Adult Ministries Pastor Candidate

Next week our church will have a candidate for the position of Adult Ministries Pastor. Since I'm not sure if he's still working at another church, I won't mention his name, but I'm VERY excited about the possibilities should he be hired. I'm also a bit nervous about the situation, not because of him, but because of our church. I love his ideas and thoughts, and I'm already to jump onboard with what he'd like to do. I'm just not so sure that the folks who will show up to vote at the congregational meeting are going to be ready to do so. The information they provided today, which I had received in an email earlier in the week, is very reflective of the emerging church blogs I've been following, but it doesn't go so far as to call for the dismantling of the clergy and other steps that I think are excessive.

The candidate is proposing a new service to be added. The nice thing is that he's not talking about just taking the same-old-same-old and adding rock music to it, but he's talking about combining a number of elements, old and new, to create a different atmosphere. That's what I like to hear. We've been struggling quite a bit with our church's structure of late, and I'm beginning to think that it will take a new way of doing things to really keep us at our church over the next few years. That doesn't mean that I don't love the people, but I look at where the church is at and I worry about the direction that it has been taking. I'm concerned that it will go the way of the dinosaur. That doesn't mean we jump on the latest bandwagon, but that a lot of thought goes into what the church should look like in five years, ten years, etc. Who do we want to be, and why? Of late, we have tended to act like a church made up of people at or near retirement age, and that's just not where I'm at. I've seen people my age come and go, and often the go because they don't like the bad attitudes that can surface at business meetings.

So, here's where I land on this one. I'd love to see this fellow come and do what his vision entails. My concern, though, is that, when it's all said and done, he's going to be trying to do this in an unhealthy environment. As much as there may be excitement among the younger generation in the church, there will still be the all-church business meetings that will serve to remind us of how divided our body is right now. Perhaps this will change. I pray it will change. It will only change by God's hand. Should this fellow walk into this situation? I don't know the answer to that.