Your Career Path to Nowhere

For many years, in church world, the career path for pastors has been pretty darn predictable. The path may vary slightly from denomination to denomination; however, it really looks very much the same.

You graduate from seminary or bible college and you take your first job as a student pastor. Maybe it’s at a smaller church where you’re responsible for both middle school and high school. Maybe it’s at a larger church where you’re more of an assistant or you have responsibility for only middle school. Your ministry is incredibly relevant because, unlike adults, kids will actually leave if you’re not relevant. Your ministry is very focused (because students are not). You have loud music. You get to speak to believers and non-believers at the same time. You recruit the best adult leaders in the whole church to volunteer in your ministry because you can cast vision for it in your sleep. You get even the most skeptical kids into meaningful small groups. Life change happens. All of this nonsense is strangely condoned at your church, even though it’s so different from what the adults do. After all, your exploits are keeping their kids off the streets.

But you’re an ambitious person and need to move on. Problem is, the time-honored path is to take a Director of Christian Education (DCE) job or Associate Pastor job at a bigger church, perhaps in a larger town. Then, if you do that well, you get the coveted job of Senior Pastor at a church established early in the 1900′s, maybe in a smaller town. Then, if you live through that, you may ascend to a Senior Pastor position in a church in the capital city of your state. Sad thing is, after the student ministry job, you totally disagree with the way ministry is being done in every subsequent step along this career path. And you’re pretty much powerless to change it.

You cannot shake the fact that the last time you saw real ministry happen was in your student ministry. On one hand you cannot sit on the floor and eat pizza and hang out with 10th graders the rest of your life. On the other hand, you cannot sell your soul, compromise your ministry philosophy, “grow up”, and take the next step on an increasingly irrelevant career path to nowhere.

What worked with students was focus, relevance, believers and non-believers together, recruiting incredible lay leaders, and meaningful small groups. In your gut, you know that very same approach works with adults too. Both students and adults are, after all, just people.

You’d love to start a church where you could change the way adult ministry is done to make it really work. It would be a place where life change regularly happened. Where believers and non-believers would regularly mix together. But you cannot dream like that, dang it. You have 2 kids in diapers and a mortgage.

You cannot afford to dream like that because you have your God in a very small box. He couldn’t possibly overcome these obstacles merely to see His Church move forward, could He? Or maybe, just maybe, that’s precisely the business He’s in.

Go to this site to learn about 20 churches started by guys who jumped off the career path to nowhere. If you ask any of them if it was scary, they’ll tell you yes. If you ask them if they’d do it again, they’ll tell you yes.

Be sure to check out the FAQ section.