker 2: It's a small minority of cases.
• 17:31
  Speaker 2: Uh, we say transitions in churches kind of happen across a spectrum.
• 17:35
  Speaker 2: Right, you have some transitions that are.
• 17:38
  Speaker 2: You know, if the severity goes from one to five, right, you know.
• 17:42
  Speaker 2: Number one is the church is fairly healthy.
• 17:44
  Speaker 2: They can just get by in pulpit supply and find, you know, do a thoughtful pastor search and be good, they can make by without a transitional pastor, really an intentional one who's using a more robust process, maybe.
• 17:55
  Speaker 2: Slot number two is, yeah, they could use some help, maybe with their public committee thinking about it more carefully, but then it's not a lot of things that really need to be dealt with and maybe that church doesn't need a transitional pastor because it's fairly healthy.
• 18:07
  Speaker 2: Maybe they can get by with advice.
• 18:09
  Speaker 2: Right, really, the situations that we're placing transitional pastors into are slots like three, four and five.
• 18:16
  Speaker 2: Five would be the very worst of things.
• 18:18
  Speaker 2: One of our board members did a transitional pastor in a church that when he went to this church the church at its peak had been 2,000, and by the time he got there it was 200, and it's because the pastor had been disciplined and actually deposed from the ministry and it was an unbelievably huge calamity, right.
• 18:37
  Speaker 2: So that's like four and a half or five.
• 18:39
  Speaker 2: That's about as bad as it gets right, and you know what?
• 18:42
  Speaker 2: I think moral failure is also there.
• 18:44
  Speaker 2: The guy runs off with the secretary.
• 18:45
  Speaker 2: I think those are the very worst of sort of the fives.
• 18:48
  Speaker 2: Can trust ever be built again?
• 18:50
  Speaker 2: That's the kinds of things.
• 18:52
  Speaker 2: And then you get ones that are more like between 4 and 5.
• 18:57
  Speaker 2: I did some transitional pastor work in a church that was really split over the events of 2020, both COVID and the election, and the elder board was split.
• 19:03
  Speaker 2: The congregation was split.
• 19:04
  Speaker 2: They lost people.
• 19:04
  Speaker 2: They lost like half the deacons.
• 19:06
  Speaker 2: It was very, very difficult right, and it might have been a 4 and a half, and a 4 is there's some really significant issues and I think that's where pastors leave under duress, kind of get fired, the elder board's divided about what we need, and maybe a three is something.
• 19:21
  Speaker 2: That's kind of like yeah, we got some unhealthy stuff here that we need some help with those three, fours and fives.
• 19:27
  Speaker 2: That's where we're typically placing transitional pastors and there's a lot in those three realms.
• 19:33
  Speaker 2: There's a lot of churches that could use help, but not all of them are fives.
• 19:38
  Speaker 1: What does a transitional pastor bring?
• 19:40
  Speaker 1: What does he have in his toolbox?
• 19:41
  Speaker 1: I know I've asked this a number of times, but I think it's really important to be highlighting what does a transitional pastor have in his toolbox that the next lead pastor doesn't have in the same way.
• 19:54
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so a couple of things at least.
• 19:55
  Speaker 2: One is typically much more experience, so the pastors that we're hiring to be transitional pastors are usually the youngest they are, are late 40s and they've usually served in two or three calls in diverse circumstances.
• 20:09
  Speaker 2: So these are highly experienced pastors that we're bringing into situations.
• 20:13
  Speaker 2: They're also gifted for this, so we don't hire anybody that we don't think can do this particular kind of work, which means that we turn down people.
• 20:20
  Speaker 2: That doesn't mean that you shouldn't.
• 20:22
  Speaker 2: If you're interested in being a transitional pastor, reach out to us info at flourishcoachingorg.
• 20:26
  Speaker 2: This kind of work intrigues you.
• 20:28
  Speaker 2: I'd love to talk to you, but I guess what it is saying is that we turn down people for this work too, because not everybody's suited for it, and so we're trying to pick people that are particularly suited for it because of the skills that are needed.
• 20:41
  Speaker 2: We also make everybody go through training, everyone receives coaching, and they're using processes that are mature, so they're bringing all of that with them into the situation.
• 20:50
  Speaker 2: A new lead pastor may have almost none of that.
