Now What?
Let’s get you moving in the right direction
You are without a pastor, so what’s next?
Well, Jesus is still building his church, and the harvest is still plentiful.
So, let’s reboot and get on with it.
Your Reality
- Your pulpit is vacant.
- Your church is stagnating or declining.
- What you’ve tried hasn’t really worked.
- You are hoping and wishing for a new pastor to make it better.
Can we make a suggestion?
Before you hire your next pastor, you need to start moving in the right direction so you can attract the right pastor.
When we talk to pastoral candidates about a call to a smaller or a stagnating church, we are often asked, “Is the church a project?”
Ouch.
Projects are high-risk.
FYI: Many pastors who accept a call to a project do not last more than five years.
It is hard on a family.
- The wife carries many of the family’s burdens.
- The pastor often lacks some of the key skills to get the church moving in the right direction.
- The kids get a front-row seat to witness the difficulty of getting the church moving in the right direction.
This leads to an exhausted family who loses enthusiam for the church.
What if you could flip the script?
1. START MOVING IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION
Before searching for a pastor, figure out who you are and what God wants your church to do in its next chapter. Figuring these two things out will give you the direction needed to find your next pastor.
Our reboot process will help you get there. It is a simple five-step Scripture-based process to move your church from maintenance to mission. At its heart you will:
- Discern a vision for what God wants you to do based on who you are
- Create a plan
- Identify teams to make it happen
2. SO YOU CAN ATTRACT THE RIGHT PASTOR
Once you get moving in the right direction you can attract the right pastor.
Attracting the right pastor is like finding the unique jigsaw piece that completes your church’s puzzle.
We create a Candidate and a Church profile to attract him.
When he reads the Candidate Profile, the right candidate will think, “This is me!”
When he reads the Church Profile, he will think, “These are my people!”
His gift-mix, personality, knowledge, skill, character, and passion will fit the next chapter of your church.
We will find him for you.
Caution: Hiring a pastor first and having him set the direction can be trouble.
Here’s why: Two or three years in you might discover that his direction doesn’t really fit the congregation. We see this a lot. By the fourth or fifth year he leaves because he has taken the church as far as he can.
Now you are back to square one.
3. THEN OFFER HIM THE RIGHT SUPPORT
Through post-placement training, we will provide the right support to your new pastor and the leadership team for 12 months so he gets off to a strong start.
We will connect him with the plan you created to help him implement it, work with the Elders as needed, and provide customized support from our library of resources.
A PASTOR’S PERSPECTIVE
“In addition to the placement, David and I have been working together over the first year to gain an outside perspective on how to make the transition as helpful and healthy as possible.
His insight, coaching, and encouragement have given me valuable guidance and clear direction. He has helped me prioritize transitional essentials in the first year of ministry.”
JON ROBINSON
Pastor
New Covenant EPC
4. YOUR NEXT STEP IN ATTRACTING THE RIGHT PASTOR
Book a call below with Rev. David Zook, our lead on this initiative. David is an ordained EPC Pastor, served as a Lead Pastor for 14 years, revitalized two churches, and spent five years recruiting executives prior to entering ministry.
David will help determine if this process is right for you.
THE PROCESS
Our Reboot Process channels your ministries through the Great Commission. It ensures that every ministry is equipped and empowered to reach out, share the faith, and disciple others. It is built on a double-edged platform of renewing people spiritually, then giving them something to do.
1. Aligning Perception allows you to see your church as it really is. You will work through a church health self-assessment and answer the question, “Where are we?” This starting point establishes a baseline of comparison to the ending point of REBOOT NOW. This step usually motivates people to act like few other tools.
2. Aligning Vision puts the vision for your church in alignment with God’s vision for you. You will work through our proven vision process that answers the question, “Where do we want to be?”
3. Aligning Strategy makes sure that what you DO in ministry is in alignment with God’s vision for your church. You will wrestle with several questions and our strategy process which will answer the question, “What will get us there?”
4. Aligning Structure organizes your leadership around the central mission of being faithful to the Great Commission. Allocating resources and defining a decision making process will answer the question, “How will leadership function?” This will support your strategy and vision.
5. Aligning People draws your congregation into the vision of reaching a community and assimilating those reached into the life and mission of your church. Your leadership will figure out how to keep people involved and realize the future depends on a healthy culture of outreach, evangelism and discipleship.
THE SEARCH
Once we get you moving in the right direction, we will start the search for your next pastor. It begins with the candidate and church profile and ends with securing the candidate on your behalf.
1. Creating a Candidate Profile attracts the right candidates to your call. When the right candidate reads it he thinks, “That’s me.”
2. Creating a Church Profile will also attract the right candidate to you. After he reads what you are doing and the direction that you are heading, he thinks, “Those are my people.”
THE SUPPORT
Once your new pastor begins, we offer 12 months of post-placement advanced training. We have over 70 topics for advanced pastoral training. Very few pastors are proficient in all of them. We will work together to chose those topics that he would like to strengthen based on where you are as a church. We might pull in the leadership team into some of the training too so that everyone is singing from the same song sheet.
