Transitioning a Church

Regardless of the book or conference, one of my greatest cautions to pastors is to digest the content presented before doing anything with it. In other words, you need to fully evaluate what you have heard in light of your ministry situation. That would include the systems and structures of that situation in addition to the people and programs already in place.

I have pastored two new churches and several established churches prior to becoming an associational director of missions 6+ years ago. In the new churches, I could set up the systems, strategies, etc. with little friction and conflict from my core team or the church as a whole. BUT, in the established churches I pastored, I practiced what I called my "3-month rule." I told this rule to my leadership and even to the entire congregation at times. My 3-month rule was that "with rare exception, I will never try to implement any significant changes in the church until I have taken at least three months to pray about it." Regardless of what I had read or heard at a conference, my commitment was to wait at least 3-months before implementing any real changes from what I had learned. This rule did three significant things:

1. It gave my leadership/church the security of knowing that I wasn't going to run in and try to implement the latest idea or fad I had discovered, and
2. It gave me the opportunity to genuinely pray through what I had learned.
3. It also gave me time to contextualize the ideas I had been exposed to and develop a process that would work where I was serving.

My thought was that if after 3-months, if there was still a burning desire to implement something, it was probably a prompting of God. It is amazing how many things I never tried to implement after I was removed from the excitement and emotion of it by 3+ months. It is also amazing to me how much more smoothly many transitions were when I could go before my leadership and say, "On (state the date I began praying about the change) I began to pray about (whatever the transition was). Sometime my prayer over a transition or change was only the three months ... but other times I had prayed for over a year when I presented it.

Transitioning an established church verses a church plant is similar to steering a huge cruise liner verses a speedboat. If you are piloting your vessel through a canal and you change your mind about the direction you need to go, both vessels can make a change, but in very different ways. In the speedboat, you can turn the wheel almost immediately and reverse direction right in the middle of the canal. Change made ... back to full throttle. In the case of the cruise liner, no change can be made until you get your vessel back out into deep open water. Once in the open water, you can begin to turn the vessel, but it is a slow and meticulous process to redirect it in a new direction. In a church plant, a transition can often be made much like the speedboat while if transitioning an established church, it must be much more like the turning of the cruise liner.