First, I would suggest new terminology: we don’t “hire” pastors. According to Acts 20:28, pastors are made overseers of the church by the Holy Spirit. The task of the pastoral search committee—for those churches using this methodology—is to seek out the person God has chosen for this role in their church. Our Baptist churches are notorious for “voting pastors in” and “voting them out,” but I tell our congregations that that is precisely what we are not doing. By “electing” a pastor, we are expressing our belief that God has chosen this person to be our spiritual leader, our shepherd, our overseer.
Now, back to the question.
A friend who does interim educational work in churches, usually for a few months at a time, always announces to the congregation when he begins that “I have come to leave.” He wants them to know the transient nature of his role. There is a sense in which every pastor and staff member could make the same announcement. None of us come to stay. Therefore, we should prepare the congregation for life after our departure, and one way to do that is to sit down with the lay leadership and work out a written method for selecting the next pastor. The congregation should be asked to study it and vote to adopt it. Eventually, when the pastor does resign, the system is already in place.
In my work with the one hundred or so Southern Baptist churches in metro New Orleans, I have prepared a 10-page presentation on what churches should do when they suddenly find themselves pastorless. I suggest they choose a small group of leaders to make pastoral-type decisions in the interim, and to recommend whether the church should “call” (not hire) an interim minister.
The two primary cautions I give our pastorless churches are: (1) not to overreact against the previous pastor in choosing his successor; and (2) not to fall in love too quickly with a prospective pastor.
On the first, churches sometimes react against a departing pastor by choosing someone with all the strengths which he lacked, but none of the strengths he possessed. Too late, they realize how ill-suited the new minister is for their congregation and how much they miss the former pastor.
On the second, pastor search committees can be like teenagers in love if they’re not careful: they fall head over heels for a prospective pastor and quit checking into his background because they do not want to hear any bad news about him. Too late, they realize the pastor they ended up with was not the person they thought he was. The committee should be patient and learn all there is to know about a prospective minister, and likewise, encourage him to do the same about the church.
