The Church Renewal Podcast
The Church Renewal Podcast
How Much Does A Transitional Pastor Cost?
I’m guessing that the second biggest question you have about transitional pastors is ‘how much do I have to spend?’ Well, today that is exactly what matt and I are going to break down. Are you ready to uncover the true cost of church renewal? Join us as we unpack the financial aspects of hiring transitional pastors on this episode of the Church Renewal Podcast from Flourish Coaching. You’ll gain a clear understanding of the expenses involved, including the baseline cost for small churches and the additional expenses for larger congregations. We’ll also share our unique approach that allows churches to utilize our process expertise independently, making it a cost-effective option for many.
What’s stopping more churches from leveraging the benefits of transitional pastors? We'll explore the barriers, from financial concerns to resistance to change, and discuss why these hurdles persist in today's changing landscape of church ministry. With insights on the importance of a 15 to 24-month timeframe for effective church health assessments and pastor searches, this episode provides a practical framework for navigating church transitions successfully.
Navigating a transitional phase within your church can be daunting, but it doesn’t have to be. We’ll guide you through the essential steps and questions to consider, emphasizing the importance of a gospel-centered transition process. Discover how experienced transitional pastors can reinvigorate your church and prepare it to share the gospel with the community. Plus, learn about Flourish Coaching's mission to empower ministry leaders and revitalize their hope in the gospel. Don’t miss this opportunity to gain valuable insights and strategies for effective church transitions.
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Welcome to the Church Renewal Podcast from Flourish Coaching. I'm Jeremy, I'm Matt. I'm guessing that the second biggest question you have about transitional pastors is how much is it going to cost me? Well, I got you Today. That's what Matt and I are going to break down. Today we're going to deal with the hard question dollars and cents, dollars and dimes how much does it cost to have a transitional pastor? So, matt, I want to deal with this in two different sections. One is going to be the financial cost. Let's just deal with that up front. Next is going to be the larger cost.
Speaker 1:This is one of the discussions that you and I had ahead of time was what hurdles do we think people have in dealing with this conversation? Right, and one of them is just dollars and cents. What's it cost? We have to. We know that a pastor's leaving. We have to bring someone in. We know it costs money. We we know our budget. Your typical church doesn't have gobs and gods of gobs of money right hiding off. So give us an idea here. If you can, let's just hit this hard how much is it going to cost?
Speaker 2:Well, let me um. Can I get there in a second and give you something, a little bit of preview for that?
Speaker 1:I need you to deal with this right now. Right, okay, I'm avoiding, okay.
Speaker 2:So there are three buckets of work that have to be done in a transitional period in a church. Three buckets of work that Jeff think Preaching, care and process. Preaching, care and process. Okay, preaching is everything about making, pulling off Sunday, from bulletins to slides, to what songs are going to be sung and who's going to play the instruments, to who's going to staff the nursery and who's going to open the building, make sure it's air-conditioned or heated or whatever you need. Right, so it's making basically Sunday happen. Okay, so that's we call that preaching, including who's preaching in a transition? Right, okay. Care is how is the congregation being cared for in the absence of a lead pastor? Right, so how's care actually being delivered to God's people when there's not a pastor there? And then the third one is process. Every church follows some process, from when the pastor says goodbye the old pastor until the new pastor is there for his first Sunday, every church follows a process. Question is, how intentional and thoughtful is that process?
Speaker 1:Okay, that's fair.
Speaker 2:What we are experts in. The people that we have are pastors, so they've done a lot of preaching and care and they can do that. But what Flourish is, our expertise is in particular is process To such a degree that we can actually do our process, our transition process, completely as an external coach to the church. So we don't actually have to place somebody there. In many circumstances we do place somebody there, many circumstances we do place somebody there, a transitional pastor. But there are churches that can take care of preaching and care themselves and they just hire us to do process and so the least expensive, actually, way to use Flourish's mature processes is to not have a transitional pastor there and we can do that for you. And that is distinctive among organizations. I don't think there's anybody else that you can go to in the United States that can do a whole transitional process for you without placing somebody there except Flourish that's at least what I've been told Interesting.
