How the Interim Minister Set Me Up for Success with My New Congregation – Transcript
Jim Latimer
Welcome to Coaching for Interims. We are about empowerment for interim ministry, best practices and quick help – Wisdom from the field. This is our collaborative Wisdom from the Field project featuring short interviews with transitional interim ministers and others with practical help and wisdom to offer those engaged in transitional ministry. Thank you for tuning into this episode of wisdom from the field.
Today we had the joy of having with us Reverend Heidi Johnston, and I’ve known Heidi for a few years. She’s a millennial and an ELCA Lutheran pastor. Several things strike me about her as I have come to know her. One, is her courage. She’s a courageous person. And she’s also committed to gospel justice and how she plays that out is inspiring to me. And she combines a clarity of boundaries, with real compassion and empathy that recognizes our interconnectedness of all people. And when she told me, she said, Jim, I feel that the congregation and I were really set up for success by the previous interim minister. Oh, I want to interview you! Because we interim ministers are always interested in knowing what did we do that went well? That didn’t work well? Feedback is really hard to get. So, Heidi, we would love for you to say a few words to us interim ministers and others about how did it go.
Heidi Johnston
Thank you so much, Jim, for inviting me. Yes, when you first approached me about speaking on this podcast, I thought, well, you know, I’m not a transition minister. I’m not trained as a transition minister. But I have really benefited, as you said, from the work of transition ministers. So today, I bring like an ode to the transition minister. Praise be, glory to God and to the transition minister! Because like you said, I really feel especially in my current context, that I had a smooth and very positive beginning, because of an intentional interim time before I arrived. I do feel the need to share that, as I speak, I want to acknowledge I was not a fly on the wall during the transition conversations that preceded my call. So, I don’t know exactly what happened or exactly what was said. But I will speak to what I’ve heard and what I’ve sensed and seen as a newly called pastor.
Jim Latimer
That’s what we want to hear! That’s it!
Heidi Johnston
Okay, just the truth, right? So, in my current context, I’m grateful for many things. But when I think about the transition process, I think I could narrow it down to three particular things. The first one is, I believe the transition pastor before me expressed very clear boundaries about what she was able to do in the set hours that she would be working each week. So, they had an agreement, you know, she was going to work this certain number of hours. And she was able to say, you know, I will be able to hold about this many meeting per week, which means I won’t be able to maybe do this evening Bible study or support that evening dinner church. So, some of those things were already on pause because of pandemic times. But because the transition pastor set those boundaries, she then was able to invite the church leadership to respond to that, to consider what was most important to them, and to the congregation during the transition time, right? Like, what is rising to the top? What do we really need to put our energy towards right now? So, that helped them determine what is critical for lay leaders to pick up and carry forward. Okay, the transition pastor can’t do all these things. We probably in a transition period can’t do all of them. But what does rise to the surface as most critical? And also, then you know, what needs to lay fallow, and maybe be reconsidered or taken back up when a new pastor is called?
Jim Latimer
Let me pause you there. Heidi. This is rich. Let me pause you there for a moment because what I’m hearing is that your interim minister – the intentional interim minister that preceded you – equipped the lay leaders with what they needed to be able to negotiate things, right? And I have heard many times from my colleagues over the years of why don’t the lay people understand more about…? I’m so stressed. I’m so… Why can’t they understand more? And I totally get that. And I also know that it’s incumbent on us as pastors – interim or settled – to teach lay people what our lives are like in this role. It’s not rational to expect them to just know that. We’ve got to teach them: This is what my life looks like as your pastor. And so, when people know that, they then can negotiate. They can set priorities. So that’s what I heard she did. That’s great.
Heidi Johnston
Right. And like I said, I wasn’t there for all the nitty gritty details of that. But I imagine that there had to be some clear conversations, and that she really set boundaries and worked the number of hours that she had agreed to work and didn’t say, Okay, well, this needs to be done. So even though I’ve only agreed to this many hours, I’m gonna go ahead and do that. Then I was able to come in and they weren’t shocked when I started setting boundaries about my own time.
Jim Latimer
Nice. Oh, that’s nice. What a gift.
