2nd Opinion: Beware of traps; enjoy the ride

2nd opinion

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A minister recently asked me what major traps most often snare ministers when they move to a new congregation. Great question! Healthy churches and ministers pay attention to potential trouble spots and act proactively to avoid getting derailed early in their relationship.

Several traps come to mind:

Expectations. Coming into a congregation as the new minister is a wonderful season of new beginnings and possibilities. People await their pastor with great expectations.

Often those expectations are exaggerated and gran-diose. The pastor is seen as the one who will reverse decades of decline, inspire apathetic congregants, make everyone happy at all times and never disappoint.

Sometimes the grandiosity is in the mind of the minister. She or he thinks this church is everything the last church was not. The grass looks so green on this side of the fence! Personal foibles and bad habits are overlooked in infatuation with the new opportunity.

Unrealistic expectations, wherever they originate, are a set-up. They lead us away from God's design for us and his church, and they trap us in impossible situations. The minister never will succeed as the Messiah, and the congregation soon will expose its cracks and fissures and reveal this really isn't heaven on earth. Talking about this and anticipating the inevitable disappointments is an essential component of a healthy relationship between minister and congregation. The humility that comes when we acknowledge we all are "earthen vessels" and deeply flawed is a great place to begin a relationship between minister and congregation.

Agendas. The pastor's arrival invites the congregation to imagine new possibilities. That is a wonderful and divine part of the opportunity. However, it is helpful to remember all of us have agendas. Some are overt; some quite covert. Simply put, some will see the pastor's coming as an opportunity to advance a cause or seek a role that has been thwarted previously. The arrival is a new day that will bring frustrated congregants out of the woodwork. Others will assume they will have the same intimacy or insider status they had with the previous pastor. Some will have been deeply disappointed by the predecessor and will greet their new pastor with frosty indifference.

The pastor's job is to be aware. The pastor must avoid the trap of believing everything heard. From search committee members to the most detached congregants, personal agendas abound. The pastor must watch with a degree of prayerful detachment. The pastor must get up on a mental balcony in every meeting and during every conversation and ask: What is really going on. Why this? Why now?

Talking. Since clergy seemingly are paid to speak, the usual pattern is that they do—profusely, often and repeatedly. A new pastor must watch out for the trap of verbosity. The entry into a new congregation calls for a season of diagnostic rather than prescriptive conversations. If your medical doctor walked into the exam room and immediately began a monologue about ideas for your health, without ever asking for input from you, I hope you would jump up and leave the room. I'd offer the same counsel to a congregation and its minister. The pastor's role in the early days of a ministry is to keep ears wide open, eyes wide open and heart wide open. There will be a time to speak truth to the situation, but initially talking should consist of words of invitation to others.


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Silence. After 100 days on the job, the pastor had better have something to say. There are those who counsel a full year of observation before making any move toward acts of active leadership. The pace of our culture dictates a new reality. The learning curve has been shortened, and the pastor must understand the trap that silence as a leader, should it go too long, will be misinterpreted as lack of ability to lead. The first 100 days offer a never-to-be-repeated opportunity for definition and to establish some trajectories for ministry.

After 100 days, the pastor should emerge from this time of study and observation with clear and compelling observations. The people need to hear from their pastor. The rest of the first year will be a time to begin an extended congregational conversation that will shape the church's agenda for the near future. Those days are for "what if" questions. Pastor and church should dream with each other and God about possibilities.

Beware the traps and enjoy the ride. It really is a marvelous opportunity to start anew—for the church and for its pastor.

–Bill Wilson is president of the Center for Congregational Health in Winston-Salem, N.C.

 


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