Before You Go: Introduction

The release of Before You Go: A Few-Sneaky Good Questions Every Minister Must Answer Before Moving to a New Church is imminent.  We’ve got just a few more editing and formatting tweaks to make and then it will be initially available as a Kindle ebook via Amazon. (Update: It is now available.)

Until then, here is an excerpt from the introduction:

In 2003, when I accepted a call to a new church in Tulsa, Oklahoma, I believed I was stepping into a ministry with tremendous potential. After being there for less than a year, I found myself in a quagmire of conflict and financial turmoil. A key staff member, someone who was crucial to my effectiveness there, resigned unexpectedly. The leadership team that looked so healthy during the interview started manifesting old dysfunctions that we all hoped had been exorcised. I was angry and disappointed. Angry at the leadership team for falling apart and disappointed in myself for getting caught up in such a volatile church system. As the situation continued to unravel, and as each month presented yet another unsolvable problem, I repeatedly said to myself, “I didn’t sign up for this!”

Since then, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how I ended up in such a difficult situation. Hindsight is supposed to be twenty-twenty, but my perspective on what happened, and why, is still a bit fuzzy. I can, however, make several observations. First, I was desperate to leave the church I was working with when I interviewed with the church in Tulsa. Before I even began the interview process I knew that I would accept the job if they offered it to me. Second, there were a number of important questions I failed to address throughout the process. I either didn’t ask these questions because of inexperience or because I didn’t want to know the answer. Desperate people don’t ask questions they don’t want to know the answers to. Third, the most important questions that needed to be asked were not questions about the church, but questions about myself. Changing churches didn’t change me. I was the same guy in both places and that was part of the problem.

This is a resource for ministers thinking about moving to a new church. You may be in the early stages of sending out resumes or you may be on the verge of saying “yes” to the church of your dreams. You may be as desperate to move on to a new ministry as I was, or you may be a rookie hoping to land a job with your first church. My hope is that what follows will give you some good questions to help you discern whether or not to make a move. Most of these questions are the product of mistakes I’ve made over fourteen years of ministry. I hope you can learn as much from my mistakes as I have.

This can also be a valuable resource for search teams who are looking to call a new minister to their church. I hope this will give you an idea of what kind of questions should surface during the search process.

To read more, download the Kindle version here and the Nook version here.