• 20:53
  Speaker 2: They may have that age and experience, but they don't have any of the rest of it, and that's what we're trying to deliver when Flourish brings a transitional pastor to your church.
• 21:03
  Speaker 1: And we're going to dive into each of those in more depth in upcoming episodes.
• 21:07
  Speaker 1: Would you talk a little bit more about cases where the pastor or the church has suffered some kind of loss, some kind of tragedy?
• 21:17
  Speaker 1: And I guess what I'm really getting at here is, In each of these scenarios that we're talking about today, when we're looking and saying, does my church check a box or several boxes?
• 21:29
  Speaker 1: We're answering the question yes, should I be looking at using a transitional pastor?
• 21:35
  Speaker 1: There are two words that kind of come to the surface in all of these.
• 21:39
  Speaker 1: For me, One is sin, okay, but the other one is grief or wound, and you and I both know that church is working through ministry grief ministry, pain ministry, healing.
• 21:53
  Speaker 1: All of the situations that you've described here are not just we hit a speed bump.
• 22:00
  Speaker 1: We hit a speed bump going 75 miles an hour and we lost grandma and the two-year-old.
• 22:06
  Speaker 1: They're on the side of the road still rolling.
• 22:09
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 22:10
  Speaker 1: And this is real there's.
• 22:11
  Speaker 1: There's blood left behind us Right and there's a healing process, there's a grieving process that has to happen in order for health to be returned to Right.
• 22:25
  Speaker 1: Would you talk about that?
• 22:26
  Speaker 1: However, you want to.
• 22:27
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 22:28
  Speaker 2: So I think that in America, I think that we do very poorly at grieving, and particularly in terms of our institutions.
• 22:36
  Speaker 2: We do this is not even people don't even think about it and so like, if you look in the Old Testament, you look at all of the Psalms of Lament, the Israelites they were used to having institutional ways to grieve.
• 22:50
  Speaker 2: That's preposterous to us.
• 22:52
  Speaker 2: We would never even think to do that.
• 22:56
  Speaker 2: It seems bizarre.
• 22:57
  Speaker 2: If you try and if you're a worship leader and you set a new tune to a Psalm of Lament, you're wondering if you're still going to have your job after that week, because everything's supposed to be up and cheerful and it's great and, yes, the gospel's good news, but it's good news in the midst of a lot of sadness and difficulty and challenge.
• 23:17
  Speaker 2: I think about this church that we're working in right now, where the pastor died suddenly from a heart attack.
• 23:21
  Speaker 2: He was 48, right, how do you as a church, how do you even it's like I had to start at the church right and how do you even begin to grapple with that?
• 23:32
  Speaker 2: And you need time and space to do that and not feel the need to rush towards getting a new pastor and that it's better for you, just like someone who loses their spouse, it is really better if they go through the whole, at least a cycle of grief.
• 23:48
  Speaker 2: I don't know about process of grief we can disagree about that.
• 23:52
  Speaker 2: There are features of grief and it's important that you have experienced those features and know how to deal with them, because they'll recur too.
• 24:03
  Speaker 2: But before it's even good for you to begin thinking about another romantic relationship if you've been widowed.
• 24:09
  Speaker 2: That's what a program like Grief Share would help you with.
• 24:12
  Speaker 2: Right, it's good for a church to grieve before they go looking for another pastor, whether that grief is about sin or death or a split or whatever, right, it's good for them to grieve and have the space for that and to be led in that, right, yeah, right, they.
• 24:29
  Speaker 2: It's good for them to grieve and have the space for that and to be led in that, right, yeah, um, there's an organization that I really enjoy that does this kind of work called vital church.
• 24:33
  Speaker 2: I'm happy to link to them because they're wonderful and I've learned a ton from the people who work there and benefited from that greatly.
• 24:41
  Speaker 2: We may even do an interview later in the season with one of the principals there, who's a friend of mine, but one of the things that I learned from the folks at Vital Church and going through their training for transitional pastoring is just this idea of actually working towards some kind of service where we try and mark the end of one part of our church's life and the beginning of a new part.
• 25:09
  Speaker 2: And sometimes that can just be lament over grief.
• 25:12
  Speaker 2: Sometimes that's like in the Old Testament we're going to get together for a service of repentance.
