Job Hunting

Confessions of an Unemployed Minister - Part 13: Job Hunting

Another gift of employment transition is the opportunity to experience the interesting process of applying for church jobs. Every denomination has it’s own system for engaging potential new ministers. Unless one is already involved in a denomination with bishops who appoint ministers, or one is approached directly by a church, one must go through the application route with each local church. This route begins when one first hears about an opening. This may happen through a friend or family member. Someone mentions, “Hey, did you hear St. Whatever Baptist’s minister just resigned or is retiring?” Or one may surf denominational web sites to find opportunities. Then one sends in a resume with a cover letter and waits (sometimes up to eight months) to hear back from each church.

The whole process is fraught with unique temptations on the part of churches and pastors. For the pastoral applicants there are the traps of self-promotion. How does one present one’s self without using any manipulative tricks of worldly marketing? What is the best resume for a spiritual leader? How does one honestly offer one’s self as a strong candidate when the very best qualities of spiritual leadership are humility and other godly qualities that the world neither recognizes nor honours? How does one trust God to guide and provide when one desperately needs a job to pay the mortgage? It is in deed a tricky activity!

And, we should all feel for the hard working volunteers on these search committees who must try to discern the leading of the Holy Spirit based on limited information. There are temptations to be impressed with subjective first impressions; to be attracted to outward appearances; to be captured by good salesmanship; to be swayed by promises of unrealistic expectations; to be influenced by a few biased references; to overlook weaknesses out of desperation to hire someone before September. It is easy to fall into fantasies about a savior-pastor who will be the perfect leader to make the church “great again”. I think it’s ironic that all the applicants are expected to “feel called” to be hired by the same particular church. Only one could be right, right? The rest must be liars or delusional. The search committee is under enormous pressure to “get it right”! I’m being somewhat facetious, but it begs questions about what the real “right” actually is.

I have served on two church search committees myself. It is interesting to hear what different people were most concerned about when it came to the qualities of the “right” spiritual leader for their church. One woman said she was mostly looking for someone with whom she could regularly meet for coffee who would be a good listener and encourager. I asked her if she was actually looking for church pastor or a boyfriend. 

It has been fun to meet many people of different churches, walks of life, and denominations. It has mostly been interesting and encouraging. I have been offered a few jobs and been complimented by many wonderful people and have seen glimpses of God’s Spirit at work in many communities. There have also been some discouragements. During three years of conversations with many search committees, five different people from five different churches told me the exact same thing. They each said, “We are looking for a young man with a young family”. I wondered if they know that this is illegal in Canada. I am 54. I just smiled. I did confidentially tell a younger friend about this and he said, “I AM a young man with a young family. I don’t want to be led by someone like me! I want to be led by someone who has survived this stage of life with some wisdom to help me through it!” Now, each of these churches, and most of the other ones I have applied to have all found wonderful new pastors. And, some of them are young men with young families. But it demonstrates the dangers of a pastoral search: attractive, outward qualities can be emphasized while more meaningful qualities such as wisdom and maturity may be disparaged. There’s an old joke that neither Jesus, nor the apostles Peter and Paul would get past the first stages of most church search committees today. Ironically I did get a call from an 80 year-old friend who said his 79 year-old pastor was thinking of slowing down a bit, and they were “looking for a young man with a young family” and they thought of me!   


I have some subversive thoughts about church hiring. I wonder if any church that does not continually raise up a multiplicity of its own new spiritual leaders hasn’t fundamentally failed the most basic task of the Church. I wonder if the whole idea of sheep taking resumes for a new shepherd is really a good idea. I wonder if people can think outside the box of “leaders” as young, white, athletic, charming married men with children. I wonder if we could approach the search for spiritual leaders in a completely different way. What if we narrowed it down to a few who had all the “right” qualifications, prayed, “Lord, you know everyone’s heart. Show us which of these two you have chosen”, and then just drew straws (see Acts 1)? What if each local church in need of a new pastor, gathered any who “felt called” together in a room with the search committee, and they all sought the leading of the Holy Spirit to discern the answer. Is there a “right” answer? If there is, I wonder if the right answers are found more in the process than in the results.