The Church Answers Podcast
#153 Why Your Pastor Search Process Is Not Working
Welcome to the Church Answers podcast presented by Chaney and Associates. Chaney and Associates are the accounting firm for the church. Now get ready for fast-paced insights on key issues affecting the local church today. We release three episodes each week, so make sure you've seen or heard them all. And now, here is the CEO of Church Answers, Tom Rayner. The phone call came in. It was a friend. A friend who is serving in a church as a layman, and the comment was that I've heard before. We are having trouble finding pastor. Boy have I heard that so many times. It seems like so many more times lately. Now Sam and I at our other podcast right on leadership, we've talked about the impending and the growing shortage of pastors just in general. I'm going to approach this issue from a different perspective, and I'm going to talk about the fact that many churches get their pastors through a process called a "Pastor Search Committee." It used to be called public committee now, "Pastor Search." Now understand, some of you are in churches where appointments take place. Some of you are in churches where it's not a committee that brings about the pastor search. I get that, but I'm going to talk specifically about the pastor search process where it's not an appointment, where a group is recommending a pastor to the congregation. Regardless of your polity, I hope that you will stay tuned for this because there's some good points that can be made regardless of how you bring pastors in. Once again, the church answers podcast, once again, sponsored by Chaney and Associates, the accounting firm for the church. Just a reminder, they're already serving over 1,100 churches with accounting and payroll. They've been around for over 2 decades. They serve small churches, church plants, medium-sized, large-sized, mega churches. They serve them all, and they serve them well. Reach out to our friends at Chaney and Associates. You can see the link in the show notes, or you can just Google Chaney and Associates, and if you want to, you can go chaneyassociates.com. There are all these kinds of ways to reach them. You can right now go to our friends at Chaney and Associates. Let's go to this question. Is your church pastor/search process working? The evidence is, no, it's not. Part of the evidence is we're hearing from search communities. Can you help us find a pastor? We should have a nickel for every time someone asks me that question. Why can't we get a pastor? Why do these candidates not seem to work out? Why is it taking us so long? Those are some of the things we hear and some of the questions that we're asked. I've tried to dissect this and to figure it out because it used to be as a fairly efficient process. You form a committee. They get resumes. They go through the resumes. They pick to a three. They interview them. They pick one of the three that worked well, and they liked the best, and they present them to the church. They'd probably go here and preach somewhere. It was a typical process. I served on one pastor/search committee when I was in the business world, and that's pretty much how it worked. We ended up getting the pastor through that process, and it was fairly efficient. Not so much anymore. What's taking place? Why are pastor/search processes not working? One of the reasons is denominational networks are not as effective as they once were. Denominations are not as unified as they once were, and I'm speaking in general, they're exceptions to this, but they're torn apart in just so many different ways. Because of that, the connections where denominational leaders could recommend someone, almost an appointment, quasi-appointment process. Here's my one to recommend for this church or this church, and that's just not nearly as pervasive nor as effective as it used to be. As denominational structures begin to break down, as the denominations begin to decline, the denominational source of providing recommendations for a pastor are obviously decreasing, and so the denominational network is not as effective as it used to be. This is one of the reasons why pastor/search firms, and there are several good ones that are out there today, pastor/search firms became more useful to the churches because the normal way of finding a pastor was not being effective, and so you had to go and find someone who does nothing but search, and as a result, many pastor/search firms began to rise up during this time, so one of the reasons is that the denominational networks have broken down. Now, here's kind of a related reason to that, non-denominational churches are some of the fastest growing churches, and so they don't have the network of pastors, they don't have a denominational network, and even these healthy churches are having difficulty finding pastors. That's not a reason. Submitted resumes are not necessarily the best candidates. If you go through this process where you seek resumes and you go through a pile of resumes, I'm going to tell you, you're going to probably waste a lot of time. Many times the resumes that you get are not the type of fits for your church. They are, I can go into many reasons why. I'm not suggesting that every resume that you get is the wrong person, but I'm going to say most of them are. And many pastor/search committees or whatever the group is called, spend in an ornate amount of time going through resumes when most of the resumes aren't going to be a fit anyway. Just hear me well on this. Submitted resumes often aren't your best candidates. That's why we lean toward recommendations of people that you trust more than just resumes showing up and you put them in a pile and you take weeks to go through them. A third reason that pastor/search committees are not working is the people on pastor/search committees don't do this full-time, meaning they've never done it at all. They cannot put the time into it that, say, an appointment process can or a pastor/search firm can. So they go slowly. And if they're going through resumes and they're picking their favorite, maybe listening to sermons of 10 or 15 online, my goodness, that process can take forever. And many pastor/search firms have, pastor/search committees have come out of this and said, we listened to hundreds of sermons, we went through hundreds of resumes and we still haven't found anybody. Well, you might be going about it the wrong way. All pastor/search committee people, members of it, are part-time, the process is methodically slow. What else? What else is the reason? The work of a pastor/search committee is rarely efficient. The work of a pastor/search committee is rarely efficient. I've talked about them being part-time. And I've also talked about going through a stack of resumes being probably not as effective or even listening to a series of sermons. The work of a pastor/search committee is rarely effective. That is why when many people call me, I appreciate them calling me and sometimes I'll give them a recommendation. We have great network of people at church answers and I love giving them a recommendation if I think that it's a fit. But that is why the recommendation process is often the most effective. So if you are a part of a pastor/search committee and you're wondering why you've gone through all these resumes and you haven't been able to find a fit yet, saying where have all the -- doing another where have all the -- but where have all the candidates gone that we used to be able to find? Well, you cannot find them in many cases by the same way we used to find them 15, 20 years ago, even 10 years ago. Your pastor/search process may not be working because you don't have a denominational network that is effective. You may be counting on submitted resumes which are often not your best candidates. It may be because you can't put the time into the search committee because you're not full time doing that and because many times the work of a pastor/search committee is inefficient. At some point, I'll come back other than saying get recommendations and I'll talk about some of the characteristics of effective search committees. But for now, this is why you may not be finding a pastor rather quickly. Hope it helps. Maybe gives you some ideas of what not to do so you can have some ideas of what to do. Once again, thank you, Chaney and Associates for being the sponsor, the total sponsor, the exclusive sponsor of the church answers, podcasts. Remember they are the counting firm for the church. Remember I appreciate you. Not now, subscribe and just let us know that you have this as a part of your ongoing ideas to find out things about ministry. Thank you. All of you listeners, all of you viewers, thank you for being a part of this. We'll see you in the next episode. You have been listening to the church answers podcast presented by Chaney and Associates. Chaney and Associates are the accounting firm for the church. In need to focus on ministry, Chaney will focus on finances. Also please subscribe and give a review to the church answers podcast on YouTube and on your favorite podcasting app. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)