The response to pain is a major indicator that separates great leaders from the mediocre.

One of the problems with experiencing pain is that we want to distance ourselves from it as soon as possible. The more acute the pain the more rapid our response to withdraw or protect ourselves.  

After all, we’re all hard-wired physically to have knee jerk reactions: a quick, instinctive response by our nervous system which often prevents further injury or damage.

A physical knee jerk reaction is one thing, but a mental knee jerk is often not helpful. Church leaders (lay or staff), facing the excruciating pain of an abrupt departure by their senior or lead pastor, need to be careful of how their knee jerk reactions can actually make a difficult situation worse!

Knee jerk: a quick reaction that does not allow you time to consider something carefully

Great leaders are aware of the temptation to quick reaction, so they intentionally pause to consider carefully the options in front of them.

Here are the top 5 knee jerk reactions that can make the abrupt departure of your pastor worse.

1. It’s all about him.

When the pastor morally implodes the collateral damage in the church is painfully extensive. His choices and what he did is on everyone’s mind, it becomes the main topic of conversation, and it causes a deep emotional ache. In wanting to distance ourselves from the sin, the danger is believing that what the pastor did is the only problem.

This is not going to be easy for you to accept, but when the lead pastor has a moral meltdown there is usually a systemic problem in the church. Is he responsible for his choices? Absolutely! Yet his sin occurred within a corporate culture, and except in rare situations, that culture to some degree contributed to his choices. Wise is the leader who is willing to ask the hard question of how we contributed to this.  

2. Kicking into FIDO (Forget It and Drive On).

Even though most church leaders have great godly character, many are uncomfortable handling deep emotion in themselves or in others. The abrupt departure of the senior pastor causes the church to deeply grieve yet few on the leadership team know how to help others mourn. So instead of taking the time to resolve the loss the tactic often used is forget it and move on.

Ken Cope has written, “For too long we have been taught that shedding tears is a sign of weakness and that you must not wallow in your sorrow. As a result of this approach to grief, we have a whole generation of people with unresolved issues, hurts, and pain in their past that have been shallowly dealt with at best, and at worse have been ignored and discounted completely. The result has been an increasingly shallow Christianity and a profound lack of understanding of the nature of God and how, as His people, we are to move and live in a fallen world.”  (p.9 “A Sacred Sorrow: Experience Guide”)

Pressing the church to quickly move on is detrimental. This is a season when the body needs to mourn and mourn together! They need to see the situation dealt with justly. Many need to learn how forgive.

3. Quickly bring in a new pastor.

This knee jerk reaction assumes that the church simply had a personnel problem. Just bring in a new pastor and all will be well. That is using a business model to handle the leadership vacuum.

But if the leadership team doesn’t take the time to ask serious questions like: What just happened? Why did it happen? How did we not see this coming? How did our church culture contribute to this occurring? Who has been deeply impacted by this, and how are they struggling? –then all you’re doing is passing the problem on to the next pastor. Typically he will end up being an unintentional interim pastor (i.e. he won’t last 2 years).

4. We can move forward by DIY.

Andy Stanley has observed, “The longer you’ve served where you are and the longer you’ve done what you are currently doing, the more difficult it will be for you to see your environments with the objectivity needed to make the changes that need to be made. The shorter version: Time in erodes awareness of.” (Chapter 9, “Deep and Wide”)

The danger is to inadvertently minimize the breadth and depth of damage the pastor’s abrupt departure has caused. It’s easy for leadership team to assume “we know best” and that it has all the resources it needs to meet the challenge.

But again, wise is the leader(s) who appreciates the unique season the church has entered because of the quick exit of the pastor, and who seeks to gather outside godly counsel and resources to shepherd the church well.

5. Adding strict accountability will prevent this from happening again.

When it becomes public knowledge that the lead pastor’s choices were out of control, the reaction is often to exert a form of heavy-handed control motivated by fear. It is easy to think that an extreme form of accountability will both monitor and control the choices and behavior of others.

Appropriate boundaries are necessary when people live and work together, but rules and regulations won’t stop sinful behavior. This is Paul’s argument in Galatians 3. Take the time to carefully read Mark 7:14-23, for Jesus tells us it is what comes out of the heart that defiles a person. So instead of enforcing new rules and protocols, start a discussion of whether there is a safe environment in our church to talk about the struggles of our hearts.

There are obviously other knee jerk reactions to the abrupt departure by the pastor. If you’ve seen others that need to be mentioned, leave a comment below.

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If you know of a church that has recently lost their pastor in an abrupt manner, what the leadership team does in the first 90-days is critical to how their church will recover.

Coming April 1^st is a workbook from TRM which addresses the issues. Use the sign-up form on the right to get advanced notification of discounts and how to get your copy of “Aftermath: Leading the Church After Abrupt Pastoral Transition”.   

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