How I Helped Initiate A Shared Ministry Project – Transcript

Jim Latimer 

Welcome to Coaching for Interims. We are about empowerment for interim ministers, best practices and quick help from interims for interims – wisdom from the field. I am your host Reverend Jim Latimer and today I have the joy of having with us Reverend Gail Irwin. Gail is a seasoned interim minister. And she’s also thought a lot about interim ministers and written a lot about churches in transition. And in any mainline denomination, we are in transition, whether we like it or not. I’ ve read her book, “Toward a Better Country: Church Closure and Resurrection,” which is a great book. And so I wanted her to share some of her wisdom in this. We’re having two segments here today. In the first one, as churches decline in size we know that the interim time is an opportunity for a church to gauge whether their staffing model is still appropriate to their size and budget. And so Gail is going to speak to what happened when she looked at the staffing model in one of her interim positions. So Gail, please, we’d love to hear your thoughts.

Gail Irwin 

Okay. Hi, thank you for having me. I wanted to tell a story about two churches I worked with in an interim and helping them work together. The first church I came into as a full-time pastor, following some very high functioning pastors – one had been there 30 years and had been one of those 24/7 kind of pastors. And after I came in, and started doing some financial digging about how they were doing, I discovered that they were really no longer able to afford a full-time pastor, and that we needed to look at the possibility of going part-time, which was a pretty big shock for them. Meanwhile, in the next town – exactly 11 miles away – there was another UCC church. They were also in an interim at the same time, also having finished up a long-tenured 30-year pastor who had retired. They had an interim minister already there, but he had some health issues several months into his ministry with them and had to resign.

And at that point, the judicatory leader in our conference, we call them Associate Conference Ministers – the ACM – she looked at the situation. She knew that we were considering part-time. And she made a proposal to me that these two churches might share me as an interim. This was big enough by itself, but then she added that she wanted them to consider doing that as an experiment to see if they might want to join up with each other to share a called pastor. So the idea was that I would be their guinea pig – their experiment pastor. And I have to tell you that I was initially not on board with this idea for a couple of reasons. I mean, it was exciting, but first of all, there was the workload issue. I knew that these were both churches that had high functioning pastors, and were what I would call pastor-dependent churches. Also, I didn’t know the other church, but I know sometimes churches are just culturally very different from each other, and may not be able to play together. And I was, I’ll be honest, skeptical that this might be more about expediency for the judicatory than it was about the good of the churches. I really didn’t know.

So we’ll come back to that. But, I did agree to try this on a couple conditions. One was that I knew we were going to have to be very clear about the scope of my work. And I’ll just put in a little plug here for the Call Agreement workbook, which I did introduce to these congregations and talked to them about here’s what half-time is going to mean versus full-time. And what you need in that half-time, all of that. And the other condition I put on these two churches – if they wanted to do this – was that they were going to need some lay leadership training if they were going to go from full-time to part-time, and I know you have other podcasts about part-time ministry. So this was also important.

So the ACM met without me with these two governing boards. She got them together. They talked about it. Then they decided they wanted to go ahead and they agreed to meet with me and to hear my conditions. I have to say, I think honestly at this point both churches, you know, money was talking. They saw an opportunity to keep a pastor cheaply. And that looked good to them. There were even some comments, I remember when we first met together, somebody said, “Well, let’s just do this until we can get back on our feet and have a full-time pastor again.” And I didn’t press on that. I just thought, okay, we’re in experiment mode, we’re going to see what we can do.

So we all agreed to do it. There was some resistance. And there were some people that were truly intrigued by it. We formed a joint ministry task force that served kind of like a pastoral relations committee, or a transition team. They were my support staff. They were the cheerleaders to the two congregations. There were three from each congregation. And they were people who were on board with the concept. And so they were really helpful to me, and were a wonderful team. We had to negotiate and write up a shared covenant – how they would share the pastor, how they would do the logistics of all of this. There was a lot of work in that. And then we worked on my conditions related to lay leadership training. So we chose three topics that we wanted to do training in. One was governance. I wanted to be sure that these two governing boards could govern themselves without having the pastor control everything. So they needed to understand their own constitutions, know how to make decisions together in healthy ways. And how to discern when a decision they were making might affect the other church, because now they had to think about somebody else when they made a decision.

