Throughout my eighteen years in pastoral ministry, in three different churches, I found myself asking some questions. I was surprised to find the questions didn’t change even though my ministry positions did-from youth and children’s ministry on a small staff in a changing urban neighborhood to youth ministry on a two-person staff in a booming new suburb to Christian education ministry on a large staff in a stable, college town. In each setting, I pondered issues like these:
Why did a mistake cause people to lose trust in one pastor, when a similar mistake could be overlooked in another?
Why did I encounter walls of resistance, when later, asking for much the same thing, I found little hesitancy?
Why did I feel stretched and excited, yet at other times bored-in the same job?
Where was I growing and going in my ministry? What should I head toward? Where should I put my energies?
I tend to analyze things, and as I observed and talked with others and continued to reflect, I began to see some patterns. In fact, I’ve come to believe there are distinct stages in any minister’s development. Seeing these stages answered many of my questions.
Stage 1: Getting Acquainted
When you first come to a church, there’s a tremendous sense of euphoria and relief. The board or senior pastor is thinking, We finally got the person we need. Things are going to move ahead now. And you’re thinking, I finally found the right church. It’s much like a honeymoon.
Now, what’s a honeymoon for? To start a major project with your new partner, like remodeling a house? No, it’s a time devoted to enjoying and finding out about each other.
Consequently, two tasks confront pastors during this Getting Acquainted period:
1. Talk to as many people as you can. I’d contact a cross section of the group I’d be working with: kids, teachers, parents, patron saints. I’d ask, “Tell me what our church is all about. What exciting things have happened? What’s meant most to you? How can we serve you? If you would like me to do one thing in the next three years, what would it be?” At this point I wouldn’t promise anything; I was just discovering their interests. I made notes, so I could remember what they said and so they knew I took them seriously.
Seldom was I terribly surprised by the answers. If you have done your job in candidating, you’ve asked a lot of the same questions, maybe even to some of the same people. But now you’re going a step beyond to the wishes, hurts, and fears of the people.
It pays off immediately. When you listen, people become your friends. If a person you talked with is in a committee meeting later, you can refer to something he or she said and show how it’s influenced your thinking. Listening builds relationships, which is what a honeymoon is for.
2. Create an initial success. The second thing you need in this first stage of a new ministry is a visible, tangible success, something that people can look at and say, “A new day has dawned. That was good.”
This rarely comes from starting an ongoing, institutional program. With those, it’s hard for anyone to say, “Pastor succeeded,” at least until it has been underway for a year.
Instead, a success is usually a one-time event, perhaps a staff training event, a retreat, or an appreciation banquet. But it’s something you can get into and out of, and people say, “Praise God, we’re going somewhere.”
When I became a youth director at one church, they had just scrapped the youth group meeting. This was back in the sixties, and the kids resisted institutional youth programs. They said, “Let’s just go to the youth lounge and rap.” After three months of rapping, they grew tired of it. So I tried the Hewlett-Packard approach-asking, “What if . . . ?” We put together four or five short-term projects for the kids to choose from. They said, “This is great. This is what we want to do.” When the parents saw their kids actually doing something and excited about it, they felt good about what was happening.
For a friend of mine, the initial success was creating a media center-pulling together equipment, upgrading the current facilities. For solo or senior pastors, an innovation in the worship service or a refreshing approach to the missions conference may give people the feeling, I like what the new pastor is doing.
So during the Getting Acquainted stage are two key goals: creating the sense “the new pastor cares for us” and creating the feeling “a new day has dawned.” People need to see both the ministerial heart and the beginning of productive changes.
How long does a honeymoon last? Usually, from two days to six months. Often it comes to an end with some sort of tension-personal or staff problems, disappointments, personality conflicts.
My honeymoon at one church ended with a Christmas program. I had been at the church since July, and things had gone well. But I had never put on a Christmas program before, and this one involved hundreds of people. It didn’t come out quite as well as people were anticipating. I felt the tension inside, and I knew the honeymoon was over. But people loved me and stayed with me.
The longer the honeymoon, of course, the better. When you’ve developed a relationship with the people and had an initial success, you can move through the next stages more quickly and gracefully.
Stage 2: Getting Established
In the second stage, Getting Established, your task is to build people’s trust. With every action, you are doing one of two things: establishing trust or increasing mistrust.