Speaker 2:So that's the least expensive right Is because you're not paying somebody to do preaching and care. You're just paying us for a process.
Speaker 1:Okay, talk to us about that.
Speaker 2:If.
Speaker 1:I'm trying to do that and we've got a good slate. Our bench is full. Good to go there. What would I be looking at for?
Speaker 2:So for all three processes. So our three processes are church health assessment We'll get into these more but church health assessment envisioning pastor search For those three processes for the smallest church, we can do that for about $35,000. Okay, for the smallest church. Now what does happen, though, is that, as church size increases, complexity increases, cost increases for us, and so cost increases for the church, but that's the minimum price for a small church.
Speaker 1:So when you say small church, what's a small church?
Speaker 2:Are we talking 70 people Under 100 people?
Speaker 1:Okay, yeah, with this kind of process, is there a size at which this is ideal? Are there churches that are so large that this is, you know, not even necessary or not something that they're looking at?
Speaker 2:um, I wouldn't say that. I think that, uh, we're working with churches. We've worked our transition process with churches. Uh, between 600 is the largest that we've worked with right now and we're working in one. That's that size right now, down to churches. I was with a church this week just before I came here to record with Jer. That's 50 people and so we've worked with that small, medium and large. We've not worked with a megachurch yet over 1,000 or 2,000. I think our processes would work fine for those. But that's what we've worked in, which is most all churches fit in that in those categories there are very few churches much larger than that.
Speaker 1:So if that $35,000 is for all three of those, All three of those processes for the smallest church yep, for the smallest church. Okay, so that's the starting point for the full slate.
Speaker 2:Because that's us working external to the church as a coach to the church. So that's not with anybody that we would place on the ground there that's doing preaching or care at all, it's just working from the outside as an external coach to the church. When Flourish personnel visit the church, the church is responsible to reimburse travel expenses. Our board insists on that because we've gotten really zipped in previous years because travel is just expensive and churches do want to see us right and so there are several visits over time that you end up reimbursing. So $35,000 is the process cost.
Speaker 1:Okay, so in terms of that $35,000, what's actually being covered there?
Speaker 2:So, what you get for that is you get those three robust processes. You get a church health assessment which runs somewhere between three and four months and yields a 70 to 85 page report that highlights the most pertinent issues that the church needs to deal with in the transition process. You get our envisioning process, which starts with a training session by one of our staff and a retreat at the end, and we basically teach you how to think about your community like a church planter or a missionary would, and we're trying to help you understand who you are and also what God might be calling you to in your community. Missionary would, we're trying to help you understand who you are and also what God might be calling you to in your community. So we're trying to help you get that direction.
Speaker 2:The way I analogize it is if you think about a compass, one church could believe that God's calling them to go five degrees north northeast Great, godly, wonderful direction. Another church could think that God's calling them to go 185 degrees south southeast Great, godly, wonderful direction. Another church could think that God's calling them to go 185 degrees south-southeast Great, godly direction, could be absolutely wonderful. Any of the points on the compass dial could be good godly directions for a church to go as they seek to be God's Great Commission agent in that community and pursue that Great Commission in a Great Commandment way. But better to know that as a congregation you believe God's called you to five degrees north-southeast than 185 degrees south-southeast For sure, because you need to have some sense of direction to more wisely call a pastor. Better to tell a pastor hey, here's who we are and here's where God's calling us to. Is that something you'd be interested in leading us towards? That's what we're trying to are and here's where God's calling us to. Is that something you'd be interested in leading us towards?
Speaker 1:Right, that's what we're trying to do. I'm trying to stay away from the analogies that keep coming to mind of eHarmony, okay, but Okay. So, for full disclosure, my background is in counseling, both pastoral and professional counseling. I've done it for a long time, and the relationships, both on the one-to-one level and then on the larger social network level, they intrigue me. I'm stimulated by them, I find them fascinating, as I know you do as well. Yep, from my perspective and you said this in in the episode that we dropped in the last episode knowing who you are, being able to have a clear identity of yourself, is paramount to being able to choose the person who is going to join you in the captain's chair or on the deck of the bridge or whatever, whatever analogy you want to use here to take you where you're going.
Speaker 2:Absolutely.
