In Today’s Conversation, Leith Anderson and Marshall Shelley talk about hiring and firing pastors, and the relationships between pastors and their congregations and church board.

In this podcast, you’ll hear thoughts and advice on:

How to handle pastoral transitions well;

What the Bible says about letting pastors go;

The legitimate reasons for pastoral terminations; and

How and what to communicate publicly regarding personnel decisions.

Read a Portion of the Transcript

Leith: So Marshall, delighted that you are on Today’s Conversation. And let me just start out by asking, why are we talking about this subject? Why is this important?

Marshall: Well as you alluded in your introduction, Leith, I think we’re talking about this, because it’s sometimes an inevitability that leaders are going to separate and that a church does need to make a change. But it’s so often done so poorly that it damages the church. It damages the church’s reputation and ministry in the community, and it can certainly damage the pastor and the pastor’s family. And if there’s a pastor who’s there one Sunday and gone the next with little or no explanation, it can also lead to civil war within the church. So it’s just a very delicate time. It’s a vulnerable time — both for the pastor as well as the congregation. And done well it can lead to renewed strength in the church, but done poorly it can do undue damage.

Leith: So there’s really two issues here. One is whether or not to terminate a pastor, and then how it’s done. And I think we’re focusing primarily on how it’s done. How widespread is this? Are there a lot of pastoral terminations?

Marshall: Well there are. The most recent research that I was able to come across is 20 years old now, but when Christianity Today did some polling of the pastors in our sphere, it indicated that 23 percent of them said that they’d been let go at a previous position. So that’s almost a quarter of the pastors had been either fired or pressured to resign in a previous position. So that’s a significant number. It’s not a majority by any means, but it’s certainly a significant minority of churches that have actively had to ask a pastor to leave.

Leith: Each month the NAE has what we call the Evangelical Leaders Survey and in July of 2015 we asked our survey recipients — and these are top leaders, heads of denominations and organizations — if they had ever been terminated from a paid ministry position, and it was 18 percent. So that’s almost 1 in 5, and these are people who went on to significant leadership. I just got to tuck in here a bit of my own experience. After graduating from seminary, I was a youth pastor at a church in the Rocky Mountain West, and the church voted me out. It was really — at the time — an awfully painful experience. It wasn’t because I’d done anything bad, but it was because they didn’t have money to pay me. And of all the ironies, the senior pastor the church had to go away shortly after that, and they didn’t have anybody to preach the next Sunday. And the chairman of the board called me up and said would I preach because they couldn’t find anybody else, and then he said “and we knew you’d be free.” Of course they knew I would be free, because they had just fired me a few days earlier.

Marshall: They had made sure you were free.

Leith: And the irony of it was, a couple of months later the senior pastor resigned, they called me as a senior pastor and I ended up being there 10 years. So it doesn’t always mean that the person has done some awful thing, and it doesn’t mean that there’s going to be a bad outcome, but it means it’s just got to be done right.

Marshall: I think that’s a great story, because it also illustrates that firings can be painful. They are humiliating, and you can feel used even if there’s good reason ...