The key element in building trust is focusing on your job and doing it well. (Obviously, your attitudes and relationships with the congregation also influence things.) If you’re doing the job, people will tend to trust you.
Part of the problem in doing your job in Stage 2 is knowing exactly what it is. Now that the honeymoon is over and the superficiality has been erased, suddenly you begin to realize, These people said they wanted me to do this, but what they really want is something different, or more frequently, This group said this, but that group is saying that, and I’m supposed to please both.
Once I had to go to my executive pastor and say, “What should I be doing? I know my job description says to direct Christian education, but what do you really want?”
He said, “The three areas we really want you to work in are administration, college ministry, and single adults.”
“Well,” I said, “what do you expect in these three areas?”
We kept working it through, and in a few weeks we had agreed on clear goals for each area.
Once you understand your job, it’s important to develop two aspects of it:
Systems. In Christian education, for example, if you don’t build an effective recruitment process, you’ll have a hard time gaining trust. You end up always on your heels, playing catch-up, becoming defensive or negative because you just can’t find the volunteers you need. In a senior pastorate, it’s a system for regular study and sermon preparation (and/or visitation). In youth ministry, it’s developing a ministry strategy. But in any position, you have to build a system for handling your key tasks. Once you develop and establish an approach, you save yourself a lot of time and energy.
But many systems take time to build, and some require a complete cycle through the church year, sometimes several. And they’re often invisible to the church at large. Meanwhile, people want to see some progress. So to give yourself some latitude to build the systems, and to keep people’s trust, you also need to provide some strong events.
Events. These may be much like the “initial successes” you created during Stage 1. But there’s a key difference. After a successful honeymoon event, people said, “That’s nice.” They were just checking things out. But now you want people to say, “This is solid; I can invite somebody to this.” Trust has been established.
In the youth program of one church where I served the high school students always had presented the traditional Christmas pageant, complete with bathrobes. So I suggested doing a play instead. The kids agreed, because they didn’t want anything to do with “that dumb old program.”
So we bought scripts from a professional drama house, came up with sophisticated props, costumes, lighting, and makeup, and put on a play of comparable quality to their school productions. People said, “The youth program seems to have a new flavor now, an integrity of its own.” Such events give people a point to rally around, even if other parts of the program aren’t going well yet.
But the opposite can happen. One time I saw a youth director in this stage plan a social for the kids. It should have drawn dozens of kids, but instead, because of the director’s mistakes, maybe five or six came. One kid said, “I had to get off work to come here! I sacrificed a whole day’s work to help with this, and it’s no good.” At that point, mistrust of the director began to build in the minds of the parents and the kids.
If you’ve built mistrust, you have to stop to deal with the causes and reestablish trust. Occasionally, those who have made a significant initial blunder learn through it, and people see they have a teachable spirit. Their Stage 2 takes longer, but the leader survives.
But more often, in my observation, people don’t really recover from this mistrust. Some may stay a little longer, spinning their wheels. They eventually find their way out the back door to another ministry or even out of church work.
The good news is that when you do build trust at this stage, people’s attitudes change. Suddenly it’s “How can I help you?” People are willing to invest themselves in your projects because they perceive them and you as solid.
Stage 3: Getting Rolling
Entering Stage 3, you have gotten yourself established, and your systems are running, your core ministries are functioning effectively, and your initial goals have been achieved. The challenge at this stage: growth or stagnation.
Growth means you’re able to build on what you’ve accomplished. On the other hand, there’s also the possibility of becoming stagnant. You may feel as if you’ve run out of creative approaches, or you have expended so much energy in the first two stages that you can’t keep going.
Growth. Here are some indications that you’re 4 growing:
Wider responsibilities. You begin to be offered wider responsibilities, within the church or outside, and you have to decide which ones to take. Because you’re doing a good job as youth director, they want you to speak on Wednesday night. Or shepherd the college group as well as the high school group. In one church, for example, because I had some creativity in developing events, I was asked to join the worship committee. And sometimes, as the wider responsibilities increase, there may be a need for changes in your job description.
Support in failure. Because you have built people’s trust, when you stumble, people still support you. The board or the pastor say, “Well, we blew that one, didn’t we? But that’s okay; let’s go for it again.” The mood is different than, “It didn’t go very well. What are you going to do about it?”
