Featured A letter to prospective Pastors

When I graduated seminary I believed I was being called into the ministry and what I did was work with my church in their teaching ministry, pulpit supply and was licensed to the ministry.

Where I am now (I've been out of the military for a little over 2 years) is that I preach occasionally and have been at my church for about 8 months. I believe that I'm called to the ministry vocationally, but there are some road blocks.

Road blocks of my own making is that I am very hesitant to even consider leaving my church. My family and I love the people. We are a family. I hesitate to consider leaving my job. My primary income is military retirement and VA, but I manage a company that my best friend owns. It'd be hard to leave my church and my job. It would be hard, but I think I would.

Which brings me to road blocks not of my design. There are 8 churches (all of these are small churches, the largest having about 130 members) in my area that are without pastors. Three of these are looking for full-time pastors, five for bi-vocational pastors. All have been searching for well over a year. All require a seminary education (which I have...except for the church with 130 members which is seeking someone with a doctorate). But all also require at least 5 years experience as a senior pastor (which I don't have).

Then I look at my church (it's a fairly small church, about 300 members) and notice that I am not the only seminary graduate at my church in the same boat. Now don't get me wrong, I know that I need to gain experience. I cannot compete with the retired pastors now filling those pulpits as interim pastors. But I sometimes wonder about the how potential candidates are considered.

I'm not talking about being hired, I'm talking about being interviewed and, if that went well, prayerfully considered. One can't gain experience as a pastor without filling the position of a pastor, and one can't fill the position without experience. (At my last church I remember a man talking the pastor into making up a position for him - "full-time", but unpaid and in his spare time - so that he could consider that as experience. It worked for him, but I'm not willing to do that as it doesn't seem honest to me).

What would be your suggestions to someone like me, someone who has graduated seminary but doesn't have experience?

 

Jon, I have never understood why a church who only is willing to provide a low salary - which necessitates a bi-vocational ministry - but they demand a seminary degree.
My college is limited to 1 semester of business college (military management). So I am not really able to give any advice - other than to say up here in the CNY Bap Assoc, we have several non-college grads who are pastors of churches.

You are in our prayers.

Salty

 

You are aiming too high with your first arrow. Look for an associate/assistant position where you can work under and learn from an experienced man. I was 37 years old when I was called to my first Senior Pastorate, but I had 10 years of experience in subordinate positions.

 

I appreciated the method that my husband went through to be ordained. He came on as staff as a pastoral intern and was one for a few years. He did this as he continued to have a consulting business so was still working for a paycheck outside of the church. Then he increased his training and responsibilities at church and eventually became full time on the pastoral staff. There were a few men who were not ordained on staff and so they and the ordained pastors worked together for a period of 18 months going over MANY topics of theology to work towards ordination. The main thing that they did was to study one aspect of theology every month or so and then one would be randomly chosen out of a hat to teach that aspect of theology to the others and the others would be able to do kind of an ordination counsel on him for that subject. It ended up being really rigorous because these were all pretty learned men, all but one who had at least a college degree if not grad degrees. There were at times other pastors from other churches who would sit in on the class as well and THEY would throw questions in too. By the end, each man then was presented to a group of local pastors and were confirmed to be ready for the ordination to ministry. What a blessed time it was to stand with these men of God as they were ordained. (Each man's wife was involved in the ordination since she will be closely involved in most ministry with her husband and she is a helper to him so when the man was prayed over, she was prayed over too.)