• 25:19
  Speaker 2: Right, we're going to show together corporately that we're going to, we're putting this behind us and that's what we're going to.
• 25:27
  Speaker 2: That's what we're going, that's what we're going to do together and that's super critical.
• 25:32
  Speaker 2: I think that honors the Lord.
• 25:34
  Speaker 2: It's true and good.
• 25:36
  Speaker 1: I'm sure I will say this again, but one of the things I think that makes a transitional pastor uniquely able to do this is that he can.
• 25:47
  Speaker 1: He can shepherd the church to having their needs met met by jesus yeah, and not by him.
• 25:57
  Speaker 1: He knows his role here is under shepherd.
• 26:01
  Speaker 1: He knows that jesus is the one that needs to be heard from, that jesus is the one who loves this church, that jesus is the one who wants to see them healthy, that Jesus is the one who loves this church, that Jesus is the one who wants to see them healthy, that Jesus is the one who can heal them and that he is not the intermediary between God and man.
• 26:17
  Speaker 1: His job is to point them and lead them and walk with them to Jesus and then step out of the way.
• 26:22
  Speaker 1: That's good, because he knows that going in, he can.
• 26:25
  Speaker 1: I think he can be uniquely beneficial to a church going through something where they probably don't have the impulse at that moment to actually slow down.
• 26:39
  Speaker 1: The impulse and pain is get through this as quickly as possible.
• 26:42
  Speaker 1: Get this in the rearview mirror.
• 26:43
  Speaker 1: Let's deal with this.
• 26:44
  Speaker 1: Let's diagnose this.
• 26:45
  Speaker 1: Let's deal with it.
• 26:45
  Speaker 1: Let's get it done Because this sucks Right.
• 26:46
  Speaker 1: Let's deal with this.
• 26:47
  Speaker 1: Let's diagnose this, let's deal with it, let's get it done, because this sucks and, unfortunately, jesus is not an ER doctor, he's a gardener.
• 26:57
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that's good, and churches that have lost their pastors are—one way to describe them that I think is actually helpful is they're very anxious, they're unsettled and they want to be done with that sense of being in the wilderness without a pastor as quickly as possible.
• 27:14
  Speaker 2: And I'm not sure that that's always what God wants to do.
• 27:19
  Speaker 2: I think he wants us to learn the lessons of the wilderness, whatever they are for a particular church.
• 27:26
  Speaker 2: He wants us to learn them.
• 27:27
  Speaker 1: Is he a tame lion?
• 27:28
  Speaker 1: No, sorry.
• 27:32
  Speaker 2: He's loving though.
• 27:35
  Speaker 1: Thank you for this time, matt.
• 27:36
  Speaker 1: Thank you, listener, for sticking with us.
• 27:38
  Speaker 1: I know this has been long.
• 27:39
  Speaker 1: I hope this has been beneficial.
• 27:40
  Speaker 1: All of these things that we've talked about will be linked in the show notes.
• 27:44
  Speaker 1: I encourage you, if you have questions, if you have concerns, to dig through some of these resources and reach out.
• 27:51
  Speaker 1: We'd love to hear from you with any questions or concerns that you do have.
• 27:55
  Speaker 1: Thank you very much.
• 27:57
  Speaker 1: We'll talk to you soon.
• 28:01
  Speaker 1: Thanks for listening to the Church Renewal Podcast from Flourish Coaching.
• 28:03
  Speaker 1: Flourish exists to set ministry leaders free to be effective wherever God has called them.
• 28:08
  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.
• 28:16
  Speaker 1: When pastors or churches feel stuck, our team of coaches refresh their hope in the gospel and help them clarify their strategy.
• 28:23
  Speaker 1: If you have questions or a need, we'd love to hear from you.
• 28:27
  Speaker 1: You can find us at flourishcoachingorg and you can reach us by email at info at flourishcoachingorg.
• 28:32
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• 28:39
  Speaker 1: Please share this podcast with anyone you think it'll help, and if we get a client because of a recommendation you make, we'll send you a small gift 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.
• 28:52
  Speaker 1: All music for this show has been licensed and was composed and created by artists.
• 28:56
  Speaker 1: The Church Renewal Podcast was produced by me, jeremy Zaffirati, in association with Flourish Coaching, with the goal of equipping and encouraging your church to flourish wherever God has called you.