The Ken Johnson Group / January 4, 2006 Featured Article

Why Would a Church Hire a Loser?

by Ken Johnson

I have recently worked with three pastors who had been at their churches from seven to thirteen years and each church declined in attendance, giving and membership. In spite of this decline all three pastors have moved on to larger churches. Why would a church look at that history and still hire any of these pastors?

The first church is a mainline church in the suburbs of a major city. This pastor began his tenure with 1350 members and in thirteen years “grew” the church down to 650 members and was subsequently hired by a church with 2000 members. Generally speaking when a pastor grows a church down it is because he/she is not capable of leading a larger church and they are growing the church to a size that fits their capabilities. In this pastor’s case the church would have had to downsize to 0 before it would have been small enough for him to manage.

I worked with this pastor for two years and found him to be an abusive leader. Actually he wasn’t a leader; he had no understanding what the word leader meant. He was a dictator and if you didn’t do what he wanted you were in trouble. Actually he didn’t know what he wanted so you were always in trouble. I found it difficult never knowing where I or anyone else stood with him at any time. The church went through countless staff people in his thirteen years, and the leadership obviously didn’t think anything about it. Oh well, so much for the Christian Church and caring leadership.

I prayed daily that God would find another place for this pastor. My prayer was that he would receive a call from a Christian College or Seminary where he wouldn’t have any involvement with parishioners, but God obviously didn’t agree with me.

The second church is one that I used for a consultant training class. This was a mainline church right in the heart of a major city. In the seven years he was at this church he grew it from approximately 400 members to around 250. Not earth shattering numbers but still not growth or even plateauing. In all honesty I hoped that this pastor would learn how to lead a church of this size and stay, but he too felt a call to another church. The church he is going to is larger than the one he just left.

I really enjoyed working with this pastor—he was very personable, a strong Evangelical Christian, and had a passionate desire to build the church, but he came to a church that was already on its way down. This church had major problems with an old line membership that “had done it this way for years” and they weren’t about to change. This pastor could never break through their cultural facade and was never able to add enough new people to change the culture so away he goes. Someone new will have to come in and try to make those changes. I actually had one member tell me that they had tried to give the pastor opportunities to lead and he never took them. Interesting?

I feel like this pastor has an opportunity to be the leader that he is meant to be at his new church. He really has the understanding to do what needs to be done, but will need to be dealt a better hand than he had at the former church,

The third pastor worked in a mainline church that had a change of culture in its immediate neighborhood during his tenure. This did create some problems, but his dictatorial leadership style will hinder him wherever he goes. In his seven years he grew the church from 250 to 165.

I consulted with this church on their sound system and reconfiguring their platform. The pastor told me that I wouldn’t be able to do anything with the sound system because of the sanctuary configuration. The sound system was actually quite simple to fix and they currently have a sound system where everyone can hear—what a unique experience. Incidentally, the pastor never told me thank you or acknowledged that the new sound system made any difference. Oh well so much for being humble.

Not to many months before he resigned he told the music director that he felt like he had tried everything “in his bag of tricks” and if the last thing, The Purpose Driven Life, didn’t work then it was time to go. That’s interesting. I guess that we use our “bag of tricks” and God doesn’t fit into the equation. God definitely wasn’t a part of his attempts to revive the church. Maybe if God had been included things would have been different.

This pastor is definitely an “abusive leader” who didn’t care what he said or did to anyone. There were a few people who he treated with a little “respect”—the people who gave the big bucks. The pastor and these other people treated the staff with total disrespect, but if one of the staff said or did anything against any of those people they were in big trouble with the pastor.

I am already feeling sorry for those churches that the first and third pastors went to because they are in for many years of torture and decline in membership. As far as the second pastor I am praying that he will be able to overcome any of his difficulties with the size of church and become a successful pastor of a larger church.

All three of these pastors were and are still pastors in the same mainline denomination.

Why would a church hire a pastor who had literally killed his most recent church? Maybe the pastor is a good interviewer, maybe even a good liar, but any church can look on line and find out what happened at one’s previous church. Maybe he convinced the new church that the churches slow death was not his fault. Who knows?

In his book Breakout Churches, Thom Rainer says that the temperament of the pastor is one reason that many churches become great. He says that the pastors of all of the thirteen Breakout churches were humble. What a unique idea. He didn’t say that they allowed people to walk all over them, but that they were humble. Two of the three pastors identified above have no idea what being humble means, so it won’t make a difference where they go they will never be successful.

What about you? Are you humble or are you a dictator in your leadership? Do you encourage people or do you Lord your authority over them? Would your church hire a loser?