Speaker 1: 0:02

Welcome to the Church Renewal Podcast from Flourish Coaching. I'm Jeremy, I'm Matt. Today, matt and I are going to discuss the productive years of a pastor. Just like a church has a normal life cycle, a pastor also has a ministry life cycle. Knowing where you as a pastor or where your pastor is in his cycle will not only help you to plan for the future. It will also help you better understand why your church is the way it is right now and show you how you can more fully engage all the members of your church in the ministry that God has called you to. Welcome back to the Church Renewal Podcast. I am Jeremy.

Speaker 2: 0:38

I think most days I'm Matt. Do you ever get any pushback on that? If I'm with my mother, sometimes it's Matthew. Okay, that's fair.

Speaker 1: 0:46

That's fair. We are here to talk about all things transitional pastor and transitional period for churches. Today we're talking about the idea that we've already discussed to some extent, but we want to dig into it a little bit deeper here. It's the idea of the productive years of a pastor. So right off the bat, mac, give us the 30,000 foot view of what you mean when you talk about the productive years. And my second question you can go into it if you want to is where did that idea first come from?

Speaker 2: 1:16

So let me give the overview and then I'll go back to the idea.

Speaker 2: 1:18

So the overview is that the origin of this, at least in my own thinking, is the work of Tom Rainer, and we can link to some articles by him and podcasts that he's done on this topic.

Speaker 2: 1:29

The concern is the average tenure of a pastor in America. The average amount of time the pastor stays in the seat in America is something like five years, and Rainer has demonstrated through his research over decades that the most productive years are years 7 to 15. So the main problem is that most pastors never get to the productive years. In my own context, my estimate, where PCA has about 2,000 works, our estimate is that 50% of pastoral matches don't last five years, so only 50% of them they're not getting even to the national average Okay. So the other 50% are getting into the neighborhood of that year 7 to 15.

Speaker 2: 2:13

Why and this is again me just riffing on Rainer's work, this is independent of my own why does it take that long, I think, and we can link in the show notes as well to some work from years ago by Carl George. Carl George talked about years ago the idea of a berry basket that when a pastor walks into a new congregation, that he has some people usually the early adopters in the congregation, which is a small segment of people who are already with him because they see where he's going. They're forward thinking anyways. In the congregation, which is a small segment of people who are already with him because they see where he's going, they're forward thinking anyways. They're maybe pre tilted towards trust. They don't have any trust issues. They maybe they weren't glad to see the last pastor go, but they could see that it was time for him to go and so they are with him. But that's a minority of people and a pastor can't really lead well until he has a majority of the congregation With him. Okay.

Speaker 2: 3:09

And the way that majority ends up happening is either by the existing people that are there more than coming over onto onto, kind of yeah, I'll say his side.

Speaker 2: 3:19

But the way that Carl George puts it is you've got a berry basket with two halves in it and when you come in and the half that's on your side has just a few berries in it and most of the berries are on the other side, and you get berries into your side of the basket as a pastor when new people come to the church and they opt into the church because you are the leader of it and other people that are existing in the congregation.

Speaker 2: 3:43

They become convinced of your leadership and then eventually, over time, you develop the ability because you've got more barriers on your side of the basket to actually lead. It takes that period of time over five years to actually gain the trust of people and have the opportunity to lead them and have the opportunity to lead them. This is why many times young or first-time pastors are shown the door very quickly because they see what needs to change but they don't first get the relational equity that they need in order to enact change, so they move too quickly or they move too suddenly without having the buy-in.

Speaker 2: 4:26

Absolutely. So we're working with the church right now. Where, uh yeah guy came in, it was his first time that he was a lead pastor. He saw necessary things that needed to change. So this is a very important point to make. It's not to say that the pastor doesn't have the right insights right. Many times, even in this situation that I'm thinking of, where the pastor only lasted, I think, 18 months was, I think he had the right insights but he didn't have the equity in order to lead those insights forward, and so, particularly for pastors, you have to have the patience for the long game. So you could try and do it in the first year or two, but they'll show you the door, and so pastors have a hard time having the patience to wait and gain the relational equity that's needed. The advantage that a transitional pastor has between long-term pastors is that he comes in with permission. If it's been set up well by the elder board, he comes in with permission to make the needed changes that have to happen between long-term pastors.

Speaker 1: 5:32

I guess to some extent he also understands there are changes that may need to happen that are going to be beyond the length of my tenure here.

Speaker 2: 5:40

Absolutely that we do in the transitional period. We do the most important things to get the church on a healthy track, but there are more things that are left over In a church health assessment report. We do the most important things to get the church on a healthy track, but there are more things that are left over In a church health assessment report. We provide long-term recommendations, short-term recommendations, medium, short-term and immediate, and those immediate ones are the ones that must be accomplished in the transitional period in order for the church to be in a healthier state when a new pastor comes.

