Right or Wrong? Relationship with a departing pastor

Our minister's last Sunday in the pulpit is coming soon. We have had a wonderful relationship. How should our church and our current minister relate during the interim and after we call a new pastor?

The relationships you already have built and the new ones that you anticipate are based on trust. You have trusted your pastor with guidance in your faith, with counsel in your struggles, with comfort in your grief and with a myriad of other spiritual challenges. The bonding of the minister-congregant relationship was forged during critical moments of life.

If the same relational depth is to be realized with your next minister, then those special moments of ministry must be encouraged. Your present minister should openly acknowledge her/his new calling by relinquishing pastoral responses, especially in difficult congregational experiences. The soon-to-be-former pastor's willingness to affirm this transition publicly will go a long way in assisting the process.

The interim minister should be alert, as well, to guard against potential bonding moments that build emotional connections that inadvertently could complicate the future minister's responsibilities.

Ultimately, the success of transition rests on the congregation. The smoothest change in pastoral leadership will occur if the former pastor, interim pastor, future pastor and congregation all seriously accept the significance of calling. The former minister has been called away. The interim minister is called only temporarily. The future pastor will be called to serve fully in your fellowship. The congregation has been called to live out faith continually through all of these relationships as the local body of Christ. If we believe God is in the business of calling, then we should accept the transition of leadership passing the spiritual mantle inevitably brings.

In practical terms, the most significant opportunity for the affirmation of calling occurs in the crises moments of the church's life soon after your new pastor arrives. In those moments, the former pastor must not step in, but rather should move aside so the congregation can turn emotionally and spiritually to the new pastor. In my current pastorate, that moment occurred when a dear saint passed away very soon after my arrival. She and her husband were prominent leaders in the church. The former pastor had retired and remained in the community, and he and this family were good friends. When the former pastor graciously and publicly allowed me to be the pastor in that moment, and when the family of the deceased embraced me as the pastor emotionally and spiritually in their crisis, the transition was cemented. I had become the church's pastor.

Remember, your new preacher will begin as soon as he preaches his first sermon; but your new pastor will begin when he pastors the church through her first significant crisis.

Allen Reasons, senior minister

Fifth Avenue Baptist Church

Huntington, W. Va.

?Right or Wrong? is sponsored by the T.B. Maston Chair of Christian Ethics at Hardin-Simmons University's Logsdon School of Theology. Send your questions about how to apply your faith to btillman@hsutx.edu.