A Broken Transition

When the day began, the long-time elder had no idea that it would end in the emergency room with an irregular heartbeat, but it did. The palpitations began at the conclusion of a contentious church leadership meeting in which long-time friends and partners in ministry had crossed lines and said words that could never be taken back. Some spoke in fervent support of the church’s new pastor; others spoke in vehement opposition. By the time the meeting had concluded, friendships been severed, reputations sullied, the church had most certainly been split, and the name of Christ tarnished. 

As the elder sat in the emergency room alongside his supportive but equally broken wife, trying to catch his breath and calm his heart, he wondered how and where it had all gone wrong.  Was there anything that he or anyone could have done to head off the disaster that struck their congregation after their founding pastor left?

What followed in the case of this congregation was years of painful conflict and loss as the congregation rapidly dwindled from its earlier heights to a small sliver of what it once was. But not only did hundreds of people leave the church, many people lost meaningful friendships that were closely tied to their involvement in the congregation and the successor pastor, a good man, suffered under the weight of the broken transition and ended up leaving the church a short time later.

Sadly, stories like this are common. For my research I had contact with dozens of churches that had experienced some variety of significant loss upon the season of first transition, much of it born by either the founding pastor or the first successor pastor.

While statistics on church splits are difficult to locate, one study on general church conflict conducted by Christianity Today led its author, Eric Reed, to conclude:

Apart from the pastor's personal hurts, the collateral damage of conflict in the church is mostly in relationships. By the way congregations handle disputes, personal friendships are damaged in more than two-thirds of the cases; for almost as many a sadness remains long after the fighting has ceased…Like the 38% of pastors who eventually leave, a similar number of members and leaders look for a new church.[1]

The fact that over one-third of pastors affected by significant church conflict subsequently leave their church suggests that churches lack reliable research and tools for managing pastoral transition.

Foundational to overcoming the common difficulties associated with any transition, and especially a first pastoral transition, is the need for key leaders to understand the complexities involved in the process as early in the life of the church as possible.

[1] Eric Reed, “Leadership Surveys Church Conflict,” Christianity Today, 2004, http://www.christianitytoday.com/pastors/2004/fall/6.25.html.