Speaker 1: 0:02

Welcome to the Church Renewal Podcast from Flourish Coaching. I'm Jeremy, I'm Matt. Okay, as we come to the end of the third season of the Church Renewal Podcast, we've talked a lot about the ministry of Flourish Coaching, but what about the wider field of church transition? Are there other organizations that work in this specialized area? Who are they? What are the similarities and distinctions between them and what, if any, is the relationship between them? Join us today as we talk about the broader field of church transitioning. Welcome back to the Church Renewal Podcast. I am Jeremy Seferati.

Speaker 2: 0:37

And I'm Matt Bowen.

Speaker 1: 0:38

And we are glad that you guys are here with us today, matt. We are coming to the end of season three no, of the Church Renewal Podcast. We couldn't possibly be. We are, in fact, we're going to have to do this again. I would love to Coming to the end here. If anyone is still listening either, they are convinced that they should fire their lead pastor and get a transitional pastor.

Speaker 2: 1:00

I heard it was transitional pastor.

Speaker 1: 1:01

That's right, or they stopped listening. Either way, let's recap this for the listener Give me the elevator pitch on why a person, why a church, should be using a transitional pastor.

Speaker 2: 1:14

Yeah, so church should use a transitional pastor because managing stewarding really, I think, is a good word to use. Stewarding the transitional period between long-term pastors is one of the very best things that you can do for your church. If you can lay the foundation in that transitional period for the fruitfulness of the next pastor's ministry, if you can set things up in a way that he can be there for at least a decade of fruitful ministry, that's entirely worth taking your time and spending the money that it takes in order to employ a transitional pastor and to work your way through the assessment and envisioning and wisely going into pastor search, knowing a lot more about yourself as a church and about the direction that God's calling you to, and what it is that you need in your next pastor so that he can calling you to, and what it is that you need in your next pastor so that he can lead you forward.

Speaker 1: 2:07

So what does a transitional pastor, or a TP as we lovingly call them, have in his toolbox that either the lead pastor doesn't have or hasn't developed to the same level?

Speaker 2: 2:19

A couple of things. First of all, they feel a calling towards this. So they feel a calling towards being there with the church in this transitional period between long-term pastors. And they feel that kind of calling because it takes different gifts and abilities and experiences, training capabilities, even wiring, I think, in some ways to do this work when you're between long-term pastors. And so the guys that are on our roster, they feel called to this, they feel like this is what God made them for in this latter part of their ministry, and so they see this, just like you see the Apostle Paul as he progresses through time in his own ministry. In some places he's the guy that is planting a church, in other places he's the guy who's going back and he's the encourager of the church, he's writing to churches. So I think that these transitional pastors see this work as the thing to which their lives have been pointing.

Speaker 2: 3:23

The way I like to put it about myself when I had the privilege to do this and maybe I'll do it again in the future my wife and I have chatted about that is that that may be someone else led Flourish at some point. I wouldn't mind doing transitional pastoring again. I don't think I would do it as a geographical bachelor, but I could imagine doing it again. I could honestly say I was made for this, and so I can see other people that they were made for this as well, and so there's a special calling and equipping by experience and training for these guys to do this sort of work, and so, anyways, you can tell I get a little excited about this.

Speaker 1: 4:05

I'm glad. I'm glad so. Is Jesus going to keep my church alive, like some kind of evangelical zombie? Well, I don't tell Matt the questions ahead of time, just so that you know, Every church that we have in the New Testament.

Speaker 2: 4:20

as far as we know, they all ended up closing at some point, and so have millions and millions of churches. The day that we're recording this, the statistics bear out that eight or nine churches will close in America today, something like 3,500 a year.

Speaker 1: 4:39

So the Church of Galatia is not. The Church of Galatia is not there. The Church of Colossae is not there.

Speaker 2: 4:44

Exactly of galatia is not. The church of galatia is not there. The church of colossi is not there exactly, um, and so churches do go through a life cycle. Um, some, just um, some just die out over time, they age out. Um, some are broken by scandal and can't be retrieved. Um, and some you can look at and you can look at those, the new testament letters, you can look at the letters of Revelation. You can go, yep, that church would not change and Jesus left and he took the light with him.

Speaker 1: 5:10

Are you saying that Jesus will shut a church down?

Speaker 2: 5:13

Absolutely. Those are not dead letters. If a church won't look at the mainline, why have the mainline churches shrunk so much in the last decades? It's because Jesus left, left the building. They took the light with them and they're they're closing at these crazy rates because they were. They had an agenda. It just wasn't jesus agenda.

