Is It Time to Quit?

In my experience in coaching pastors, the most often asked question is something like, “Am I finished here? Is it time for me to leave and find a new church to serve?”

That is a difficult question – especially for a pastor. It is difficult for several reasons. Let’s take a look at some of those reasons.

1. The Church Board meets and unanimously votes to terminate your employment. When this happens, there are always some “friends” in the church who call you and tell you most people are behind you and you should stay and force a showdown in a congregational meeting. This is what my friend, Dave Hussing, would call a bad-good idea. The Board didn’t vote to fire you because someone was having a bad day. You have lost the confidence of the church leadership and that is something not easily won back. Most of the members may want you to stay (Honestly, most really don’t care one way or the other.) but nothing good will get done with you butting heads with the church lay leadership. Pack up and go.
    
2. Suppose there is no pressure to leave. But you are frustrated and are having a difficult time getting new programs and ministries accepted and off the ground. Is your job done here? Have you done all you can do and now the church needs new pastoral leadership to move ahead? Maybe. But it could be that you are just tired or burned out. Perhaps, instead, it is just time for you to take a vacation. So take a vacation – a real vacation. Leave town. Stay away for at least two weeks. Ignore email and texts. Have only one person from the church (Who is agreed on ahead of time.) whose phone calls you will pick up. Let them know to only call you in case of an emergency. Define what constitutes an emergency – such as the death of a key church member. Have someone (a trusted colleague) cover your hospital calling. Unplug. Unwind. Do NOT engage in any church talk with your spouse or children. Ten days after arriving back, if you still feel it might be time to leave, start to prayerfully discern if it is time for you to go.
    
3. The question of leaving a church is as difficult as knowing when to answer the call to a church. It is God’s will? This is the $64,000 question. In some ways it is easier making decisions without the “God factor”. How do we discern God’s will? Many methods are attempted. I have often used “The Three Lighthouses.” The story goes that there was a great, safe harbor that attracted ships in stormy weather. The one negative to the harbor was that it had a narrow opening surrounded by rocks that snagged and sank many ships. The people tried erecting a lighthouse but it didn’t help. Finally they came upon the solution of building three lighthouses, one directly behind the other. They then told the ship captains to enter the harbor only when the three lighthouses appeared as one; when they lined up with each other. Applying this to making Godly decisions I was taught to move only if God’s three lighthouses line up: God’s Word; Circumstances; Godly Counsel. If all agreed there was a good chance it was the right decision. Not a bad system, but certainly not foolproof.
    
4. If you are leading the church in the process of Church Transformation and you have been in the process less than five years, it is not time to leave. Church transformation is very difficult and emotionally draining and you will want to quit on a regular basis. But normally the process takes around seven years. Three to five years to make the transformation and another couple of years to stabilize the new systems to the point they have become the church’s default systems. Without the extra time, every time there is a problem or a challenge, the leadership will default to the old, unhealthy systems of dealing with the problems.

Way back when I first entered ministry, it was common for a pastor to stay at a church for five years or less. In my first few churches my average stay was three to five years. Since then research has been done and it has shown that for a pastorate to be effective the minister needs to say a minimum of seven to ten years. In my home church, the two pastors I had during my time at the church each stayed from seminary to retirement. Under their leadership the church consistently grew. That long tenure may not always be good or even possible, but the experience of many matches the research and we pastors need to dig in for the long haul.

While in college we had a saying: “When in doubt, chill out.” That is pretty good advice when it comes to changing jobs as a pastor. It has been my experience that most of my moves from one church to another, in retrospect, have been premature. I mistook the end of the “honeymoon” for the end of the calling. Sometimes I mistook exhaustion or frustration or conflict or complaining as a sign I was finished there and as God’s call to a new field of work. Sometimes I just got bored. That was before I discovered church transformation. Now that I do transformation, boring sometimes sounds appealing.

Copyright © 2014, William T. McConnell, All Rights Reserved