Approaching our graduation from seminary, my husband and I took the pastor of our church to lunch and asked if he had any advice as we prepared to start our ministry journey.
He responded without hesitation, “Don’t be a ladder climber.”
Nick’s wise words have never left us. Yet while many in ministry would profess agreement with his advice, we live in a culture that expects upward progress. And in pastoral ministry, that climb leads to the senior pastorate.
In some churches, only the top dog is even referred to as “pastor.” After several years on ministry staff as an associate, my husband received his first opportunity to preach to the entire congregation. When we got home after the service, we found a message on our answering machine: “That was such a great sermon, I was wondering: have you ever thought about being a pastor?”
The senior pastor role is typically equated with the greatest opportunity for authority and impact. But is it?
A recent online poll by a major newspaper found that, in the business world at least, an overwhelming 75 percent of respondents did not want to be the boss in their work setting.
Here are the stories of three ministry leaders who had a taste of life at the top but realized that not only did they not want to be the boss, they were actually better suited for a supporting role. As a result, they took a step down the ladder, and ended up where they felt God wanted them.
Tom Curtright: Solo or Ensemble?
While eager to dive into full-time ministry immediately after seminary, Tom Curtright looked around him and saw fellow seminarians searching for a year or more before finding positions in existing churches.
“I thought, Do I want to search and search for a year to try and find a job, or do I want to just get started?” Curtright recalls. “One of the best avenues into my denomination was church planting. Maybe this wasn’t a wise decision, but I opted to just get going.”
Curtright interviewed with the denomination and was immediately accepted as a church planter in Missouri. But the church struggled to grow from its original core group of two couples.
“It was a test of perseverance,” Curtright says. “When they did the personality and gifts profiles of me in the church planting assessment, they said, ‘You can do a lot of things, but church planting is probably not the best one.’ I guess I was either foolish or trusting God, I don’t know, but it was very much an uphill battle.”
Eventually his church grew enough to become self-supporting, but Curtright still struggled.
“Being a solo pastor, I often found that even though the people were great and fully supportive, it was hard for me to go to work on Monday, to begin that next work week and be by myself all the time. I was lonely,” he explains.
Still, the thought of leaving hadn’t really occurred to him. “I wasn’t looking to move, but I remembered what it had been like to be part of a team when I was on staff [doing university ministry],” he said. “Once in awhile the thought entered my mind, Wouldn’t it be great to be part of a team again?“
That’s when Curtright received a call from a senior pastor friend, inviting him to interview for a position as director of children’s ministry.
“My knee-jerk reaction was, ‘No way! This is not me,'” Curtright says. Eventually, however, he decided to leave his fledgling church in Missouri for the opportunity to join the team at Valley Church in West Des Moines, Iowa, where he has served for the last six years, first in children’s ministries and now as pastor of adult ministries.
Curtright doesn’t have any regrets about any stage of his ministry journey.
“When I took the personality test and it indicated I wouldn’t be a good planter, that was completely accurate,” he says. “Nonetheless, I think that was God’s purpose for that season in my life. There were things I learned about persevering that I think all pastors have to draw upon to remain in ministry.”
But he’s also convinced that his current situation is a much better fit.
“Even though I’m not top dog, God has used my gifts in a greater way than if I were the senior pastor of a smaller church,” he explains. “While I don’t preach except for a couple times a year, I am teaching every week. Through that and all the teachers I work with, we’re having a huge impact, originally with hundreds of children, and now with hundreds of adults.
But the biggest benefit has been the opportunity to serve as part of a team again.
“I’ve just come to see that I do better as part of a team than going solo,” he says. “There are a lot of people who are really able to thrive in a solo situation. I just don’t happen to be one of them.”
Rick Thoman: Happiest to Serve
Consultant. Mentor. Teacher. Associate pastor. Interim pastor. College professor. Rick Thoman’s resume lists a lot of ministry titles, but senior pastor is not one of them.
Instead, Thoman has consciously and repeatedly rejected the siren song of the senior pastorate, even though he has been offered the role, or encouraged to consider it, in a number of churches.
Why?