Speaker 1: 6:04

I'm totally off script here, but we're going to talk about coaching in future episodes, as an organization does Flourish work with the transitional pastor at that church for their specific game plan to say, hey, let's work through not just what this report says, but let's be reviewing how this is going and seeing how we can be effectively accomplishing the right tasks.

Speaker 2: 6:29

Absolutely. Yeah, I think that's one of the most important things is that we're actually, I think, all the major organizations that provide transitional pastors us and IPM and Vital Church we all provide coaching to our transitional pastor to provide them a process and we provide them coaching to help them stay on track and be wise as they go. Okay, all right. So why seven to 15 years? Why are those the most productive years of a ministry? Well, because a pastor's got the relational equity to lead, he knows the people, he knows the environment and he can actually, in that time period, revision the church and then lead that vision out productively. So why 15? Well, think of it as a series of sevens, right? So the first seven years you're able to revision and then be able to figure out how to lead this forward.

Speaker 2: 7:16

Once you get to the next seven, which would be year 14, you're now at a spot where you're 14 years into a church If things have developed. You have to continue to develop as a person, as a pastor, as a leader, as a preacher, and the church needs to pastor as a leader, as a preacher, and the church needs to be that's right revisioned again. And so the question is at that point can the pastor reinvent himself and can he help the church reinvent itself again. And some people are able to do that and some people recognize okay, it's probably time to bow out here. I've had a good run, and so there are pastors that can be productive past that point. But it's the end of that second cycle that tends to end the productivity of that pastor. Version one, if that makes sense, does that make sense to you, jerry?

Speaker 1: 8:06

That makes sense to me. The pushback I have to give to this is that I've known and I'm sure you've known as well many, many pastors who have served faithfully and well for 20, 30, 50 years in the same pulpit, and even going back, we've got 2000 years of church history where a single pastor gives 70% of his life to one church. Right, I know you've already said in the past times have changed. Yeah, is this as simple as times have changed, or is there more that goes into this particular dynamic?

Speaker 2: 8:43

Yeah, so I would say there's a couple of factors that come in about why churches need to increase the rate of their adaptivity. So, first of all, churches should adapt. If you look through the ministry of the Apostle Paul in the book of Acts, as he goes into different settings, he takes the same gospel message, but he adapts the door that he walks through with it and even his own methodology. He adapts it for the audience that he's going to talk to and basically what their background is ethnically and religiously. So if we look at our neighborhoods, I'll ask you, dear listener, look at your neighborhood. If you've been in your neighborhood for 15 years, has it changed? Most places it's changed a lot ethnically and religiously, and so we need to continue to adapt as missionaries to our context, to how the place where we are has changed.

Speaker 2: 9:42

I think there's a second factor about why we need to increase the rate of the adaptivity of churches. If you've not picked up the Anxious Generation or Generations, so two more recent books that have both made the point that the defining factor that's going on societally, at least in the West, is the rate at which new technologies are introduced and embraced by people. It's changed the way that people interact. It's changed the way that people think, and so that means if the people are different, so I'm the same riff. If the people that we're trying to reach are different and they are because of the technologies that they're embracing then we need to increase our adaptivity curve so that we can be positioned to reach them.

Speaker 1: 10:38

So this question is going to possibly be meddling, but does the length of a tenure of a pastor have any kind of correlative indication towards the spiritual health of a church?

Speaker 2: 10:51

Yes, so pastors that stay longer produce healthier churches.

Speaker 1: 10:55

Pastors churches that churn pastors, is that?

Speaker 2: 10:58

past 15 years. It depends if they adapt or not, but certainly churches that churn pastors end up immature and continue to have problems. So we've talked about pastoral churning in other places in this podcast season. But yeah, churches, because if you can't get there and if you can't get there, grow yourself and help the church, give you the relational capital in order to lead, give you enough relational chips to lead with, then you don't ever get to lead and the church never gets to actually learn and grow and change and become more like Jesus. It stays in its continuing immature state. It's Pete Scazzaro that talks about how there are some pastors who have not 40 years experience, but they have 40 experiences of the same year of experience, and I think that that's the. It's the reason why I got into coaching pastors particularly is that there's nobody there in many pastors' lives to help them continue to develop and grow. There's nobody there to keep developing them. Pastoral coaching, in my mind, is more than, but not less than, the ongoing discipleship of the pastor.

Speaker 1: 12:16

Okay. So I've heard a couple things. I've heard you say that the motor that runs a church is designed to move the entire church, not just burn out tires at the starting line. That's good. I've heard you say that if you have a church full of laymen, your first seven years is going to get you lazy-eyed Leo.

