Long pastorates

 About 20 years ago I got to meet one of my heroes, H. B. London, Jr. H. B. had retired from pastoral ministry. He was a brother-in-lay to James Dobson and was serving as the Director of the Pastoral Ministry Department of Focus on the Family. We were both invited to serve as plenary speakers at a leadership conference. He spoke three times that week, and I spoke twice and led three workshops. One day the conference director asked if I would take H. B. to lunch. I thoroughly enjoyed my time with him and learned much from him that week.

All of his books impacted my life, but one thing he wrote in one of them impacted me the most. He said that if you are currently serving as pastor in a strong, healthy church it is because someone stayed there long enough to make it such a church. If you are not serving in such a church, perhaps God has called you there for this time to make it that kind of church. I'll never forget those words.

When I became pastor at Hebron Baptist Church in 1981 they had experienced a revolving-door pastorate. The average pastoral tenure at that time was 12 months. That was the average! Veteran pastors in the association told me I wouldn't last that long. I stayed there 20 years as their bivocational pastor. That small, country church accomplished much during that time, and part of the reason for that was that I simply hung around. You can read some of those accomplishments in some of the books I've written.

While larger churches may accept leadership from a new pastor, that is not usually the case in a smaller church. George Barna writes that the average pastor will see his or her greatest ministries between their third and eleventh year of ministry. I am convinced that in the smaller church that will be greatly impacted by the pastoral tenure of the previous pastors. It takes time to earn the trust of a church to lead it, and the shorter the previous pastoral tenures have been, the longer it will take to earn that trust. In my case, it took seven years. Looking back I realize it was in my seventh year as the pastor of that church that two members of leading families in the church shared with me personal information from their lives. In both cases, after sharing this with me, they told me they had never told another pastor about this. Both came to me in the same week. I realized later that positive things began to happen in the church after that.

Depending on whose figures you read, the average pastoral tenure today in the US is less than four years. If Barna's findings are correct, most pastors never really lead their churches. They don't stay long enough to earn the trust and the right to lead. Maybe the pastor is climbing the pastoral ladder of success, but it is so unfair to the church.

Yes, serving in a smaller church can be a challenge. Many of them have been deeply wounded in the past and may not trust pastoral leadership. It can take years to earn that trust, and these will not always be easy years. But, maybe H. B. London, Jr. was right. Maybe God has called you to this place for such a time as this. May each of us be faithful in the place where God has placed us.