In one church I was in, the executive pastor was considering scheduling a traveling group to do a mime presentation in the Sunday evening service. I had involved our youth group in various creative arts and film, so he asked me what I thought about a group coming. I said, “I think it’s great,” and I agreed to introduce the group.
Well, our people were not ready for mime. Some saw the group’s white faces and mistook them for clowns. The church chairman, who happened not to have been there that night, got a phone call at home in the middle of the service, saying, “There’s a clown in the sanctuary claiming to be God!”
The next night the board met and took me to task. I could have said, “Listen, it wasn’t my idea anyway,” but I played the team player and said, “I think we made some mistakes last night. Mime is like the gift of tongues: you need somebody to interpret it. Our failure was not that we had mime but that we failed to interpret when we announced it in the morning service and in the evening service prior to the presentation.” I never sensed my ministry there was hurt by that. Mime was still controversial to the vocal minority, but because of previously established trust, they said, “Okay, let’s learn from this.”
Time management. One sign of growth is that you are learning when to say no. When I reached this stage, I started saying no to telephone calls. As a pastor, you feel you are supposed to be available all the time. But I realized that if I were to continue to develop as a minister, I needed some solid blocks of time in which to work. So I started asking, “Can I call you back in a little while?” or instructing my secretary to find a time I could return the call.
There are many other keys to time management: clustering like projects, delegating work, handling a piece of mail only once. It takes the shepherd’s heart, with the executive’s strength, to make “no” palatable. But as part of growth, most of us need to learn how to say that two-letter word.
Honesty about feelings. You tend to be more vulnerable with staff and lay leaders. Now they know pretty well who you are, and you feel comfortable with what you’ve done, so being vulnerable, even about doubts and failures, is more possible. In Stage 1 or Stage 2, such public confessions might have added to the mistrust side of the ledger, but now they actually solidify relationships.
Stagnation. Stagnation is the opposite of growth. You’ve had a few successes, but you don’t know where to go from there. You may have worn out the job you’re doing. I’ve learned to watch for symptoms like these:
Exhaustion. Fatigue becomes a regular experience.
No wider opportunities available. You may want to do something else, but the institution won’t allow it. In one church, I had about outgrown the youth director position, and I wanted something else to do in the church. I didn’t want to leave; I loved the people. But institutionally there was simply nowhere to move.
Hiding of feelings. You don’t want to let on how you’re feeling, and increasingly you mistrust other leaders.
New nonchurch priorities. As you struggle with the feelings of stagnation in the church, you tend to look for credibility and challenge outside-in hobbies, service clubs, or whatever. Unlike healthy outside interests, this is more of an escape.
Other possible indicators of stagnation: a feeling that the church or your position in it lacks direction; or the hiring of staff or recruiting of lay people by a colleague that innocently harms responsibilities you should be handling.
I remember when I had to choose between growth and stagnation.
I had been developing a balanced high school program of drama, music, media, service, and evangelism. I had a competent lay person in charge of each area, no one area dominated, and we encouraged kids to move around and try each one. Then the church hired an intern named Frank as music director, and as part of his responsibilities, he took over the music area of our high school program. With Frank at the church five days a week, kids could drop by after school and talk with him, which they couldn’t do with the sponsors of the other areas. And he could devote four times as many hours to his area as the lay sponsors could. Pretty soon, every kid-and especially the best kids-wanted to be in the choir.
This was killing my concept of a balanced ministry, so I told Frank, “You’re doing a great job, fulfilling all the board asked you to do. But you may not be aware of what’s happening.” Frank readily agreed to try some compromises, such as an all-group bike hike around Lake Michigan that included his music group doing concerts every night.
But ultimately, the compromises didn’t solve the problem. I’m finally getting rolling, I thought to myself, and now the tires are out of round. The systems I’ve worked so hard to develop in the last three years aren’t working anymore. I knew I had a choice: stagnate or grow. Stay with what had worked and become embittered, or change and grow.
The growth wasn’t all comfortable. I’m a task-oriented person, and I’d built the system to fit me. Now I had to reconstruct it. I decided to support Frank’s music program and on the side build a brand-new discipleship approach, which I was not as experienced in, and in which I probably could not be as successful.