Thoman admits others may view those decisions as “almost slitting my wrists, leadership-wise, from the world’s perspective.” But for him, at each opportunity he felt that God’s calling was to a supporting role. The circumstances were different, but the theme was the same: Thoman felt that his gifts and passions made him a better fit for an associate position at the time.
“Each time I prayed about it and thought, Maybe I’m missing something and should do this, but each time the answer came back, No, what the church needs is different from my passions right now,” Thoman said.
“With some senior pastor positions, the main role you have is preaching and then vision-casting,” he explained. “While I love teaching and preaching, I would sorely miss the making-things-happen part, the strategic planning initiative. If someone tells me, ‘Take that hill,’ I love getting a team together, figuring out the strategy, and making that happen.”
For Thoman, the key is knowing his own strengths and being comfortable in his own identity, even if he’s not at the top of an organization.
While some men and women aspire to the office of senior pastor, Thoman has never been one of them.
“I’ve always been highly committed to ministry, no doubt about that,” Thoman explains. “I’m open to a senior pastor role, but ‘aspire’? For me, it really comes down to, ‘What does God want me to do right now?’
“I aspire to leadership, yes, but how that plays out is open to what God wants me to do.”
“Does the [senior pastor] position by nature carry a little more weight? Yeah,” Thoman acknowledged. “But just because you have the position doesn’t mean you’re going to carry the influence.”
Thoman’s latest calling is to the professorate, as a mentor and educator to young ministry leaders at Northwestern College in St. Paul, Minnesota. There, he enjoys the opportunity to instill his service-based mindset into the next generation.
“I’m passionate about the fact that pride and ego have no place in ministry at all,” he emphasized. “The Lord keeps pounding away at me that he came not to be served, but to serve. I need to do that as well.”
Tom Lamkin: Return to a First Love He hadn’t intended to return to an associate role once he reached what most view as the pastoral pinnacle.
As a newly minted seminary graduate, Tom Lamkin took an associate position. From there, he moved into a senior pastor role, first at a brand-new mission, and then at a student pastorate when he went back to seminary for doctoral studies.
But when school ended, nothing of the senior pastor variety became available.
“In the middle of it, there were a lot of tears because I was being rejected, and rejected for reasons that I thought were not fair,” Lamkin recalls.
Then Lamkin received a phone call that he now knows was divinely orchestrated.
“A fellow I knew in seminary, who had gone on to Washington D.C. to become a pastor, called me and said he needed a pastor of education,” Lamkin explains.
But the decision wasn’t easy. “Suddenly a staff position threw itself at me, but I thought, ‘Do I want to start serving with somebody else, as opposed to being someone who is supposed to be making the decisions?’ It was not a choice we made quickly.
“It meant I wouldn’t have that sign on my desk anymore that says the buck stops here; I wouldn’t have either the primary responsibility or the authority,” he recalls. “But I looked at my background and what I’ve really enjoyed, and that was small group interaction instead of standing in front of large crowds.”
Lamkin eventually agreed to the associate role, a position he held for the next 17 years in two churches.
“In Washington D.C. the first two years, I was probably still burning from the rejection, but in the next years, I was thanking the Lord for the opportunities I had to do teaching, Bible study, and training,” he recalls.
“God put me in the field of education, and always in a staff role,” explains Lamkin, who now supports pastors as a director of mission in the Baptist State Convention of North Carolina. “Looking back across 24 years, I have always been happiest when I was not the person who had to stand up behind a big piece of furniture and preach week after week.”
At the same time, Lamkin is thankful he was still able to perform broader pastoral duties, even in an associate role.
“In all the churches I have served, I was looked upon as an associate pastor, and was expected to carry out a lot of pastoral ministry. None of those pastoral responsibilities have ever been out of my reach or taken away from me,” he says.
“My joys have always been with small groups or in a one-on-one context. I have thoroughly loved teaching, but working with a group and walking with them and seeing their eyes when the light bulb comes on …
“That has been the confirmation that the very first thing I started out with … that really was the signpost I should’ve been watching more … and would’ve kept me on the path of an associate staff position.
“In hindsight, it’s what I should’ve been doing all along.”
Angie Ward is a Leadership contributing editor in Chapel Hill, NC.
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