Pastor search teams often fail. Within months of the new call, faultlines appear. Conflict brews under the surface. Members of the previous search team leave the church. These disruptions don’t need to happen.
When search teams miss the mark with the call of a new pastor, their failure often happens for very predictable – and avoidable – reasons. Some of these reasons are the responsibility of the church when they established the search team. Some of these reasons take place within the dynamics of the search team, itself. Others are the result of a faulty process.
Knowing these reasons from missing the mark can help you avoid them.
The Church Must Avoid:
- A Lack of Prayer and Spiritual Discernment. Treating the search like a business hire rather than a spiritual process dishonors God. The church must undergird the process with regular and earnest prayer. Seek God’s will at every turn.
- No Unifying Vision. Multiple expectations for the next pastor is a sign of competing visions. Confusion and disagreements almost always follow when members see the call of a pastor as the opportunity for their vision to control the church’s future.
- Choosing Team Members for the Wrong Reasons. The members of effective search teams are chosen for spiritual maturity and an ability to work as team players. All other characteristics are secondary. Churches search teams made up of a pre-existing committee, ex-officio members defined by other roles, those chosen by their ability to lobby for inclusion, or popular vote experience the most frustration in their work.
The Search Team Must Avoid:
- Rushing the Process. Moving too quickly can cause serious problems. Don’t rush to secure the names of candidates before your team prays, builds trust with one another, establishes committee procedures, and defines the qualities for effective candidates. Invest in knowing one another and creating shared understandings of your work. Define team roles and Responsibilities. Discuss how you will handle tasks like research, candidate communication, and logistics.
- Ignoring Congregational Input. Pastors have personal relationships with varied stakeholders. The broader church body wants to express their opinions. Involving them beforehand is healthier that hearing thor disappointment later.
- Failure to develop an accurate profile of your church’s current status. What does a candidate need to know about your congregation’s trends, ministries, leadership structure, history and community?
- Relying on resumes alone. While resumes are important, they don’t tell the whole story. Committees must go beyond the paper and engage in meaningful conversations and effective interviews.
- Insufficient Background Checks: Go beyond the references on a resume. Neglecting thorough background checks, including social media clues is a neglected opportunity to cull candidates with inappropriate behaviors. For your final candidate consider a criminal background and credit check.
- Breach of Confidentiality. Nothing ruins a process quicker than sharing a candidate’s information outside the committee.
Our search consultants have helped hundreds of congregations search for a new pastor. In those churches where 3+ years have passed since the completion of the process, more than 95% of the pastors called were still serving the congregations we served. The Center for Healthy Churches can help your team avoid the most common mistakes in order to find an effective pastor for your congregation.
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