Speaker 1:Taking the time to do that kind of work is crucial, so, but that leads me into this next question. Obviously, we're talking about cost, right. I don't assume, though, that cost is, or is not, the biggest hurdle. My question is this Since the benefits at least from your perspective and in your experience are so obvious to using a transitional pastor, why are more churches not doing it?
Speaker 2:I think there's a couple of reasons, and we should talk about the rest of the cost, because we talked about the least cost, not the most cost. But maybe by the time this podcast episode drops, this will be published. But I was actually asked to write an article about this, about why more churches don't do it. I think that the primary reason is they don't even know, they didn't even think to choose another option other than create a public committee and start going looking. They don't even know that there's something else out there that's available, and so part of the reason for this podcast season actually is simply to raise awareness that this is something that's available and that's out there. There are other reasons.
Speaker 2:Sometimes cost is a barrier, sometimes people are actually resistant to change, and so having somebody in there would, in their mind, be bad because they want to control the outcome.
Speaker 2:Right, and some people think you know, churches have gone on for you know, 2,000 years since Jesus' resurrection and we've never used transitional pastors before. Why would we do that now, right? My most recent response to that is well, have you noticed that the world might have changed a little bit and that we live in a very different world than even we did 30 years ago. We're recording this in the region of Annapolis, maryland, and I've been in the Baltimore, washington region this week and it's if you've lived in any of the major cities and you've seen the way that the world has changed over the last 30 years. Things have changed a lot, and the way that we think about doing church is going to need to change if we're going to continue to reach people with the gospel, and so part of the reason that we might consider doing it differently in transition is because the world's changed. We still want to be useful to people that don't yet know the Lord.
Speaker 1:So what are some of those other costs that you referred to?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so what are some of those other costs that you refer to? Yeah, so if the least cost for the smallest church, just for the processes, was $35,000, the most cost that it could cost a church is the way we like churches to think about it is what are you going to pay your next pastor? So, not your previous pastor, but what are you going to pay your next pastor? Because sometimes churches need to consider carefully their future. They may have been underpaying their previous pastor, they may have diminished. I talked to a church today that actually had diminished since they hired their last pastor, sadly, and so they were actually looking at a smaller budget. So they need to know what can we pay the next guy? All in Benefits, taxes, everything. What are we going to pay the next guy? And what we tell a church is let's start at that spot. Let's look at that number and see what it is, and so we ask churches, if they're going to have a full-time person on the ground, to be prepared to pay that number in their contract with Flourish. We also ask them, on top of that, to provide housing, and here's why A transitional pastor that comes into your church typical time period for a full transitional ministry is 15 to 24 months.
Speaker 2:A transitional pastor that comes into your church for 15 to 24 months, he actually lives somewhere else. He actually has a residence somewhere else. Jera's got a home. I have a home. We're paying on them. We pay expenses, taxes, upkeep. We are still putting food in kids' mouths, and so we have all of these expenses.
Speaker 2:And so out of the salary that flourished would pay a transitional pastor, that pastor's paying on his own home and so we don't ask him to pay twice out of the same salary. We ask the church to provide housing for the transitional pastor that's there Now. With that said, that can be a manse or a parsonage, if it's an older church that has that. It can be a mother-in-law that somebody's got because they hadn't took care of aged parents but now it's sitting empty. It can be an apartment that the church either rents or pays the person. Enough pays flourish, enough that we can pay transitional pastor, enough that they can rent it. We've seen all of those iterations. So that's the most it would cost the church is what they're going to pay the next person plus the cost to house the transitional pastor.
Speaker 1:Help me understand how you work this out. Then, just on a practical basis, do you go in saying we know it's going to take between 15 to 24 months, so we're going to contract for this period, or do you do it on a month-to-month basis?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we tell in the sales process up front, we tell churches it's going to take 15 to 24 months so that they know what to be prepared for. We know kind of the minimum that our processes take to execute because we've done them enough times and so we know church health assessment is going to run three to four months, envisioning is going to run three to four months, pastor search is going to run at least nine months, and some of that is because there's preparation, there's training the search committee, it's them getting it together and gelling as a team and then beginning to evaluate people and just this cycle of how long it takes to find pastors, particularly in the environment. Right now in most of the settings that I talk to people in the US there are more open positions than pastors looking for them and so it's a scarce market.
