How to Select a New Pastor

Perhaps your old pastor was very good and well loved, and perhaps he suddenly died at home or in a tragic accident. Maybe your old pastor just moved on to make more many somewhere else, or perhaps with much hostility your congregation just had enough of him and unified themselves in a huge revolt. Perhaps your pastor was fired because of something inappropriate that he said or did such as preaching under the influence, using excessive profanity, or just simply resorting to violence to resolve a theological dispute. Overall, I thus assume that you are reading this article because you had a pastor unexpectedly lost, and you are desiring to get a new one.

First step is that you carefully consider what the scripture has to say about the subject, "Here is a trustworthy saying: If anyone sets his heart on being an overseer, he desires a noble task. Now the overseer must be above reproach, the husband of but one wife, temperate, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, not given to drunkenness, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, not a lover of money. He must manage his own family well and see that his children obey him with proper respect. (If anyone does not know how to manage his own family, how can he take care of God's church?) He must not be a recent convert, or he may become conceited and fall under the same judgment as the devil. He must also have a good reputation with outsiders, so that he will not fall into disgrace and into the devil's trap." (NIV) 1 Timothy 3:1-7 (NIV) So you have considered the qualifications for the position as scripture records them, and you have a basic understanding of what you are looking for (this will be the most important guide for narrowing the selection).

Telling other churches that your church is associated with that you are looking for a new pastor might be the best start depending upon the circumstances, but if your church is in a organized denomination, then the people in the upper levels of your church denomination may match some new graduates to your church in a rather nice selection pool of candidates. If however you have trouble getting candidates, then advertising through seminary schools and even through Christian employment sights might be the best step to get some resumes to flow into your church. Overall, once you have compiled a huge list of all the prospects the next step is to evaluate those prospects.

If you have a few hundred candidates, then removing the resumes from your stack that do not appear to be of interest to your congregation would be the first step until you get the selection down to about forty or so. Giving those forty people all a call for a telephone interview that would last a hour each (a hour is often average) will result in either a week of work worth of full-time interviewing or two weeks of interviews made for twenty hours a week. Overall, narrowing the selection down to about five or ten people would be ideal, and once those ideal dozen are selected, then you could either assemble a panel of deacons to personally interview and test the ideal candidates, have each candidate give a sermon at your church, or narrow the selection down yourself with the help of those that are involved in the decision making.

Once you have a seemingly perfect few people that you believe would work best for your congregation, then the next step might involve the real challenges. Lets say that you have in your congregation a few children that have demons, a few women that are feminist, a few people that are pro choice, some rebellious teens, business men that are super greedy, several couples that are proud of the 'sexual revolution', and many families that are first generation citizens that hardly speak English, and you would like to know how each of your ideal pastors would deal with such people in such situations. Your best course of action would be to have each potential pastor of your ideal selection committee speak on selected bible verses that deal with the problems at hand such as demons, women being obedient to men, the value of life as a result of what Christ has done, obedience, fleeing from worldliness and greed, fleeing sexual immorality, and speaking in tongues.

Once the pool of candidates have addressed all the relevant issues, then some decision making needs to be done in order to determine the best pastor in order to fit the needs of the congregation. Obviously the person that avoids the critical issues would not be best, and the pastor that tried to minimize sin in order to maximize popularity would not be good either. The pastor that addresses all the critical issues and is very honest with the scripture who explains things to the people such that everyone realizes their challenges but at the same time identifies their shortcomings may be the best.

Even if the best pastor could be selected for addressing the critical issues, the most important element of being a pastor is to do all work out of a love for God. Finding who loves God the most could be by far the most challenging task. Many churches may equivocate love for God as passion and knowledge of the scripture, but even Satan himself has had thousands of years to read the scripture. Many churches may equivocate a love for God as a acceptance of church doctrine, but the problem is that many churches have very unique doctrine produced by theologians long since gone that many people would not care to understand anyway.

If for example your church believed in and practiced intinction, consubstantiation, and full immersion baptism, then getting a pastor to honestly support and endorse such a strange mix of things would not be completely realistic. Instead the best pastor will be able to navigate through the critical church doctrine and perhaps raise some challenges and mild criticism, but the worst candidates would avoid the issues or would perhaps even become hostile. Overall, if a pastor is selected to be your pastor that avoids central doctrine because he disagrees with it, then he will be silent upon the issues of doctrine that the church finds important, but if he becomes angry when approached about fundamental doctrine, then that is even worse because the church could enter into a long set of hardship down the road.

The best pastor will be able to talk to people personally in order to make things better, manage finances, develop talents in others, and unify the efforts of the church, and the only way to truly know if a pastor could do all those things is to select a pastor for the church upon a short term contract as a trial bases. Once the ideal pastor has been selected on a trial bases, then his entire job will be to turn things around in a short amount of time such as two months. If the selected pastor succeeds the trial period, then you have accomplished your mission, but otherwise you might have to contact the few people that you had been close to selecting that you did not select and offer the same trial bases to them.

My plan of how to select a pastor is based on the idea that your church has not reared a deacon into a pastor, and that your church also does not have a bishop or arch bishop that would be in charge of the pastor selection process. Ideally pastors would be selected by other pastors or most importantly by those in charge of the denomination. Overall, the process that I have detailed would be the best process to use in a emergency situation without disbanding the church.