Speaker 1: 12:37

You'll get to Rachel after seven and you might be working Rachel off if you keep on going, but it could also be really good. I think there's a lot to think about here, because I don't personally know many people who go into the ministry and say you know, I think I'd like to be doing five years and then hop around. Most people that I graduated from seminary with were thinking I'll have one, maybe two calls, right, and I'll get planted here, I will develop this congregation, I will watch them flourish, I will serve them faithfully and well, I'll hand this off and God will continue leading this church once I'm gone. And I agree with that as an ideal. I think that that is the desire that we all have.

Speaker 1: 13:29

But we've talked now about both the church life cycle and now we're talking about the pastoral life cycle and whether or not this is a feature or a bug. Right, I could definitely sit here and make an argument and say Western society has shifted from a family-based understanding of life to a community-based understanding of life, to an organizational-based way of life, and I think that in an organizational way of life this kind of quick turnover is to be expected, as we see in business. But when you take it back to the way that oftentimes in Scripture it's either a body metaphor or a building metaphor or a family metaphor, and it's actually the body metaphor that's used most often in Scripture talking about the church. The way that's put together is it's designed to grow together and, as we are, as pastors, are in the position of leadership, it's not enough to say I have a direction that I believe God's calling us in and I can take us there. And here's what there looks like rah, rah, rah let's get by and let's go Right Right.

Speaker 1: 14:49

It is also raising up the generation that's behind me, so they don't need me. I mean, every pastor, like every good therapist, should be trying to work themselves out of a job.

Speaker 2: 15:02

Yeah, developing people, right. Yes, yeah, discipling people.

Speaker 1: 15:06

I don't want my children living with me at 35 years old, right, I want them know how to do the dishes, how to clean up after the sims, how to take care of their bills, how to change their oil and not be my responsibility any longer, and I want to be helping their kids learn how to do it.

Speaker 2: 15:20

Yeah yeah, I'm very challenged by when you look at the ministry of the apostle paul in the book of acts. He goes into a place and he raises up elders in 18 months, from unbelievers to elders in 18 months yep, and that feels unbelievably, staggeringly difficult to us. And yes, I'm I'm I'm not pollyanna. I know times have changed. We don't live the village life where, you know, discussion was happening every night because the sun had gone down and there was nothing but oil lamps and everybody lived within walking proximity of each other.

Speaker 2: 15:54

I'm not Pollyannish about how culture and society has changed, but I am challenged by the length of time in which it takes for us to help people mature and that we don't raise up leaders behind us. Because Paul would say to Timothy both hey, let them see your progress, lean into your own growth and that's what I try to help pastors do Lean into your own growth, because you could do more than 15, but only if you've reinvented yourself so you can up the church, reinvent itself again. But he would also say Paul, what else say to Timothy? Hey, you know, raise up the guy behind you and so that he raises up the guy behind him. It was a three-generation view. It's just like Psalm 78 in the covenant family. It's that in the covenantal family the new people of God. Right, it's both. They're parallel there between Psalm 78 and 2 Timothy 2. And we need pastors that think that.

Speaker 1: 16:52

You're welcome. We just got into covenantal theology. You thought it would take longer, but no, we got there. That's a good PCA way to go. I love it. I had a pastor friend who served he's one of the guys who served faithfully for 50 plus years and he used to say often if you need to make a 90 degree turn, make three 30 degree turns or six 15.

Speaker 1: 17:16

And he's a guy who exemplified the graciousness of Jesus and also led, knew where he was going, knew who he was called to be faithful to. So I think there's a lot here that the listener, whether a leader or a parishioner, can take from, be encouraged by, be challenged by and hopefully we've made you think. If we have, we'd love to hear about it. Share this with a friend. If you can, let us know what your thoughts are. You can reach out to us. We'll talk to you soon.

Speaker 1: 17:53

Thank you for listening to the Church Renewal Podcast from Flourish Coaching. Flourish exists to set ministry leaders free to be effective wherever God has called them. We believe that there is only one fully sufficient reason that, this day dawned, jesus is still gathering his people and using his church to do it. When pastors or churches feel stuck, our team of coaches refresh their hope in the gospel and help them clarify their strategy. If you have questions or a need, we'd love to hear from you.

Speaker 1: 18:24

You can find us at flourishcoachingorg or you can email info at flourishcoachingorg. You can also follow us on Facebook, twitter or YouTube. It would make our day if you would like or subscribe. Wherever you're listening, please rate and review this podcast with your team, your friends and anyone that this may help. A special thanks to Bay Ridge Christian Church for the use of their space to record today's episode. All music for this podcast has been licensed and was composed and created by artists. The Church Renewal Podcast was produced by me, jeremy Seferati, in association with Flourish Coaching, with the goal of encouraging and equipping your church.