Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Every pastor knows this feeling.

Imagine you are sitting across the table from someone in your church—a person you have led to Christ and baptized. They are involved in the life of your church and dedicated to the mission, and they say, “We’re leaving.”

When this moment hits, especially if you didn’t see it coming, it feels like the world is spinning.

Edwin Friedman said, “A major difficulty in sustaining one’s mission is that others who start out with the same enthusiasm will come to lose their nerve. Mutiny and sabotage came not from enemies who opposed the initial idea, but rather from colleagues whose will was sapped by unexpected hardships along the way.”

This, by far, is one of the most painful realities of leadership and ministry. To have the people closest to you bail before the end. 

This occurs for various reasons. Life situations change, and now they can’t go with you. Their theology or passions change. It may require more than they have to give. 

To be clear, the reasons that people stop working with you or trying to accomplish the mission are not all evil. But they all still hurt. 

Talk to any pastor or church planter, and they can tell you a story of someone who said, “I’ll be there til the end,” and they weren’t. 

I remember when we started our church in Tucson and one person from our launch team told me, “I’ll be here as long as you’re here.” Ten years later, they were at a different ministry. Now, it was an amicable ending, and we are still friends, but it stung deeply. 

The reason this stings is that you have been in the trenches with this person. You have prayed and wept with this person. You have celebrated the highs of ministry and life, and you have sat through the valleys together. You have baptized them or people in their family, and been at gravesides with this person to bury their parents or children. You have vacationed with this person and helped this person move. You have watched their kids grow up and launch out into the world. In short, you have walked a long road with this person. 

And then one day, they aren’t there. 

This cuts deeply not just for the leader but for everyone involved. Your spouse has now lost a friend, someone they vacationed with, and perhaps they will now bump into them at the store or on the soccer field. Your kids wonder what ever happened to so-and-so and why their family doesn’t attend our church anymore. 

It is one reminder after another. 

And as a pastor, you wonder what you did wrong. Is there something you could’ve done to change their mind? 

And there will also come a moment, or several, in your leadership, when you wonder how many more of these transitions you can take. I recall speaking with one leader who, through tears, said to me, “I’m not sure I can handle another transition on my team.”

That’s leadership. 

That’s life. 

If you are a church planter or pastor, you’ll have someone look you in the eye and say, “I’ll be here until the end.” And you have to believe them. You can’t think, “We’ll see…” 

[Tweet “If you are a church planter or pastor, you’ll have someone look you in the eye and say, “I’ll be here until the end.” And you have to believe them. You can’t think, “We’ll see…”]

Because if you do, you will give the enemy an opening. 

Now, that doesn’t mean you are naive and blindly trust everyone. 

So, what do you do as a pastor?

Prepare for the transitions. Know that transitions will come. Don’t be surprised when someone walks in and says, “We’re leaving. I’m resigning.” Do your best as you navigate these moments and the tensions that they create. 

Enjoy the people you have. It is easy to close your heart off after a fellow leader has hurt you. This will feel natural, but don’t. Fight against this. 

This doesn’t mean that you bare your soul to everyone who joins your team, but don’t let someone in your present suffer for what someone in your past did. 

Create relationships not connected to your church. Ensure you have friendships with other pastors or individuals who don’t work for you. Yes, be friends with people on your staff and in your church, but also make sure you balance that with people you don’t work with so that when a leadership transition comes, you don’t lose all your friends. 

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

In my doctoral research, I’m looking at how to help declining churches turn the corner to new life and revitalization. One of the books I read that I loved was Thriving through Ministry Conflict: A Parable on How Resistance Can Be Your Ally.

The question I want to hit on today is one thing that gets new pastors (really any pastors) and their churches stuck.

When a new pastor arrives on the scene, everyone expects the new pastor to make changes. They don’t know which ones, and most people aren’t sure which ones (if any, they’ll like.)

But if changes aren’t made, the church will stay on its current track. In some churches, if they are healthy, this is okay.

In it, the authors make this point:

A critical principle to keep in mind; the success of every church initiative, every new program, or the hiring of every staff member hinges on the moment when resistance emerges. Never be surprised that resistance has emerged, no matter how much homework you’ve done prior to taking action. Welcome it! And then handle it correctly.

When a pastor is in the interview process with a church, they are trying to figure out what this church wants. They are trying to figure out the church’s expectations for himself, his family and what they hope the future will be like.

That preferred future can be many things. It could be exactly like the past, and they want a pastor who will continue what they were doing. That future might be wildly different than the past, and they want a change. This path is often after a messy season, possibly a moral failure.

But what most pastors don’t know is if what the interview team tells him is true. Now, the interview team isn’t lying when they say to the pastor they want this change or that change. They usually just don’t know what change they want. They don’t know because as humans, we don’t know what changes we want because we don’t know what the change will require or what that change will feel like.

The pastor and church also don’t know how the change will feel or play out. Often, when we imagine a change, we either imagine it as the greatest thing ever or the end of the world. But usually, the change will be somewhere in between those places.

When changes are made, many people are caught off guard by the resistance that shows up. That resistance is sometimes about the change, but it is usually about something else.

I remember a pastor telling me in a college class, “When people get angry with the pastor or the church, they are usually angry or hurt by another person in their life, but they can’t take their anger and hurt out on them, so they take it out on the next closest authority figure, which is the pastor or the church.”

What my teacher told me has proven to be true time and again. 

Almost every time I meet with someone upset about a change or telling me that they are leaving the church, most of the meeting is about something other than the change or the church. Often, it is about loss in their life, loss the change has brought about, or even the pain of a broken relationship. 

When people resist a change, no matter what or how good it might be, know they aren’t resisting you as a leader or even the change; they are resisting the losses they are experiencing. 

When I arrived at CCC in 2021, I was surprised by how much grief and loss people carried, but as I got to know the church even more and learned there had been 15 staff transitions from 2015 – 2021, it made sense that people carried that much grief and loss.

This is why pastors need to learn as much as possible about what has transpired before they arrive.

It isn’t that people are against you or the change you are making; they are navigating grief and loss. They are trying to hold on to security and what they know. This is a crucial piece that pastors need to understand. When people come to church, they want a safe and secure place. Safety and security will feel like they are in jeopardy when changes occur. Watching friends leave the church, they are confused about why and wonder if they should go. 

This is also why a pastor must spread changes as much as possible. 

As a pastor, you must keep your finger on the pulse of how people are feeling. Can you lead too much change too quickly? 100% yes!

Does that mean you should not make specific changes? Again, it depends. You might need to move quickly because of the situation, but you likely need to exhibit some patience. The saying “Rome wasn’t built in a day” comes to mind. And you won’t lead your church to where you want it to be in 90 days.