Random Thoughts About Church Leadership tagged: , ,

Random Thoughts About Church Leadership

Posted by in Church & Missions

Lifeway Research has a new article out: …hot topics in Southern Baptist life. The hot topic that caught my attention had to do with the decision making process in a church.

In a related study conducted in 2007 among 405 Southern Baptist senior pastors, LifeWay Research asked, “Which of the following best describes the primary decision-making process at your church?” Among the pastors polled, 42 percent said their church was congregation-led, while 30 percent said their church was pastor-led.

I’m quite content to live and let live; it really doesn’t matter much to me if your church is pastor-led, team-led, elder-led, or congregation-led. I am interested in consistency: if you have some kind of bylaws or policy do you actually do what you say you will do? I’ve seen too many churches say one thing, do another, while neither what they say nor what they do line up with their constitution or bylaws. When I’ve been confronted with this while serving as an interim pastor I usually guide the congregation toward changing either what they say or what they do. For me it’s an issue of integrity. Pragmatically, it’s a way of short-circuiting potential problems.

I do care the church have some biblical logic for their polity. A deacon-led church has never made much sense to me. More sense, I suppose, than the church where a patriarch or matriarch is making all the decisions.

The first thing an interim pastor has to learn – and learn quickly – is how decisions are truly made. Maybe it’s just the churches God has called me to, but my experience is the decision-making process is often convoluted and arcane. Not that is seems so to the insiders. Church members have been doing things in the same manner for so long they can’t really explain to an outsider how decisions are made.

And… I have a problem with the whole concept of a church being either pastor-led or congregation-led. I don’t see it as an either/or proposition. Leadership isn’t a function of one person or even a group of people. Leadership isn’t a set of characteristics or values exercised by one individual. (This is one of the problems I have with so many books on leadership; do this – whatever “this” is – and you will be a good leader. I just don’t think it works that way.) Being a leader implies others are actually following you. Leadership is a dynamic between leader and follower. A pastor can only lead where the congregation is willing to be led. A congregation can lead only as long as the pastor is willing to participate. Leadership depends upon followership: the two are inseparable.

Here’s what I think happens in too many churches. A pastor first comes to a church and slowly figures out how decisions are really made. As time goes by he interjects himself into the system: he builds relationships, teaches, preaches, directs, cajoles, and pleads until he becomes part of the decision-making process. He persuades the congregation to accept a vision for themselves and a direction of the church. When he leaves, the congregation looks back and says he was a great leader. We are, the church members say to themselves, a pastor-led church and we want another great leader to become our next pastor. (Or, the church will say to themselves we are a congregation-led church; aren’t we blessed to have a pastor who appreciates and respects that.)

Then the next guy comes. If he’s smart he’ll do the same thing as above and eventually be known as a great leader; reinforcing the congregation’s view of themselves as a pastor-led church. If he’s not quite so smart, or just not very skilled, he won’t properly assess the current decision-making process. And he’ll make mistakes. The new pastor will still teach, preach, cajole, and plead but his poor assessment at the beginning will leave him feeling frustrated as an outsider. The congregation will be comparing him to the previous pastor and the new guy will come up short.

The congregation will chalk this up to poor leadership skills on the part of the pastor. They will see a void and eventually fill it. The pastor will feel betrayed and deceived; they said they were a pastor-led church but they’re really not. Eventually there is some form of a forced termination.

The best outcome is frustration and poor reputations all around. The worst outcome is a congregation that institutionalizes an arcane decision-making process that no one can figure out and a pastor that becomes embittered.

The solution is simple, but difficult to achieve. Pastors need to be taught how to assess the real decision-making processes within a church. And congregations need to slow down when they are between pastors and be brutally honest with themselves about how decisions are truly made. “We’ll just find God’s man and he’ll lead us” is a well intended but naive thought. It’s far, far, better to be honest with themselves before they call the next pastor. Problems can be addressed – changes can be made – before the new minister is on the field.

(Taran, blogging at Coffeespoons, has written extensively about his time on the Pastor Search Committee at his church. He gives a really good picture of how one congregation dealt with the self assessment I wrote about above.  The posts can be found here.)