Churches struggle with transitions

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Churches struggle with transitions

Strong leader's loss brings grief, doubt.

By James D. Davis, The Sun-Sentinnel, February 3, 2007

On Dec. 28, the Rev. D. James Kennedy's heart stopped briefly. It was quickly revived, and he was rushed to nearby Holy Cross Hospital.

Ministers and staff at Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church swung into action, keeping things running and assuring the 10,000 congregants that Kennedy was on the mend.

What they didn't dwell on, understandably, was what if the top man was unable to return -- what would happen to the Fort Lauderdale megachurch, and to the broadcast ministry, and the school and other organizations he heads.

When a strong, dominant minister dies, resigns or retires, his projects -- and the relationships he has formed -- may well take a blow. Whether the church fades or bounces back depends not only on how it prepares, but also on how it adjusts.

"There is much more tumult than leaders like to admit," says Jaco J. Hamman, author of the 2005 book When Steeples Cry: Leading Congregations Through Loss and Change. "A church goes through turmoil as individuals and families.

"It is impossible to lose a prominent leader and not change."

The almost 10,000-member congregation is big enough. But the Coral Ridge network encompasses a lot more.

There's a seminary and a broadcast wing. There's a K-12 school with 960 students. There's a radio station in the 30-story central steeple. There's a chaplaincy for federal workers in the nation's capital. There's a conservative action outfit and a new center for evangelization.

Kennedy, 76, is still at Holy Cross, taking physical therapy. He's made steady progress, but there's still no estimate on when he'll return to the pulpit, says the Rev. Ronald Siegenthaler, executive minister at Coral Ridge.

In the interim, the many overlapping organizations are drawing on years of experience. The session, the church's governing body, has set a schedule of preachers during Kennedy's convalescence, and each of the church's eight main departments has a supervising minister. The church also runs itself during Kennedy's three-month leave each summer.

If it became evident that Kennedy wasn't staying in the top job, a church committee would gather candidates from several sources: congregants, friends of the church, and a ministerial job bank at the Atlanta headquarters of the Presbyterian Church in America. The list could top a hundred names.

The committee would settle on a few favorites and visit the pastors' churches incognito, something like coaches scouting other teams. A couple of candidates would be brought to Coral Ridge to meet the church leaders. The No. 1 candidate would be picked by congregational vote.

The total process could take two years, Siegenthaler says. "I think it'll be a difficult position to fill. Jim Kennedy is brilliant, he's on the boards of 10 organizations, and he has an international audience. Nobody can do everything he did."

When other big churches have replaced long-standing pastors, results have varied, even within one Protestant wing like the Baptists.

Pastor Jack Hyles died in 2001 after 41 years at the helm of the huge First Baptist Church of Hammond, Ind. Succeeding him was the Rev. Jack Schaap, his son-in-law and vice president of the church's Bible college. The church continued to grow: About 12,000 now attend each week.

Less healthy was succession at First Baptist Church of Dallas, one of the largest and most influential in the Southern Baptist Convention. The Rev. Joel Gregory was hired under senior pastor W.A. Criswell, then left in 1992 after less than two years, accusing Criswell of reneging on a promise to retire (Criswell and the church have denied any such pledge).

Researcher John Vaughan says other dynamics were at work. For one, Gregory couldn't get the powerful church board to acknowledge his leadership.

"When people have been following a longstanding pastor, it's hard to ask them to follow someone else," says Vaughan, owner of the think tank Church Growth Today, in Bolivar, Mo. "[Gregory] is a good man, and it's a good church. But I think it was just a mismatch."

Hamman, an associate professor at Western Theological Seminary in Michigan, takes a psychological view of transitions. After studying almost 40 churches since 1999, he says a congregation goes through a process of grief and mourning when a beloved leader leaves.

"You can't talk about Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church without talking about D. James Kennedy," he says. "The church's identity is so fused with the leader. If he doesn't come back, the question will be, `Who will we be?'"

One likely loss will be donations, Hamman says. "People give for a big icon of a figure, a relationship. They don't give for a plan of action."

There's also a "relational loss," he says. "He's married, baptized and inspired people. When that relationship ends, people need to grieve and mourn."

Too often, what happens instead is that a dominant figure steps forward and assures everyone that everything is under control, Hamman says. That can short-circuit the effort to rebuild church identity. The members may focus on in-house conflicts.

In adapting to a new pastor, a congregation often struggles with unwritten assumptions: use of office space, who has power, how money is used. They can defend those notions so fiercely, researcher George Thompson Jr. calls them Alligators in the Swamp -- the title of his 2005 book.

"There's stuff on the shore that's easily observable," says Thompson, who has studied and coached churches in transition for 15 years.

He told of a pastor in Atlanta who retired after 27 years. Three or four pastors later, a successor seemed qualified and well-educated, but still drew a slew of criticism, even demands for his resignation. Thompson, who teaches at the International Theological Center in Atlanta, asked the leaders to write out their assumptions about the church.

One was that the pastor "should be spiritually, morally and intellectually superior to the congregation" -- an almost superhuman demand.

"The church elders realized they were unknowingly arguing over their assumptions, and that the pastor had become a lightning rod," Thompson says. "They learned that you don't make a scapegoat out of the pastor. It's a church's responsibility to understand itself."

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