Speaker 1:Give me a 30,000 foot view. What are the five tasks that need to happen during this time frame?
Speaker 2:What we like to say is that a good transition process is comprised of the answers to five questions, five basic questions. So in church health assessment we're trying to answer two questions. The first question you're trying to answer is where have we been? So we're trying to look at sort of the history question. You go in to see a counselor and they're like okay, so tell us about yourselves and tell us about the history of your relationship, and so it's the same thing we're trying to understand. The church is at a certain point. Now, how did we get here? What's the origin story of this church, right? And what's the journey that you've taken from then until now? Okay, so the first question is where have we been? The second question is in church health assessment is where are we? What is the real, honest-to-goodness evaluation of the church's health? Biblically, you go to the doctor. The doctor takes your weight and your height and takes your blood pressure and you know books and projects, all kinds of places and whatever and then he gives you an evaluation and says here's your relative health and here's my recommendation as to what you should do, right. And so that's what we're trying to do is, where are you right? And so we're trying to evaluate categories, things that you find in Paul's letters and Jesus' letters to the churches. What's your state of biblical health right now? So where have we been and where are we? That's the two questions in church health assessment.
Speaker 2:In envisioning, which is the second phase in our transition process, we're also trying to answer two questions. The first question is who are we? So the question of identity and the things that are in this bucket of who are we are things like what are our values as a church? What are the biblical values that we focus on? No church can focus on all of the values, but what are the values that we currently focus on? What are the things that if I visited your church on a Sunday, it would be inevitable that I would pick up if I were there? So we're looking at the values of the church. We're also looking at the gifts.
Speaker 2:When you open up the toolbox, what are the gifts that God has placed there in the church? Because that's going to, in part, determine what direction you go in. Your church has got a bunch of teachers. Well, maybe it would make a lot of sense for you to have a mentoring ministry or an ESL or something like that right, your church has got a bunch of administrators. Well, y'all might actually be able to pull off like a medical dental clinic because of how much administration it takes to do that, but if you didn't have any administrators, you'd be fools. Even if it was a good ministry idea to have a medical dental clinic, you'd just drive everybody bananas. So what you have in the toolbox tells you what are the things that you could, or likely should, lean into in terms of direction, and so we try and help a church understand, you know, what are its values, what are its gifts, what's its philosophy. We really want to try and be agnostic as a ministry regarding philosophy of ministry for a church. Hold on, pastor, just keep your shirt on.
Speaker 1:He didn't say he doesn't believe in God. I know you heard that.
Speaker 2:Agnostic, related to philosophy of ministry, you know. So some churches, they have a real high focus on preaching on Sundays. Some churches have a big focus on, you know, initial communities or small groups or Bible studies or whatever. We don't want to necessarily produce a judgment on that, we don't think that that's our job, but we do want to understand it, because what's animated a church in the past and what's important to them in the present should at least inform the future Absolutely. And so a church that's got a lot of people that have advanced degrees, you know what they're probably going to be better suited towards a tutoring ministry, for example, than a church that's full of a lot of blue collar folks who are going to be much more tipped towards, say, having a ministry towards single mothers to maintain their cars and their houses. But those two things couldn't exist in the opposite of those churches. So we want to know what's in the toolbox, what's in the philosophy, what animates your heart, what's God put in your heart. So we want to understand that.
Speaker 2:So who are you and where are we going? So what is our direction? And so we help the church go through a discovery process, trying to figure out, understand their community and what are the needs in their community? Where are the places of distress in particular that God might call us towards, as we would love our neighbors, both practically and with the Gospel? And so two questions again, just a summary, two questions in Church Health Assessment where have we been? Where are we? Two questions in envisioning who are we and where are we going? What's our direction? What path are we trying to walk?
Speaker 1:Okay, and that leads us to.
Speaker 2:It leads us to Pastor Search, search's third phase, and it's the answer to one question who can take us there? And in our minds, you can't answer that question unless you've done the previous phases, because you don't have enough of a sense of the us, of the we, our history, our present, our identity and then our direction, because you're certainly asking somebody to come and lead you, but lead you where? And wouldn't it be better to be conscious of that before you go looking for a new pastor?