Heidi Johnston
So the second thing that I think of when I think about how I benefited from a healthy transition time in this context, is that the church leadership was led through some really honest, and I would imagine sometimes hard, conversations about where they were right at that time, when they were in transition, when they were preparing all the documents, the site ministry profile, or the ministry site profile, getting ready to call new pastor, what was their current reality? Not just what they wished they still were, or what they hoped they might be in the future. But what was the current situation really like? So, for my site, they knew that they would be moving from having a senior pastor and an associate pastor, to only having one called pastor. So, people knew that already. But the interim pastor encouraged conversations that required, I think, a deeper dive into what it meant that they would only have one pastor. You know, you can just say, Oh, we know, we know! We used to have two, and now we’re only going to have one. But they were encouraged to think, Well, what does that really look like? How is that going to play out in the life of the congregation? And I think this very nicely goes back to setting boundaries. The transition pastor modeled boundaries about how she would use her time, which got the congregation realizing that in the future when they only had one called pastor, that that reality would also come with boundaries and limits on pastoral time. So, ministry may require more lay involvement. And it seems to me from the stories that I’ve heard and the way the attitude that was present when I came into this context, it seems to me that this was spoken about not with doom and gloom, like, Oh, scarcity. Oh, we’re only gonna have one pastor. Oh, we won’t be able to do all these things. Instead, it was presented as an opportunity. Yes, the pastor may not be able to do these things. But you could! You could teach this. You could lead this. There are lots of resources out there. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. So, there was actually this joy in opportunity for more hands-on ministry for lay people.
Jim Latimer
Wow. Beautiful. Yes. Just talk about it as an opportunity. Recognize the reality. This is reality. Now, what are the opportunities that this presents, because this is a new day? Sweet.
Heidi Johnston
And I’m sure there was some grief in there around that. Those conversations are not always easy. You can say things over and over and over again, and people don’t actually hear. So, I just want to celebrate that this context, for whatever reason, the spirit was able to help them really receive that message. But you know, the transition minister obviously was working very hard with them on that. Praise be to God.
Jim Latimer
Good. All right.
Heidi Johnston
And then I have this third praise that I want to offer up in my Ode to transition ministers.
Jim Latimer
Okay, let’s hear it!
Heidi Johnston
This one is honoring that the transition minister called people into that honest reflection about the current reality but also dug into the past. You know, there was some reflection also about what we called to be in the future, but what I want to talk about is this digging into the past a bit. The transition conversations nudge people beyond all the ways the past was more abundant. Oh, we used to have you know…! When I think conversations about the past made many of us hear about how big the Sunday School program used to be and all these wonderful things. And you know, it’s great to name that and celebrate that, and to grieve over the ways that it’s different now. But I know that the transition minister before me encouraged people to also name the past hurts and conflict. For example, there was some clergy misconduct over a period of nearly 20 years in this context. And now I found this very interesting when this was shared with me that when encouraged to dig into the past, there was disagreement about the past impact on the present reality of the congregation. So, some people when urged to talk about this particular situation of past trauma in the life of the congregation, many leaders said, All that is water under the bridge! Nobody even remembers that anymore! That’s past. And perhaps for a lot of people, that was true. But there were others in one to one conversations with the transition minister and a few other people who came and helped during that transition time, there were a few people who unprompted, started talking about that traumatic upsetting time in the life of the church, and it was clear that they were still impacted. Their relationship with the church and their faith was still impacted by those years of bro ken trust. So, I think this is important to say that that was not all resolved during the transition time. It wasn’t fixed. It wasn’t bandaged. Not everybody was perfectly healed from that really difficult time. But it was excavated enough. It was brought to the surface enough. Named enough that the transition minister was able to give me a fuller picture than my denominational leadership had let me know, Oh, there’s a history here. And then the transition minister was able to tell me a little more about what that meant for people. And then about six months into my call in this site when that past conflict reared its ugly head, I was not blindsided, because I knew some of what was going on. So, I’m very grateful for that. It empowered me to be more well equipped to have some very hard, painful conversations and make some hard decisions. But we came through better I think, because of the work of the interim.
Jim Latimer
Wow. Well, Heidi, you are fortunate and the congregation is fortunate to have such good intentional interim transitional leadership. And as someone who is dedicated to that space, it’s really good to hear this and to see the patterns. Of the jobs of the interim minister, one is to take care of unfinished business. Another one people might say is to set up the next pastorate for success. So, what does success look like? And what you just named that I thought was particularly helpful is that one of the ways we as interim set up the settled pastors that follow us for success is to equip them so they don’t get blindsided by historical things in the congregation that the lay leadership may be sweeping under the rug and perhaps the judicatory – whatever – so they’re not blindsided because something like that could really knock you off your horse. And then you’re wondering, Well, I wonder what else I’m not hearing, not knowing? and whatever. So that was a nice piece of work. And thank you for your shout out and your ode to interim ministers. It’s great. It’s wonderful.
Heidi Johnston
I’m very grateful. I think it’s celebrates too that we have different gifts and are called the different things, but we are in it together. And I really appreciate feeling that way. I am not siloed out there all by myself – doing Pastor Heidi all by my lonesome! Thank you for letting me tell a little bit of this story and praise the interim ministers.
Jim Latimer
Oh, thank you so much, Heidi. Okay, blessings. Until next time!