But the new program did work fairly well. Now I see that the growth was essential for the church, and probably for me and Frank. It kept me from stagnating in a program that was going great. It kept people in the church from taking sides. And it kept Frank, a talented, young staff member, around to serve effectively.
Stage 4: Getting Insights
After you’ve gotten rolling, and if you’ve chosen to continue growing, you move into a fourth stage, Getting Insights. During Stage 3, you began to form some initial insights into what you’ve been doing and why that works. Now you’ve made enough mistakes to have modified your initial philosophy of ministry. You’ve gained enough insight to implement a stronger, fuller version.
The choice at this stage is between influence and isolation. Here are the characteristics I see in each.
Influence. The influence track is marked by:
Counsel sought by others. People start saying of you, “Let’s ask him (or her). Let’s see what he thinks.” In Stage 3, people may have noticed, This person is sharp in areas other than just what we hired him or her for. Now they are saying, “You’ve got to talk to him or her.”
In one church, I grew to know the community especially well, and I developed a solid network of contact people and resources. So when people in the congregation wanted to know, “Where can we get that?” or “Whom do we need to check with on this?” they started coming to me.
Continuing education, formal or nonformal. By this point you’ve recognized how you learn best, and you’re capitalizing on your learning style: reading books, taking classes at a nearby university, attending seminars, talking with experts.
Frequently this leads to increasing influence in the church. After attending some seminars and doing reading in church growth, for example, I was able to help refine the church’s mission statement.
Selective cross-pollenization. Gradually you select a few especially fertile minds with whom you want to spend time in conferences or on the phone. You focus on the people who most stretch you; often they are eight to ten years more experienced than you and have negotiated successfully the passage you’re in. Sometimes I’d call Warren Benson, then a professor at Dallas Seminary, and talk for an hour: “Warren, I need help here.”
Acceptance of personal value. It’s intangible, but you’re not struggling to establish that you’re worth something. In Stage 4, you realize you have a contribution to make.
Isolation. There is, of course, an alternative to developing broader influence, and that is becoming cut off from others. You begin to feel unappreciated and ignored by the board, staff, and people.
Sometimes that comes from a change in structure. A new pastor comes, and you feel, I don’t have the emotional energy to change everything and start something new, and as a result you drift away from the other leaders. In one situation, a pastor simply didn’t trust the people under him, and in his attempts to retain control, isolated himself. Here are some items associated with increasing isolation:
Lack of a mentor. You haven’t found a person to call for help, so you’re left to your own devices. Or, more often, you may be asking people for advice, but they don’t have the capacity to be mentors. I think of a young visitation pastor who knew only semi-retired former senior pastors with whom to talk shop. But none of them understood the struggles of the younger man.
Education not continued. A closed mind is difficult to recognize in yourself. I know a pastor who had some creative people on staff, but he tended to operate under the assumption: you have to drive people because they are lazy. That mindset, the inability to see people as capable of handling freedom and resources, eventually isolated him from his colleagues. It could have been overcome by studying management, but he never had time for that.
Fragile self-image. The more isolated you become, the more you feel a lack of credibility. You sense your feelings are being ignored. You’re experiencing these negative emotions of frustration, but when you try to express them, other people at church think, So why don’t you stop complaining and do something about it? But you haven’t figured out a way to change things, or you don’t have the resources to pull it off. As a release valve, you may travel to where you can get strokes-twenty-five miles from home, with a briefcase, in the role of an expert.
The good news is that when you don’t allow yourself to become isolated, you gain a tremendous freedom to admit how you feel about things. You can be more vulnerable. There’s always that choice between isolation and influence.
Stage 5: Getting Credit
You’ve paid your dues, and now you work closely with church leaders and others who recognize your contributions. You’ve achieved your goals. Now the goals you set are bigger and better. In a sense, you’re cashing in on the trust and growth and influence you’ve built in the earlier stages.
My observation is that it takes time to reach Stage 5. The people I’ve seen in the Getting Credit stage have served in one church for eight, ten, twenty years.
In this stage, the choice isn’t between a good and bad ministerial approach. Instead, you choose between a more fulfilling ministry within your church or a new ministry outside the church (or a blend).