Speaker 1:So I'm going to pitch you a softball question, really for the sake of time. But my second question here is really what I want to know what happens if those five questions aren't, if those tasks, those three tasks, those five questions are not successfully answered? But I know the answer to that, which is my real question you end up with an unintentional yeah, exactly. My real question is what is about a transitional pastor that enables this person to better help a church move through this process than someone from in-house or someone homegrown?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So the people that we recruit, we recruit them based on their experience and their giftedness. We train them and coach them as they go along, and they're using our process that's already developed, and so we try and put the transitional pastor in the place. We try and pick very good people and put them in the place for success so that the church experiences the benefits of it.
Speaker 1:There you have it. That's the cost, the cost for going through choosing a new husband poorly is really high the cost for choosing a new father for your kids well is really worth it, and that's the tie-in here. Final question, real final question for this episode. Here's a cost.
Speaker 2:We haven't talked about.
Speaker 1:What is that?
Speaker 2:Cost of a bad hire Okay, which is exceedingly Cost of a bad hire Okay, which is exceedingly high. Yeah Well, churches come to us and they're just like we have a church right now that their last pastor was there for 18 months. He was a bad hire, he knows it, they know it, and now they're coming to us. They didn't do a transition process last time and the cost of a bad hire is exceedingly high. And in this case, not a bad hire because the person was a bad character, or they weren't a Christian, or they ran off on their wife. No, delightful fellow, very gifted, Just a poor fit for the church and what they needed, and in that sense he was a bad hire.
Speaker 1:And the cost of that is astronomically high. And this is really what separates what Flourish does from other sites where I can go to and post a job for a pastor Right. Walking through this process, asking these questions, really zeroing in on who a church is and what they need, allows you to fill this position with the right person. There's going to continue to be bumps. There's going to continue to be frictions. You're going to continue. A church is going to continue to work out.
Speaker 1:I mean, it's still a group of sinners in the same place, unfortunately, pre-heaven, pre-heaven, yeah. So having that right person is it really is critical. So if a church is going through this, offer me some hope, because this sounds very technical, this sounds process-oriented and I don't have a problem with that. Sure, where's the gospel in this?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so our process is trying to help a church own in light of the gospel, their history and their present, their identity and their direction, so that they can bring the gospel to people. We want them to experience the gospel anew so that they'll give the gospel away. And so the pastors that we hire, that's their focus. They are working you through a process, but they are pastors and they're trying to pastor you with the gospel so that you'd be reinfected with it and have a virulent case of it, so that you give it away.
Speaker 1:Well, you know that that is my heart. As much as I can look at and dog on my fellow pastors because we are fallen sinners saved by grace my heart really is to see not just the sinner's prayer but the gospel of Jesus, the grace of Jesus applied to our lives every day and then spreading from our lives to the lives around us. So let's leave it there. We appreciate you guys coming by and spending this time with us today. We're going to drop another episode in just a couple of days, so please stay tuned. Thanks for listening to the Church Renewal Podcast from Flourish Coaching.
Speaker 1:Flourish exists to set ministry leaders free to be effective wherever God has called them.
Speaker 1:We believe that there's only one fully sufficient reason that this day dawned, Jesus is still gathering his people and he's using his church to do it. When pastors or churches feel stuck, our team of coaches refresh their hope in the gospel and help them clarify their strategy. If you have questions or a need, we'd love to hear from you. You can find us at flourishcoachingorg and you can reach us by email at info at flourishcoachingorg. You can also connect with us on Facebook, twitter and YouTube and we would love it if you would like subscribe, rate or review the podcast wherever you're listening. Please share this podcast with anyone you think it'll help and if we get a client because of a recommendation you make, we'll send you a small gift just to say thanks From Annapolis, maryland, for the use of their building to record today's episode. All music for this show has been licensed and was composed and created by artists. The Church Renewal Podcast was produced by me, jeremy Zaffirati, in association with Flourish Coaching, with the goal of equipping and encouraging your church to flourish wherever God has called you.