Sharing pastors

 When I served as a an Area Minister in our judicatory I worked with a number of church pastor search teams. One smaller church in particular was having problems finding a pastor. I asked the chair of the search team if they would consider sharing a pastor with another another church or if they might be even willing to be a satellite church for a church in their association. I'll never forget his response. He said maybe, after he's gone. Years earlier, our Area Minister asked if I would be willing to serve a second church as its pastor. After receiving approval from our deacons I told him I would. The other church was not willing to share a pastor and has spend decades with a revolving door of pastoral leadership.

It's time that smaller churches accept some realities. There is not a long line of pastors waiting to serve your churches. Many seminary trained pastors are not willing to serve in smaller churches for a variety of reasons. Because bivocational pastors are not always available, they may not be available to serve your church either. Smaller churches need to accept the reality that they may struggle to find good pastoral leadership is they are not willing to share such leadership with other churches.

This is hard to accept for the Baptist churches in my tradition, but it is the current reality. Perhaps you were a much larger church in the past, and you were used to having a fully-funded pastor, but that is not the case today. Today, you are a much smaller church, and there is not a long line of pastors eager to serve as pastor of your church. Those who might be willing to serve your church may have no seminary training at all but only a sense of being called by God to serve a church. That was my situation when I became the pastor of a small, rural church, and it worked out well.

But, you may be in a church that demands a seminary education before calling a pastor. In a smaller church, you are highly unlikely to find such a person unless you are willing to share that pastor with another church.

This was the reality facing many churches when I retired as an Area Minister in 2019 and it is even more true today. Many smaller churches are now faced with the problem of finding a pastor in a smaller pool of potential pastors, and are going to have to make some hard choices. In many cases, their best choices might be to share a pastor with another church.