I met recently with the leaders of a church who have just lost their senior pastor. They had three questions for me they wanted to discuss with the group. "Who are we?; "What do we do?" and "Where are we going?" in light of their Senior Pastor's leaving.
I told them that two of the three questions were easy because they as a leadership group along with their former pastor has clearly identified who they were and where they were headed with a sandbox! In other words, they had done the hard work of getting to clarity about God's call on their congregation and the fact that their senior pastor had left had not changed the equation. In fact, they had what any potential senior pastor would want to know - who are you and where are you headed? The question of what do we do now (in the interim) was the only issue they needed to discuss.
The direction of a church should not be dependent on who the senior leader is. They certainly have huge influence in charting it but every church has a DNA and a unique call from God which it must figure out and pursue. Leaders who do the hard work of identifying what God's call is on their congregation are not left directionless when a senior leadership transition takes place. It is the lack of such clarity that causes congregations to take huge swings in direction when leadership transitions take place.
Something to think about if you are a church leader!
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