Welcome to Season 3.5 of the Church Renewal Podcast from Florist Coaching. Why is this 3.5? Because we weren't quite done with Season 3.

Anyway, I'm Jeremy. I'm Matt.

Thanks for joining us. This is Part 2 of our discussion with Tom Harris from Interim Pastor Ministry. If you haven't listened to the first part of this interview, you'll find a link to it in the show notes. Part of this interview.

You'll find a link to it in the show notes. I don't see a downside for a healthy church to take a series of months to do some of that evaluative work, because they have the imprint of the last pastor deep in their DNA and it may not be reflective of where the church is without that pastor. So they have to identify their true identity, not an inherited form or template. I think any church could profit from a season of evaluative work, a refresh of vision, values and mission, and then go looking for a pastor from great self-awareness of who they are and also awareness of what kind of pastor they need for their unique church.

You just did our sales pitch for us. That was awesome.

I'm over here reading so what we tell churches is. I know what you're looking at, Matt.

Yeah, so we tell churches and maybe I learned this from you, tom, but it wouldn't surprise me so the process we take churches through, I know you guys have like a five-step process that you use. We use a three-phase process church health assessment, envisioning and pastor search. And what we say is in church health assessment you're trying to answer two questions when have we been and where are we? So the question of history and you know, present church biblical church health, and there's an indirect there too which is kind of like how did we get here Right? So two questions in the first phase, you know, two questions in envisioning, which is who are we and where are we going? So identity and direction, or vision, if you will. And then pastor search is just one question who can take us there?

But it's a more rich question answering by the time you get there, because you have a lot better sense of the us, like our history and our present and our identity and values and all that, and you have a much better sense of direction, like what's God calling us to, not what did that previous pastor say we should be about, but what do we own for ourselves to go forward with? So it's, and when churches do that and when I, if they won't call the meetings, who like the public committee and I can explain that to them they're like I've never had a church say that doesn't make sense at all. They always go. Oh yeah, that makes sense. It's interesting. You guys have been around for 35 years and were you the first full-time director.

No, we had full-time directors back to the very beginning. The first group chose a pastor who was unfamiliar with the fact that churches in transition have so many problems, and he was 62, so he took his Social Security, did an interim or two, but soon he became full-time at leading the team that he was building around him.

So how do churches find out about you guys? Because it's a mystery to me. I mean, I know how we track how churches find us, and we're becoming more and more intentional about the way that we get the word out, but you guys have been there for 35 years. You think that everybody would know about you. What you're telling me is no, not everybody knows about you which is a mystery to me.

Yeah, you know it's different circles. There are a lot of different quote subsets of the body of Christ that have very similar theology but distinctives, and we tend to know our circles better than others. For us, it's the reputation of 35 years that may be a point of familiarity. They've used this before or a regional leader, someone off the Presbytery, in the Presbyterian Church, or someone that's a part of a region, a division, a district may recommend us because they know who we are and they trust us. We get some off the Internet that come our way. We went to 40 conferences last year conventions and had a lot of people there. So there's a table where people are walking by getting literature, hearing about us. We work really hard and we're having trouble getting the word out good enough. I mean, you're smart to have this podcast. I think I'm a little old-fashioned, haven't gotten in this direction yet, but this is the way of the future, of course, to broadcast ministries like ours.

Yeah, that's fascinating. Forty conferences, Wow. By comparison, I do like three a year. Yeah, yeah, because that's.

Well, it's time-consuming, it's also it gets expensive. But I go to the big ones and my associate that's over this area, my national director in this area of church and pastor relations he goes to some big ones and then we find an interim pastor that happens to be within a drive of that conference and some of them are just one-day regional gatherings and we will ship the materials to them, give them some training not very much go and be friendly and get some names of people that are interested and give out literature and then we give them a small honorarium so we're able to cover 40 that way. Okay, yeah, that's a lot.

Anyhow, when are we going to have the first joint interim pastor transitional pastor conference?

Yeah, that would be actually interesting, because my guys, one of the things that they asked me for, the guys that we've recruited that are deployed out in the field, is we'll get them some initial training and they're like what's the next training, what's the follow-up? How do we keep fine-tuning? And you guys do a conference every year, isn't that right?