How do you decide? Not by negative, external pressures so much as by positive, internal ones. You have realistic dreams of what God wants you to do. You’re being true to your vision and to the leading of the Holy Spirit.
Let me paint the options for the minister who has reached the Getting Credit stage.
Within the church, you begin to see:
Efficiency in ministry. Since you’ve stayed in the church and concentrated your energies there, what used to take half a day to get done, you can now accomplish in five minutes. Your systems work. This frees you to do some “dream” projects or concentrate on areas of special interest. Also, more than ever, you have the freedom to influence policy and shape the church’s direction.
Increase in truly pastoral contacts. The proficiency of your systems allows you to get close to people. Your longevity and work have won you solid shepherding relationships. This doesn’t mean you’ll be shepherding everyone. Instead, you find you can spend more time shepherding key people and caring for them.
My friend Jim Forstrom exemplifies this for me. He’s served in his church for years, weathered at least three changes in senior pastors, helped nudge the church through a constitutional revision, and been the glue that holds the church together. Jim isn’t building a Forstrom Ministries outside the church. He’s committed himself to those people, and he and they are woven together. Though his tasks are varied, I see his primary role as being a shepherd.
Development of new or innovative ministries. I’ve been impressed by Bill Stewart, who was a youth director for more than twenty years. He established within the church a great internship program. Young youth workers paid to come and get involved in his youth ministry. One by one, he developed people, sent them to seminary, and then placed them within the church or helped them find a position in another church. So now a couple of dozen ministers across the country look to him as their “godfather” in youth ministry.
Outside the church. The other option for pastors in this stage is to find ways to serve in areas beyond their churches. Here are some distinguishing elements of this choice:
Involvement in the broader religious community. Your people increasingly accept or explicitly state that they are ministering to the church at large through you. Your focus becomes more the community, the region, the denomination, or some target group other than the local congregation. It doesn’t necessarily have to be far beyond the church, though. I felt I was able to make a contribution when I served as president of the ministerial association.
Increase in nonpastoral ministries. New ventures often include speaking, writing, teaching, consulting. Usually, they are not long-term encumbrances, and they are built on what you are already doing in the church.
Moving through the Stages
Let me answer three questions that people often ask about moving from stage to stage.
How long does it take to move through the stages? Each situation is different. Recently I described these stages to a class at Trinity, and afterward a Navy chaplain said, “This describes what happens in the military. The only difference is, I have to move through the stages in three years, because after that, I’m reassigned.” His great advantage, though, is that he has a locked-in congregation with him on ship twenty-four hours a day.
Can you get stuck in a stage? Not Stage 1, the honeymoon, because time is going to move you on. Nor can you really get locked in Stage 2, Getting Established, for if you build mistrust, your relationship with the church will be terminated; and if you build trust, you will move into Stage 3.
But it is possible to stagnate and stay in Stage 3, or to become isolated and remain in Stage 4. We’ve all known pastors who stayed many years where the people loved them, and they were doing a nice job, but they didn’t have the creativity, the spiritual insight, the momentum of Christian outreach that they had before.
Can you move back a stage? That often happens when you change churches or have a change of pastoral staff at your church. You have to rebuild trust.
But you’ve learned some things and tend to move through the stages a little more insightfully, purposefully, and rapidly after that. It’s like learning how to drive a stick shift: after a while you move through the gears smoothly.
One reason, I’ll add, that more pastors don’t reach Stage 5 is that there is a tendency to move from church to church rather than stay and find ways to grow and broaden your influence in that place.
When You Understand the Stages
Why talk about this developmental pattern in ministry? Because when you understand the stages, you don’t worry quite as much. For example, early in a ministry, sometimes I felt a little anxious or frustrated that people didn’t seem to trust me. It was a temptation to think, I’ll never be free to do what needs to be done.
But as I came to understand the stages, I realized, I’ve been here only a year. Give it time, and they’ll start coming around. They’ll support me, but we haven’t gone far enough for that support to be established fully. Of course, you hope people support you from the beginning, but they probably won’t grant you carte blanche immediately.
But perhaps more importantly, I’ve learned that building trust, demonstrating competency, communicating honestly-these pastoral qualities run through all five stages. They’re always appropriate in pastoral ministry.
Mark Senter is assistant professor of Christian education at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois.
Copyright © 1989 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
