Common Errors in Succession Planning

While there are a range of overarching issues that can lead to painful or failed pastoral transitions, we can usually locate them in at least one of the following categories.

Having No Plan

By far the most common error in pastoral succession is that most churches don’t think about it at all until it is upon them.

The fact is that planning for the day of pastoral succession may be the most important leadership task a pastor and church leadership team will ever face, and if they do not put forethought into it, they are setting themselves up for failure. Noel Tichy in his book, Succession, puts it this way:

The notion that organizations, independent of their tax status, shouldn't be focused on the development and succession of their leadership, especially at the top, strikes me as patently absurd...there is no reason that institutions in the not-for-profit sector shouldn't be held accountable for the development of the next generation of leadership.[1]

Having no plan often results in a chaotic transition process that is grounded in anxiety over the prospects of the pastoral search and over-reactiveness to the circumstances that led to the departure of the former pastor. Instead, those responsible for managing the transition must prepare themselves, the departing pastor, the staff and the congregation for the challenging season that awaits them.

Misdiagnosing the Appetite of the Congregation for the Future

A second common error in pastoral succession has to do with failing to sense the directional appetite of the congregation. By directional appetites I mean the feeling of the congregation regarding the future direction of the church and the type of pastor they believe would be best fitted to lead them.

Leaders who are organic to the congregation need to determine whether a congregation desires to maintain the general direction of their church and its pastoral approach as they seek a new pastor, or if they prefer to make some kind of significant change as they move forward from one pastor to the next.

Unfortunately, very few church leadership teams put in the groundwork required in trying to get to the bottom of the answer to this question before they begin their search for a successor. As a result, some churches introduce a “maintain” agenda into a church that is stagnating.

Trying to Clone the Departing Pastor

Another common mistake has to do with trying to clone the departing pastor. Some churches think that all they need to do is list out all the things that the long-term departing pastor did well and then go out and find someone who is good at those same things.

Unfortunately, this attempt to clone the departing pastor never works because no two pastors are the same and ministry contexts are constantly evolving. When a pastor leaves, the church’s culture automatically changes, and church leaders and pulpit search teams need to be better equipped to recognize these constantly evolving factors as they launch into a search for a new pastor, lest they call a man who may be fitted to a church culture that no longer exists.

Treating All Pastoral Transitions Similarly

The hard truth is that the transitions from a founding pastor and a legacy pastor (more on these pastoral types later) are very different than other more common transitions and call for different approaches.

The reason for this is that long-term pastors, especially founders, make a series of highly unique marks in shaping and building a congregation that must first be understood before a search for a successor can commence. Similarly, legacy pastors have developed long-term, generational connections within a congregation that must be processed before a search for a successor can commence.

Shorter term pastors, while often very effective, do not impact the culture of a congregation in quite as profound a way as do founding or legacy pastors. Working through a transition from their ministry will look quite different than those who have served over a shorter period of time, mainly because the emotional bonds that are formed do not run as deep.

Failing to Understand that Some Pastors Don’t Ever Want to Leave

Many pastors are unabashedly planning to “die in their pulpits” and consider it a badge of honor to carry on their leadership duties well into their 70’s or even 80’s.

While there is something noble about this, it’s also quite unsettling because as any person ages they begin to lose touch with the questions and concerns of the generations beneath them. It’s one thing when a pastor wants to continue to minister in some other capacity than the lead role into his 70’s or 80’s (we actually need more of this!), it’s another thing entirely when he insists on remaining as the senior pastor of the church and its central preaching and leading voice well into his seventh or eighth decade.

This kind of scenario tends to unfold when the majority of the elders of the church occupy a similar generation to the pastor or when the pastor in question has some kind of a celebrity status. The result in situations such as this is that existing leaders fail to grasp the generational dynamics that may have begun to degrade the ministry vitality of the church they are serving long before a pastor reaches the final days of his tenure.

[1] Noel M. Tichy, Succession: Mastering the Make-or-Break Process of Leadership Transition (New York: Portfolio, 2014)