Yeah, we have, but the last two years we've done them online. They're very expensive to do. You cannot charge enough to the attending pastor to even cover half of the cost of the conference and with the lodging and everything, it's gotten to be where we don't have the budget, pastors don't have the wherewithal to travel distances to get there. Now let me say churches do have conferences, but generally they're more regional, not national, and so it's a commute by car three to six hours. So we're going to be online again this year and it's not quite as good, but it is continuing education.

Oh, that's good. That's something that we're trying to think through and I'm beginning to ponder how to do that with our folks. Have you found we became friends because I try and see my opposite number in lots of settings, in denominations. I'm trying to see my opposite number in lots of settings, in denominations, in other organizations, and so we're gonna interview Dave Miles as well. We've already interviewed Ken Quick for this podcast season, and so we're trying to bring on people that are leaders in the field, because we think that this is my perception is, if the word was out there adequately for all of us, there would be more work than any of us could do, even combined, our three organizations combined. There's no way if the churches that could actually use the work that we could, we could meet the need. That's my perception from you know, just knowing our, the circles that we run in, there's the need. That's my perception from you know, just knowing the circles that we run in, the need is greater than supply of interrupts. Is that what you guys are finding as well?

Yeah, but I tell you what is the shortage is available. Pastors that want to do this more difficult work. As long as it's preaching, which is every pastor's first love. As long as it's a fairly healthist setting, which is every pastor's first love. As long as it's a fairly healthful setting, as long as it's near their home and convenient. That way, it's a lovely thing to do.

But for us, because we're national, there's a need to be willing to relocate to stay busy with us, and that prohibits a lot of people.

Number two since COVID I think, there's been a change in the health of pastors that are retiring or the energy levels of those pastors, and we don't mind people that are older, but to get a 58 to 63-year-old person right now is a little bit harder and we are struggling to keep a bullpen that's strong and plentiful and available. So we're serving about 58 churches today and we are struggling to keep a bullpen that's strong and plentiful and available. So we're serving about 58 churches today and it's down from where it was a few years ago. Number two is we have a pastor pool of 58 pastors that are working and about 42 that aren't, and we probably could use another 42 in order to meet the uniqueness of locations theology needs of the churches. So finding pastors is a little bit of a challenge too, especially if you're going to do something that requires them to learn a system and a strategy to bring health to a church.

It's interesting recruiting work. Maybe you have this experience I'm not sure, but at least in my circles I run into a lot of pastors that are intuitive. They have good skills, they've got great experience and they theoretically like the idea of this. Because for some of these guys, the dynamism of it right that it is you're just, you know, 15 to 24 months on the ground and it's a new challenge, right?

I really enjoyed it because you got to get in, you got to, you know, keep the thing moving. You got to lead, you got to deal with the issues and then your job is to get out and to be forgotten and leave a healthier church and let the next pastor come in and be healthy. So what I find is it's not hard for me to talk to people about it and for them to get excited about it, and some of them some of them are like I'm so glad you have a process, because they're not a process person. They're willing to follow a process, but they're not natively a process person in the way that you or I might be, and they know that they wouldn't construct a good process. They might be a good pastor, but they wouldn't construct a good process. They might be a good pastor, but they might not construct a good process. Do you find that that some people are excited that you have some rails for them to run on?

Oh, I think so. I think when people take our two-day training and a manual of 100 pages and they see how each part leads to the next part and there are tools that are recommended or required, I think they are relieved. They would have never, on the spur of the moment, in the position of interim pastor, been able to quickly, overnight, discover all of this. So it makes them feel almost like a consultant who hasn't spent 30 years fine-tuning his own tools but he inherits and receives from us some of the better tools that are out there in processes. There are people that are really intuitive. That just reason I don't need your stuff. I can walk in the room, I can read the room and you know there is some truth to that. But rereading a room before you speak to the people in the room and really look in the closets and look under the rug and those kind of things, it's really a little bit of arrogance, I think, to be able to think I've had all this unified experience now big church maybe and I've seen it all, when oftentimes they have not seen it all, they've seen a slice of church life. The hardest part is we just had a guy turn us down because it's too complex.

After he took our training but I found out they had a church that peaked at 130. He was shepherd, he was a teacher. He wasn't used to doing the leadership piece, the visioning piece, you know. He maybe didn't have a church that was troubled and they just lived with whatever maladies. They had, not talking down about this person. But this was not what they were cut out to do. And they quickly, even though it could have been a church that was fairly healthy, it just seemed burdensome and they questioned their own capabilities. And that's because their gifts are different, for a different setting than this kind of work.

