Reflections on Leaving a Church
I am currently transition from being the pastor of Queen Street Baptist Church to being the co-pastor of Brookfield Baptist Church. There will be about a week between the two roles.
Although I have been a pastor for about twenty-five years (ordained twenty), I only have transitioned from one congregation to another once previously. Twice I resigned from my congregation without another church to pastor. In one case, it was months between churches and in the other, years between churches.
I had originally planned to retire at my current church but in spite of our comfort, we felt God calling us to a new place of ministry.
There are a couple of things that I have noticed as I wind up my ministry here. One is a sense of freedom. I don’t mean a freedom to do whatever I want because it’s not like they can fire me. Rather it is a freedom to focus on ministry.
Every once in a while a stressful administrative or policy decision comes up. Then I remember that there is no need for me to take that on as it will not be of my concern. I still pray for wise decision making by the current leadership but it is no longer my role to steer them in a certain direction.
This reminds me of how many responsibilities there are on a pastor that are not directly related to pastoral ministry. It is usually the love for ministry that attracts the pastor to the career but these other tasks constantly compete for our attention.
Related to that is the sense of a loss of authority. Now as a Baptist with our polity, the final authority (after Jesus) is the local church and not the pastor. But I had a sense as soon as I announced my resignation that something had changed.
It is not that no one cares what I think, but my limited time remaining affects how they look at me. There is an appreciation of ministry but much less of a looking for direction. My leadership role is decreasing as my pastoral role increases.
One final reflection. There is grief. There is grief on the part of the congregation and of the pastor. I am not the kind of pastor who keeps such high boundaries that there is no emotional connection. Our last Sunday will be hard. There is no reason to pretend that the grief is not real.
Leaving a church as a pastor is hard. It is hard whether the ministry has been positive or negative. I’m thankful for my time at QSBC and look forward to my time at BBC.