We don’t know.
Because it’s a process, not a program, the completion time varies.
Here are some of the factors that affect how long it takes to finish:
- The church’s past.
- The leadership team’s character, knowledge, and skill.
- The ability to overcome limiting beliefs, competing values, and core issues that may have held the church back.
- The time to you have to spend on the Reboot process.
- The way God decides to move and how fast.
What Others Are Saying
“From my perspective, Dr. Kenneth Priddy is one of the top two or three authorities on church revitalization in the United States. His approach to renewing churches is biblically sound, practically useful, and strategically solid. If you wish to see your church be fruitful in its evangelism and outreach, I advise you to listen, learn, and leverage Dr. Priddy’s insights for kingdom growth.”
Gary L. McIntosh, Ph.D., Professor of Christian Ministry and Leadership, Talbot School of Theology, Biola University
The Reboot process has helped move Logos Presbyterian forward.
This is a church that has had two significant church splits in the last five to eight years, and have plateaued/decline in the last several years.
Logos joined the EPC two years ago and started church revitalization a year and a half ago.
The process has given the church a focus. They have two strategic initiatives planned and they have accomplished the first one – the calling of a youth/outreach pastor. The second initiative is to start a second service that is English speaking and more contemporary. This is planned to kick-off next Easter.
Larry Jung has done an excellent job encouraging the church and its pastor and keeping both on track through this season. Larry has preached three times during this process including the sermon for the installation service of the new pastor. Logos welcomes Larry’s direction and experience. His own personal testimony of the importance of “high risk faith” has helped propel the church forward.
The new pastor has 25-35 youth/young adults in the middle school to late 20s range. They are all excited to have a pastor closer in age who wants to see a more contemporary service happen.
I anticipate that in the next year we will see numerical growth as the enthusiasm grows!
Thanks for the help and prayers!
Rev. Bill McDonald, Logos Presbyterian Church, Seattle, WA.
“This ministry has greatly helped to keep us on track as a leadership team, Session, and church. We have steadily seen our church grow with more and more people visiting and attending as we have made “people contact” of high priority, seeking to create “people flow” in order to reach lost people. During the time I have known Ken and gleaned from his ministry our church has grown 20% and we’ve added a Fellowship Hall and more classroom space. More than the growth, this ministry has kept our focus on the Lord and His mission to make disciples of all nations, the harvest is truly ripe!”
Dr. Rob Buchanan – EPC of Elkton, VA
“We are a small church (average weekly worship attendance of 70). While we are a mission church in the EPC, we began our journey together when a large group from First Presbyterian Church, Waynesboro (PCUSA) left after a protracted discernment process and the subsequent challenges we experienced in leaving the PC (USA).
In the early stages of our life together (spring of 2013), Dr. Ken Priddy consulted with us providing a very meaningful full-day seminar introducing some of the principles of the GO training (Building Your Church’s Great Commission Matrix). This training provided significant thought-provoking material, which challenged us to look at our life cycle as a new mission church, as well as the need for every ministry to have the same strategic design . . . GO . . . MAKE . . . DISCIPLES. He also introduced us to the Vision Team concept surrounded by prayer teams. We initiated this process shortly after the presentation. It has proved to be quite effective in helping us focus on God’s vision for us, moving from thinking only about what brought us together (shared theological commitments) to focusing on what God is calling us to be for Him and His Kingdom now (a congregation committed to being and making disciples)!
Since this March, I have been engaged in one of Dr. Priddy’s GO Clusters. These bi-monthly GoToMeeting video conferences have provided more specifics to the initial training. One specific gleaning from our most recent conference was to learn how to minister THROUGH our congregation rather than just TO our congregation. As a leadership team we are discerning how to move people to be agents of ministry rather than just recipients of ministry based upon this teaching.
The ministry Dr. Priddy is providing is a true blessing for me and our church as we continue to seek for ways to apply these ministry principles to our life together. I pray more of our EPC congregations across the country will benefit from this excellent training.”
Rev. Glen Holman, Organizing Pastor Hope Community Church in Waynesboro, Virginia.
“The training we received through individual consultation and GO Cluster participation was absolutely invaluable for our church. Rather than a “one size fits all” approach, this provided specific, detailed attention necessary for assessing the Spirit’s unique work here. Peace is attempting a “prayer based model” for church growth, which is not part of a standard “church growth” paradigm. Ken and Tom did not “despise the day of small things;” both recognized that what God is doing here is impacting lives not only in Durham and nationally but in many countries (I have been blessed with a writing ministry in the area of prayer—especially prayer for families with prodigals—and the church embraces this ministry as their own). The outstanding consultation and insight provided enabled us to investigate the relationship between prayer and evangelism in practical ways that have helped us reach deeper into our community. Further encouragement in a missional outlook through regular training at Presbytery meetings has also been indispensable (a recent presentation of “Christianity Explored” was very well received, and we will be launching our first outreach effort with it this Fall). Peace is now exhibiting positive numerical growth, financial stability, and fresh vitality and enthusiasm for a true Kingdom ministry.”
Dr. James Banks – Peace Church, Durham, NC