So we had a really fun governance workshop meeting one night. These were short things, they were like little workshops, but it was something. Remember, it’s only an interim, so you don’t have much time. The second one was worship leadership. We knew that I was going to be driving. Both churches had to change their worship times. And I was gonna be driving these 11 miles, sometimes on a Packer Sunday. This is Green Bay, you know, with traffic! And so I would maybe be leaving one church early and getting to one a little late, or whatever. So I just wanted good poised lay leaders. And to fish out some people that might be willing to be a lay preacher, too. We had a few people in the church that were stepping up to that. So we did a little training on that.

And the third one – really important – we had a lot of home visitation in both churches. And so we needed a little team of people from each church who could get some simple training. We had another church lay leader come in and teach us about what they were doing in their church for lay visitation – serving communion, making up a little communion kit. So we did some training on that. I think the biggest change when we went into this experiment was that we introduced some shared programming. I’m going to talk about that in the next podcast. But that was a big piece of it, too.

So each church produced their own profile. And they were each half-time profiles. And they were linked in the UCC Opportunities. So if you read one, you saw that you were supposed to read the other one. And they did. Eventually, it took us about a year and a half to get through all of this and to do a search, they did a shared search. And they found a pastor.  A couple years after that one of their secretaries stepped away, and they now share a secretary. She goes between church offices. She’s fabulous. And I believe now they share a website and they share a Facebook page.

So they have they have become – even though they’re still two congregations in two different towns – they have learned to share some things. So just thinking about questions that interims might want to consider if they’re looking at something like this. I think right at the top, Jim, what you said about staffing models, I think it’s really important going into an interim to understand the finances well enough to know if the church can support the staffing model that they have now, or if they’re going to need to relook at their staffing model. And that is not only how they hire the pastor. It might be their custodian or their office manager. The church I’m in right now just hired an IT specialist. Musicians, all of that. If you’re looking at changing size, you got to look at your staffing. And then whether or not you’re sharing a pastor, I’m thinking about how you can partner with other churches. And I will talk about this in the other podcast, too, including, other UCC congregations, other churches of other denominations, nonprofits, and so forth. I really do believe that sharing resources, sharing programing, staff, facilities, it isn’t just about money. I know that’s always sort of the first thing that people think about when they think about sharing, making things cheaper. But it really can also be about the vitality of the ministry and the reach of the ministry.

Jim Latimer 

Gail, this has been fabulously rich and interesting. I was so drawn into the story that you told from your direct experience, and what you’ve done. What I’ve heard you describe here is that you led the creation of a shared culture, generally, right? And not only with pastors, but with secretaries too. And this idea of, “Oh, we’ve got to think about somebody else in some other church when we make these decisions.” That mindset is not only unusual in churches, but what you’re holding up is, if you’re going to do a shared ministry model, or staffing model, and you want it to be successful, that’s something that you’ve got to have, right? I mean that a church wouldn’t think of that without the kind of leadership you’re describing.

Gail Irwin 

Yes. At some point, an interim can be a catalyst for some of these ideas. They’re not going to come out of the congregation. My churches have tended to be pretty self-focused during an interim. They might feel a little bruised about something that’s happened, and they’re just kind of curling inward. And so the interim has to be the catalyst for looking out and seeing who your friends are out there. You know, who else can work with you.

Jim Latimer 

And there are so many things I could say here, but I’ll wait because we want to keep these short, these Bits of Wisdom. But the other thing that just stood out to me was how the very early church in the early centuries – you know, from your church history class in seminary – that this was what everybody did! First of all, nobody had paid clergy. Paul was making tents to put food on his table. And he was all volunteer, right? And so churches were all sharing him, and everybody else right? So that was the model in which for centuries the Christian faith thrived. But over the centuries churches began to split off into, “Well, this is mine, and yours is over there…” And so now, because for financial reasons and others, we’re now kind of – what you seem to be describing – is a return to a model that had vitality. There’s a history of vitality of shared clergy and shared staffing that we sometimes miss because all we’ve ever seen is that we had our own minister. And so we think that we must be going downhill for sharing a pastor. Well, you might, but you have a better option than that.

Gail Irwin 

Yeah. If you think about the history of itinerant ministers, and how strong those lay leaders got to be.

Jim Latimer 

And the last thing, how you held up so many things: what you needed, conditions for you to serve, and lay leader training. I loved that! Who would think of that? Beautiful. So Gail, thank you so much for sharing this. And boy, I’ve got all kinds of thoughts coming in my mind. Thank you so much.

Gail Irwin 

Thank you for listening.

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