The Pulpit Ministry and Transition

The four foundational ministry areas in which a pastor is normally judged are preaching, vision-casting, shepherding and equipping the saints for ministry.

In my opinion, of these four critical areas, the pulpit ministry has the greatest impact on transition, because, whether intentional or not, the way a founding pastor manages the pulpit ministry will most heavily impact his successor. If the founding pastor dominates the pulpit ministry in the number of weeks he is active in the pulpit and in his rare grants of access to the pulpit by others on his staff, there will likely be several unintended side effects.

First, pulpit domination by a gifted preacher will likely enable the newly planted church to grow rapidly. If the founding pastor regularly produces biblically grounded, intellectually stimulating, personally applicable, and evangelistically effective sermons in a personable way, people will come, and visitors will be rarely disappointed and thus be more likely to attend and eventually join the congregation. 

Secondly, the frequency of the founding pastor’s presence in the pulpit will cause the people in the church, including the leadership, to develop an idiosyncratic view of what good preaching is. Good preaching will be directly equated with the way the founding pastor preaches because the congregation rarely experiences anything else.

Third, on the rare occasion when another less experienced member of the staff preaches, he will be judged against the narrow standard of preaching excellence defined by the founding pastor. Such narrow standards have the knock-on effect of stunting the preaching development of the other pastors on staff by forcing them into a particular preaching mold that delays or hinders the development of their own preaching personality. 

Finally, as it relates to the church’s ability to transition to a successor pastor, the implications of pulpit domination by a founding pastor creates an unattainable ideal for the successor pastor, who may neither preach as often nor in a similar style as his predecessor. As a result, in spite of what might be perceived as the biblical faithfulness of the founding pastor, by dominating the pulpit he may be creating an avoidable transition difficulty. 

One church I studied in my research took a bold and interesting approach to transition in putting in place a plan for the founding pastor and the associate pastor to swap positions. In order to create the smoothest possible transition pathway they reoriented the traditional understanding of an effective pulpit ministry.

Instead of continuing to emphasize the preaching ministry of the founding pastor, they decided, and their leadership team agreed, that well before the transition would take place the pulpit would be shared equally between the founding pastor and the associate pastor who was, stylistically speaking, very different from him. They also decided that this arrangement would remain in place after the leadership transition was complete, with both pastors continuing to share the pulpit equally so that when the transition was eventually affected, the congregation experienced almost no difference in the Sunday morning worship experience as both men continued to preach half of the time.

Making this decision early in the life of their church and embedding it into the culture and core values of the church created a more favorable transition dynamic when the season of transition came upon them.

Each congregation would do well to determine whether its ministry core values in one of the four key areas noted at the top of this blog are unintentionally creating unhealthy transition pathways. If this may be the case, the leadership of the church, working in concert with the founding pastor, can then determine their own strategies for adjusting these core values well in advance of entering into the season of initial transition.

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