Later this month I will conclude a 10 month interim role as the Senior Minister of United Church (Marco Island, FL): a congregation affiliated with the National Association of Congregational Christian Churches and the United Church of Christ. This year long journey has afforded the congregation an opportunity to process the past, understand the present, and prepare for the future. I firmly believe it will enable the new settled minister to begin well from day one knowing that folks are ready to contribute in working toward God’s preferred future for this congregation.
The preceding paragraph is a needed disclaimer for what follows. During my lifetime, interim ministry has been an accepted norm. When a minister moves on from a parish ministry, the congregation calls an interim before endeavoring to search for a new permanent settled pastor. Recently, people have begun calling into question the practice of interim ministry.
The conversations I am familiar with are focused on determining what is the best way forward rather than diminishing the contributions of interim ministry in a prior era. Last week Frederick Schmidt, Director of Spiritual Formation and Associate Professor of Christian Spirituality at Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University, proposed that we have become overly dependent on interim ministry. He believes that interim ministers are best suited in 2014 for congregations that “have had long-tenured leadership and troubled parishes that have been rocked by abuse or tragedy may well need that kind of care and nurture.” To substantiate his argument that most congregations would be better served by something other than interim ministry he notes five common issues with interim ministry
- extensive “fallow time” when not much is being done,
- loss of financial support and human participation;
- competing visions of the future proposed by an interim and later a settled minister,
- ignoring the particularity of a community’s needs that the community supposedly re-examines during the interim; and
- the amount of information or wisdom gathered in the interim rarely requires much less substantiates the length of the interim.
A few weeks before Schmidt, an Episcopal priest, wrote his article, a group of more than two dozen leaders in the United Church of Christ gathered for a conversation designed to help the church “begin exploring different models for pastoral transition, particularly in larger membership churches.” This is just the first of several steps the denomination will take as a part of crafting new ways forward. Of course, these new ways will not necessarily signal an end to interim ministry. They will, however, likely result in it becoming one of several options.
So What?
One size fits all responses to organizational transition don’t make sense in 2014. A few years ago, I shared wisdom from a then recent article written by Anthony Robinson that suggests a resurgence in the pastoral succession model (a new settled minister overlaps with the outgoing minister then assumes the role when the original minister departs). In that piece Robinson, a UCC pastor and widely recognized expert on congregational culture, suggested three reasons why interim ministry is no longer as effective for transition as it once was:
- Churches today find themselves in a much more competitive environment. Many cannot afford an extended period of being “on hold” during which time both continuity and momentum are lost.
- Congregations are discovering that the talent pool for pastoral leaders is an increasingly shallow one. The standard denominational system for providing leaders is unreliable. The intentional interim ministry model assumed a denominational system was relatively stable . . . Fewer congregations today can withstand such extended periods without clarity and direction.
- The quality of those doing this specialized transitional ministry is often lacking. While some transitional ministers are exactly what a congregation needs, some are people who have gravitated to transitional ministry because they haven’t been successful as pastors and have found a way to mask mediocrity with the mantel of the specialist or expert.
Open, honest, and frank conversation about how interim ministry really functions and what alternatives should be considered going forward is something we should not only accept, but also encourage. An intentional effort to appropriate older models (e.g., pastoral succession) for a new era, incorporate new/emerging models, and continue with existing models (e.g., interim/transitional) is essential to the well-being of congregations.
- What about a move away from interim ministry as a one-size-fits all approach to congregational transition excites you? concerns you?
- Have you experienced an interim ministry? If so, what did you find to be its greatest strengths? most apparent growing edges?