Speaker 2: 5:38

That promise in the great, the great commission and some people don't like it when I say this, so I'll pre-admit that is the promise of Jesus is as you're going, I will be with you, which I think is true. When you look at Revelation, you correlate it you go. If you're not going on Jesus' Great Commission in a Great Commandment way, he's not with you. And yeah, this is the truth that sometimes that happens.

Speaker 2: 6:10

The thing I think about churches and having transitional pastors is, again, we're trying to look and see a place where the Spirit's gone ahead of us and has already begun to work, and so that we're hopeful that we're not taking, you know, this called and gifted and experienced and trained and vetted and coached person and putting them in a spot where they're going to beat their head against the wall. I'm trying to not let that happen and so I'm as much interviewing churches before we take them on as clients, as I am transitional pastor candidates. I am transitional pastor candidates. I'm interviewing both of them to make sure that this is a moldable group and they're ready to follow.

Speaker 1: 6:49

Jesus where he calls them. I'm showing my age here. I grew up listening to Audio Adrenaline. Is the song some kind of zombie about churches that Jesus has not yet totally snuffed out?

Speaker 2: 7:03

Maybe I don't know. I think I was with a church this week before we started this podcast recording and the church has declined pretty significantly over time. They're wondering if they're near the end and what to do, and I think that the promise is that if we're willing to follow Jesus, to live sacrificial lives, to make room in our lives for people that don't know the Lord, the real neighbors that we have where we live, work and play, if we will lean into the gospel ourselves. So it's good news to us today, in every aspect of life, so that we naturally share that good news with other people as they live their lives. There is always hope. I think that Jesus will give us what I call a new incline right. He'll give us a new opportunity for fruitfulness and effectiveness. There's always a possibility of that, just like in a relationship that's been broken for whatever reason.

Speaker 2: 8:04

A repentance and faith can, by the power of the spirit, repair broken relationships. Repentance in the church, um jesus will respond to and continue to bear fruit through a church. But it does take that repentance. It takes turning from we've lived life for our own sex. Jesus says seek first his kingdom and his righteousness and all these things will be added to us and we as Americans go. Well, I'm going to make sure I have all these things added to us and if I've got time left over then I'll think about the kingdom and it's the inversion of Jesus' pattern. When we repent of that inversion, then there is something wonderful that Jesus can do through a church that's repentant in that way.

Speaker 1: 8:46

Do you think that what you're saying right now goes back to the promise that we read in Malachi? Every time that we hear a sermon on tithing, test me and see if I will not open the floodgates of heaven.

Speaker 2: 8:58

Yeah, and I think that it's not about our money though.

Speaker 1: 9:01

No, it's not about our money, but it is about our trust.

Speaker 2: 9:04

But remember our money is the token of our trust. Yes, and especially for us, very wealthy Americans, by standards of all ages and across the world. Even now we're wealthy. This is the money, is supposed to be the fruit that my whole life is dedicated to you, and here's how I show. It is by giving the time. But American Christianity you can cut me off, jared for too long, but American Christianity for too long has been what I call checkbox Christianity. What's a good Christian? Well, I read my Bible, I pray, I go to church, I serve in church in some way, and I go to a small group or a bunch.

Speaker 1: 9:41

I have my Christian Boy Scout merit badge.

Speaker 2: 9:43

Yeah, yeah, check, check, check, check, check. Okay. So I check off all the boxes that I'm a good Christian and I give to the church, where what Jesus is calling us to is that every single Christian is an ambassador for Christ. We are ambassadors for Christ. Paul says to the Corinthian church, to the saints there in Corinth we are ambassadors for Christ, y'all, me and you. And for too long American Christians have not had to think about their lives as though every single one of us is a missionary and ambassador for Christ, someone who's got this treasure in a jar of clay, the way Peter put it right, and we haven't had to do that and we've been able to kind of skate along and just be able to put up a nice church and teach well and people will come, like the Field of Dreams model, that day's passed. We have to think about every single one of us as a missionary, and that's that work and the envisioning that middle phase right, because we're trying to reanimate that missionary spirit in the life of the congregation.

Speaker 1: 10:52

Thank you for that answer. You're welcome. Is it fair to say that one of the reasons the transitional panster benefits a congregation is specifically because he knows that he is only a very short term under shepherd, holding a stewardship for which he will give an account, and that fact alone gives him the ability to avoid falling into the trap of becoming an intermediary between the Church and the Father. Yeah, I think Not that I'm trying to set this up.