Yeah, I've appreciated Vital Church's put out. Maybe we can link this in the show notes here. Vital churches put out for you know, um, public use, as long as you don't change it, a self-evaluation, um, that's really quite handy. It's an uh, it's a updated version of what was in miles's return manual, tom. Um, it's quite good. What I like about it is it really forces and it's that experience that this gentleman had it really forces people to evaluate.

Is this me, because it is not everybody and I would rather up front before I've spent a lot of money on training somebody and matching them to a church. For them to go and it not be a good experience for them at the church is is a huge loss for everybody. It's a loss for flourish for the man, because now he feels like, well, maybe I'm not gifted or whatever, and so lost with the church because they didn't get what they actually needed. Yeah, and that's, um, that's anyways, yeah, I, I actually pay for people to go to training because I want them to go know what it's going to be like and what's going to be they're going to be called to do so that they they don't go into it sort of blind.

They actually know what it is, so anyways the biggest challenge is not to be able to administer a survey or diagnostic and get reality. The the hardest part is facilitating change and getting a willingness for people to say we want to do these three things. In transition. We can build an evangelistic program. We can restaff the youth department. When a new pastor comes, you know we can have, you know, an assimilation program. Later that's retooled. But we've got to face these one, two or three things now. These are the big rocks that have to be moved. Without that, we're doing injustice to our fulfillment of the Great Commission. We're doing injustice to the new pastor and his wife and family that's coming. We don't try to do everything you could be there forever to perfect a church but we do try to help them move the big rocks out of the way that's blocking the movement of the Holy Spirit. That's good.

I don't know if our listeners have picked up on this, but if you've listened to this season here, you might. Matt. You and Tom don't have the same personality. I've only talked to you for a few minutes here, tom, but I can see that you and Matt are cut from two very different cloths and yet God has put you both in the position here where you're essentially singing from the same hymnal, from the same page in the hymnal, in not even harmony necessarily at all times, sometimes just straight unison and one of the things that we've talked about. There is a personality aspect to this, but I think there's something more, and you touched on it when you talked about the gifting and the calling that a person has, that this is more than perhaps what we have come to think of as being the pastor, and perhaps what we have come to think of as being the pastor, that we've simplified it or we've sublimated it into a few smaller steps, instead of it being something much I don't know, messier much broader in the sense of being able to. You talked about leadership, and I think leadership is one of the things that we can talk about a lot today, and I think leadership is one of the things that we can talk about a lot today. But leadership is kind of like whichever one of the Supreme Court justices said this. I can't define it, but I know it when I see it. Leadership is very much that way and I think there are things that we can define.

I saw just in the past couple of weeks talking about the fact that the number of pastors that are stepping into ministry, who are in my age cohort the 40 to 50 range there, has dropped off precipitously over the past 10 to 15 years and you talked about that a little bit. That is startling to me because, as you said, things aren't getting easier. Churches aren't facing fewer conflicts, they're not facing fewer challenges and I guess, as I'm thinking about this, I'm saying, lord, what are you doing? That there's such a need for leadership that there's a call that you place specifically on people to walk in this kind of ministry to represent you this way for a season. That, from what I've seen here, is really necessary in practically every church. My background is in counseling, tom, so I did a lot of counseling with a lot of different people over a lot of years and at the end of the day I know one thing everybody needs a lot of good counseling. That's just. That's the way it goes.

We need teachers, and counselors can be a guide, a spiritual guided teacher. So, yes, I think there's a shepherding need for all of us to have self-awareness and to deal with our brokenness.

Stay tuned for part three of our conversation with Tom next week. We'll pick it up right here. 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. For more information, go to our website, flourishcoachingorg, or send an email to info at flourishcoachingorg. You can also connect with us on Facebook X and YouTube. We appreciate when you like subscribe, rate or review our show whenever you're listening. It can be hard for churches to ask for help, so when our clients tell us who referred them, we'll send a small gift to say thanks. A huge thank you to all our guests for making the time to share their stories with us. We are really blessed to have all these friends and partners. All music for this show has been licensed and was composed and created by artists. The Church Renewal Podcast was directed and produced by Jeremy Seferati in association with Flourish Coaching, with the goal of equipping and encouraging your church to flourish wherever God has called you. Bye for now.