What to Do First?
I've been on the ground in my new church district for almost three weeks now.
I've been doing a lot of unpacking and moving things around and trying to get settled into our new house. Kendra has started her new job teaching a couple of classes. Nathaniel has started second grade at a new school and gymnastics at a new gym.
I've preached a sermon in each church and I've attended an elders meeting.
How do you get up to speed in a new church district?
Here's what I've done:
I've been doing a lot of unpacking and moving things around and trying to get settled into our new house. Kendra has started her new job teaching a couple of classes. Nathaniel has started second grade at a new school and gymnastics at a new gym.
I've preached a sermon in each church and I've attended an elders meeting.
How do you get up to speed in a new church district?
Here's what I've done:
- Started weekly meetings with the associate pastor
- learning about who he is and what exactly he does
- learning about who the (elected and de facto) leaders are
- learning about the current ministry structure
- learning about pitfalls and areas of opportunity
- learning about recent church history and why things are the way they are
- learning about what's on the calendar
- chosen a book to read through and discuss together
- Started working on some upcoming sermon series
- Heaven in My Heart
- Children's Bible Heroes
- Advent
- Started meeting with elders and church leaders individually
- getting to know them
- trying to figure out the big picture
- Ordered the NCD survey
- Started exercising more regularly
- Administer the NCD survey
- assess the church's health in 8 quality areas
- evaluate a starting point
- start work on two "minimum factors"
- Continue meeting with elders and leaders individually
- Move into the church office
- Establish my regular office hours and work routine
- Try not to change the whole world all at once
Labels: Balance, Leadership, Meetings, NCD, Priorities, Reading, Sermon Planning
posted by Jay at
2:57 PM
1 Comments:
Pastor Jay,
Thank you for taking the time to post your experiences online for any random person to see. As a fellow pastor in the Adventist Church, I find it refreshing to see your intentionality and openness. I am just a year and a half into my ministry experience, so I am not in the position to give you solid feedback on your intro schedule. Nonetheless, I think you seem to have a good approach, heavy on up-front listening to inform your ministry activities to come. NCD is a good move as well, so you can present many of your ministry initiatives as a response to the self-determined conclusions the congregation came up with for itself versus the new guy coming to "change the world all at once."
I think exercise is also an excellent thing to do in this time of transition, keep that up, I hope to be more consistent in this area for myself as well.
Blessings on your transition, and I do wonder, how are you going to track and report most of your findings from these one-on-one conversations with leadership? Do you plan on looking for trends and sharing the patterns with others as a benchmark? Or are you just going to keep the insights in your personal file for your own use? Just curious...
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