Speaker 2: 11:24

Yeah, yeah, no, I think that what it allows is that if I'm not having to make sure that I've got a long-term job here, then if there are problems to be dealt with, then I feel a greater freedom to deal with those problems, no matter what the consequences are. Where the long-term pastor really is always thinking about consequences and I'm not saying that that's wrong or bad, but it can keep again, the 75 percent of pastors that are externally driven that their temptation is towards people pleasing um, that that can lead into a conflict avoidance and not dealing with things that need to be dealt with. The transitional pastor knows, going in, there's going to be things that need to be dealt with here and I'm responsible to the lord first to flourish, and to this elder board that we said we're going to come in and we're going to help you and we're going to help this church be healthier. And so they walk towards those difficult things. They walk towards the the battle, because it's it's what the job is, what they're called to.

Speaker 1: 12:31

What I'm hearing you describe is I own a home. I want to hand this home to my child, right. So I I hire a contractor who may also have someone on his or her team who is an interior designer and they come in, ask the experts, and they first evaluate and say does this home have good bones, right? Right, if it doesn't have good bones, we have to deal with that, right. And we have to make a decision either we tear this down, we start over, or we fix the problems with the bones right.

Speaker 1: 13:02

And once we deal with that, now we're going to look at this thing from the perspective of someone looking and saying uh, yeah, you need to, uh, put new paint on your. You have shingles hanging off of the roof that's slanted over your front door, and it's not a structural issue but it is an aesthetic issue, right. And if you want to give this with value to someone else, or if you want someone to come in and pick this up as it is valuable and in such a way that they can agree with your valuation, you're going to have to fix these things. You're going to have to fix them, and you're not doing it for my sake yeah, I don't have a dog in this fight. Yes, I'm here to help you be successful, yeah, and I'm going to leave and go back to my house, which you helped pay for. Thank you, but that's really just the fact of life. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2: 13:53

Yeah, and I think that that outsider you know. So if you just have somebody come for public supply and you write to a search committee and you just kind of go on your own, you haven't really gotten the perspective of an outsider, someone who doesn't already pre-love your church, the people who are already in your church. They're there for reasons that seem justified to them. But you very quickly lose the perspective of an outsider, of how your church feels to a visitor.

Speaker 2: 14:22

And that's one of the advantages of transitional pastors they can help you regain that viewpoint and think about it. I went to a church this past Sunday. I was visiting family and I went to a church this past Sunday.

Speaker 2: 14:32

I was visiting family and I went to a church this past Sunday and it was very obvious that the church was not thinking about me as a visitor, because there were whole parts of things that I couldn't participate in. I had no idea what was going on, and a transitional pastor can help you come to realize that, so that everybody wants visitors to come and to stay with their church, but they're not thinking through. How does it feel when a visitor pulls into our parking lot, comes in our door or tries to participate in a service, and are we doing what we can to make space?

Speaker 1: 15:03

and room for them. But this also underlines why it is so imperative that you leading Flourish and as the guy coaching and training the transitional pastors that you place, are rock solid on the heart, the passion, the depth of conviction of these guys that they're not just coming in as content matter experts, right, they're coming in with the heart of a shepherd, yep, to say, no, I'm here to love on you.

Speaker 2: 15:35

It's just not going to be long term, right, but you're going to get the same love and I think also I'll just add one thing that we've mentioned in other episodes in the season gospel saturated because I think that if the, if the pastor himself is one who sees the gospel as good news today and that's the currency of his own heart, then I think that that's also what you give away. So what you this is because there's got a version of this Maxim, but you can't here's the Matt version of it. You can't give away what you don't have and whatever you have, you're giving it away. Away what you don't have and whatever you have, you're giving it away.

Speaker 2: 16:13

Yeah, and so you might well want to give away the gospel as good news for people's living, Right, but if you don't have that yourself, you can't give that away. Yeah, but you're most certainly giving something else away. Yes, If it's enough, and so it's got to be that you yeah, that you you're giving away the gospel for the, the way to live life, the way to think about life, the way to process life, the way to live life.

Speaker 1: 16:39

Thanks, man, you're welcome, appreciate your time. I hope this is helpful, listener. Again, I am trying to convince you, listener, that this is a good thing and I want you to see that. I want you to be able to walk away with this with confidence that what we're talking about is a good thing. I am not invested the way Matt is. I'm helping a friend out. I'm helping a brother out. I want to support the work he's doing, but I'm doing it because I, as a pastor, have a perspective that what Flourish is doing is both good and necessary. So I hope you hear that. If you have questions, we'd love to interact with you. We'll talk to you soon.

Speaker 1: 17:18

Thanks 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'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. 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. You can find us at flourishcoachingorg and you can reach us by email at info at flourishcoachingorg. You can also connect with us on Facebook, twitter and YouTube, and we would love it if you would like subscribe, rate or review the podcast wherever you're listening. 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. No-transcript. 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.