I don’t want to be guilty of promising too much, so I should say up front that there’s no one perfect way of doing a transition from one pastor to another.
Or as William Vanderbloemen and Warren Bird expressed it in NEXT: Pastoral Succession That Works, “…our universal recommendation about succession is that there is no universal recommendation. Healthy succession is more art than science.”
The Apostle Paul described pastoral succession like this:
“What, after all, is Apollos? And what is Paul? Only servants through whom you came to believe – as the Lord has assigned to each his task. I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God made it grow. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who makes things grow.” I Corinthians 3:5-7
Paul didn’t go quite as far as I’m about to go with his three wonderful pastoral transition illustrations in I Corinthians chapter three, but we can easily stretch his metaphors to observe that (1) a succession of migrant workers coming and going from a particular farming operation (I Corinthians 3:5-9a), or (2) a succession of subcontractors coming and going from a building site (I Corinthians 3:9b-15), or (3) a succession of Jewish priests serving at the temple in Jerusalem (I Corinthians 3:16-17), could easily result in some bumps, challenges or mishaps.
In the case of Corinth, the “bump” was the departure of Paul and the arrival of Apollos, the “challenge” was the disunity in the church over the differences between those two wonderful preachers and the underlying “mishap” was the immaturity of the Corinthian church members.
So again, there’s no one perfect way – in this fallen world – of executing a transition from one pastor to another.
But a good discussion on this topic – which I recently enjoyed with some seasoned pastors – led to this observation:
How did we come to this conclusion? I asked a simple question: “Tell us about leadership transitions recorded in the Bible; both the good and bad.” Here’s what ended up on my flip chart:
Bad transitions:
- Joshua was a wonderful man and a wonderful leader. He had a farewell sermon to the Jewish nation, especially targeting the “elders, leaders, judges and officials” (Joshua 24:1) but it doesn’t appear that he put special effort into training a single successor. Four hundred years of leadership chaos followed.
- King Saul was never quite exactly God’s choice for the leadership of the Jewish nation. He got off to a good start, but his leadership went downhill quickly. When God chose David to succeed him, instead of acquiescing to God’s choice and training David for the job, he actually tried to kill his God-anointed successor! Succession doesn’t get any uglier than that.
- King David seems to have made a serious effort to teach his son Solomon the wisdom he needed for life on our fallen planet (Proverbs 4). It’s uncertain however, whether David disciplined Solomon any better than he did his son Adonijah (I Kings 1:5-6) and we have no record of David training Solomon to serve his people as their King. When the time came for David to turn the kingdom over to his son, he waited so long as to find himself in a weakened and vulnerable state, almost completely helpless to affect a good transition (I Kings one). Solomon’s ultimate performance was mixed: he turned out to be a great builder and judge of character with his own besetting character flaws.
Good transitions:
- Moses to Joshua – The one-and-only Moses spent decades training Joshua as his successor. When the time finally came for Moses to die, Joshua was more than ready. It was a seamless and God-honoring transition. Moses never seemed to feel threatened by Joshua and Joshua didn’t let impatience cut his education short.
- Jesus to the Apostles – With one notable exception, Jesus’ three years of training twelve men (11 graduated from the program), was a resounding success. A motley crew of rowdy young men turned the world upside down (Acts 17:6).
- The Apostle Paul to his associate Timothy. Paul recruited Timothy to missionary work when he was young and teachable; some think he was still a teenager (Acts 16:1) when Paul added him to his team. After spending serious time together – during seriously challenging circumstances – Paul found that his associate was absolutely trustworthy (Philippians 2:19-24).
I think we can make a couple of observations:
(1) Other things being equal, it is certainly advantageous for the outgoing leader – preferably long before age forces the issue – to give thoroughgoing, hands-on training to a God-ordained successor.
This has its challenges of course, even in the church which is large enough to hire that chosen successor. Outgoing pastors, board members, staff members and congregants don’t always agree on who that God-ordained successor is.
In the under-100-persons-on-Sunday-morning congregation (the norm in America today), that challenge is even greater. While this is not always possible, let me suggest that small churches can, at least, be prayerfully looking for God’s providential provision for the church’s next pastor, either within the congregation or not far removed from it. It is occurring to more and more mature believers today that candidates for pastoral ministry can learn to be pastors, from pastors, in churches – with help from online courses – instead of moving their families to seminaries in distant cities.
(2) Churches which begin a search process with a committee, after their pastor’s departure, should at least acknowledge the weaknesses – and perhaps even the unnatural nature – of this approach. We should not be surprised that the pastor “imported” from a different church culture and a different part of the country might turn out to be a poor fit.
Can this ever turn out well? Yes, it can, and does, at times, but usually as the result of extreme care and extreme prayer. I’ll say it one more time:
