Trying to Find a New Pastor

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How should churches look for new Pastors?

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Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry coming to you from Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.
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No Compromise Radio is a program dedicated to the ongoing proclamation of Jesus Christ. Based on the theme in Galatians 2, verse 5, where the
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Apostle Paul said, But we did not yield in subjection to them for even an hour, so that the truth of the gospel would remain with you.
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In short, if you like smooth, watered -down words to make you simply feel good, this show isn't for you.
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By purpose, we are first biblical, but we can also be controversial. Stay tuned for the next 25 minutes as we're called by the divine trumpet to summon the troops for the honor and glory of her
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King. Here's our host, Pastor Mike Abendroth. Welcome to No Compromise Radio ministry.
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Pastor Steve, how is you today? I'm blessed. Where was you at? I'm blessed. Where was
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I at? I've been all over the country. I've been everywhere, man. Yeah, how did you do?
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I've been everywhere, man. How did you do with the TSA pre -check and all that? You know, I was wise this time.
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I was very careful. I did really well. Only my wife got pulled over by – we had pre -check, but she managed to get herself jammed up for a little follow -up search by bringing – she forgot she had a bottle of water in her bag.
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You know, it was closed, but they still like pulled her – now, they didn't do anything. They just went through the bag and pulled out the water and said, you can't take this through.
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That's called a no -no with the TSA. Oh, yeah. All the vital things. I know you have a sweet spot for my daughter,
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Haley. When she was probably, I don't know, 12 years old, she had some knitting stuff or something like that.
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She got pulled to the side and they saw she had some scissors in her backpack. She was sad and started crying.
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You know, she didn't want to break the rules and everything. Then the very kind, sensitive, pastoral,
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I could even say, TSA guy said, oh, sweetie, it's okay. I'm just going to take those away and you're not in any trouble or anything.
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Lots of people forget. By the way, do you know what this TSA – these letters stand for?
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Haley, like with tear in her eyes, said, no, I don't. He said, take scissors away. I said, don't worry about it.
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That was pretty good. So he rescued it. Yeah, that was pretty good. Take scissors away. I remember when
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Kristen and I were coming out here before we moved out here. We were out here for a trip to look at BU and we flew out of Burbank Airport, small little airport near Los Angeles area.
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The whole TSA thing was relatively new and we saw this – I think it was like a seven -year -old girl get pulled aside for like some random search and I'm just like –
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I was giving the death stare on that one. I've been in places,
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Steve, where I'm the one that gets pulled out. They say it's randomly and then
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I look at these other people and the whole Muslim deal garb and then they just get a walkthrough.
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Oh, because they can't profile. Uh -huh. I know. Uh -huh. Random. This is all random.
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Because random is really a good program. Steve, look at those vultures in the parking lot. Man, it's just like wild Omaha or Omaha – what was that?
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Mutual of Omaha's wild kingdom. Finally, Steve asked me a question and then see, I know versus the other way around.
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My mother used to work for Mutual of Omaha Insurance Company and it was Mutual of Omaha's wild kingdom.
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Yeah. Do you remember the guy's names? Rudyard Kipling. Rudyard Kipling and Jim Fowler.
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And Dr. Doolittle. Rudyard Kipling and Jim Fowler. Sometimes we have –
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It was Marlon something. Marlon Perkins. Uh -huh. I was trying to think of Zorro's name the other day and forgot and then
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I just had an e -mailer this week said it's Don Diego. Oh, really? Uh -huh. I was going to say Billy.
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Billy, don't be a hero. Well, sometimes you do the message moment.
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We're replacing that with a Tyndale moment. Well, if we have theme music for it and why don't we, by the way, the
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Tyndale moment would get a completely different song. It's a 1534 translation with modern spelling.
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In fact, we should use some John Lennon. Just give me some truth. All I want is the truth. Actually Generation X covered that song as well and it turned out to be pretty good.
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Did they? Uh -huh. Okay. I'm going to read from the epistle of St. Paul under the
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Hebrews. How does that grab you? I'm not familiar with that letter. Well, we think
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Hebrews is canonical but I just don't know if Paul wrote it. If he did, I'd be fine with that. Yeah. I mean, there's a possibility.
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I mean, someday you should do a show about percentages of who might have done what.
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That would be fascinating. I know Mary didn't write it, the Virgin Mary. Yeah, you can rely on her.
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Uh -huh. I know Mother Teresa didn't write it. Okay. Contrary to some public opinion. How about Pope Benedict?
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Steve, fascinatingly, I gave a quote on Twitter from the commentator who does the
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Excellent Pillar series Hebrews commentary, Peter O 'Brien, and I just said
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O 'Brien and somebody searched on Twitter for O 'Brien but they wanted a baseball player or something like that,
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O 'Brien. Oh, Peter O 'Brien, yeah. And this guy then wrote back, Hebrews isn't in the
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Bible, it was rejected as non -canonical, Clement wrote it, and it was just some kind of random baseball player person.
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So I don't like to block too many people but I had to do some blockage on that. I actually have learned to love blocking people, especially people about Lexi but that's a whole other topic.
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How about the whole Gospel Coalition blockers? Don't they block a lot of people?
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Block, block, block, block, block. I think they blocked Jesse… Ventura. Owen. Jesse… Duplantis.
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Jesse Johnson. Yes. And he said he didn't even – he never tweeted anything bad about him.
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They're just blockers. In fact, their offensive line is probably better than the New England Patriots.
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You ever pull a guard? No, never. To block? No. On some kind of pitch? Yeah. Okay. Well, here's
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Hebrews. And it says… And thou, Lord, in the beginning hast laid the foundation of the earth, and the heavens are the works of thy hands.
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They shall perish, but thou shalt endure. They shall all wax old as does a garment, and as a vesture shall thou change them, and they shall be changed.
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But thou art always and thy years shall not fail. A little bit different than the message.
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That is a passage I'm preaching this Sunday and, of course, the heavens, they don't exist eternally.
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They don't exist forever yet Jesus does. And I like Tyndale's version.
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I don't think I'm going to like Eugene Peterson's version. I mean, well, it's just – it's a chasm of difference because Tyndale with that high view of God and the reverence for Scripture and wanting to get to the original intent of the author versus Peterson who
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I would say has a fairly low view of God and a very low view of Scripture.
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Steve, to switch things up a little bit, if there's a church out there, you're part of a church listening today and you don't have a pastor, what kind of advice do you want to give to that church who doesn't have a pastor?
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How to hire pastors and what to go through as you vet other men?
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We work with different churches and try to help them. It's ultimately their choice. But I think it's good to think about how do we find a new pastor?
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What kind of advice would you give on a high level? Well, a high level, I would say that obviously it's something that needs to be taken very seriously because there's nothing, there's no decision more important in the life of a church than who they're going to hire to preach and teach and really lead the congregation.
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And so, you know, you want to be in 1 Timothy 3 1 -7 and Titus 1 6 -9, you want to be looking at those kind of qualifications for an elder and looking for a man who's qualified in that way.
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But, you know, in these days, when you can get so much information online about people and stuff like that and email and all that,
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I think there's a lot of background information that can be done before you actually talk to them, you know, so I would say that a church needs to be, well, first of all, the elders need to be very involved in the process.
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But secondly, I would say that it just really needs to be focused on the scripture and on making sure that you're getting the right kind of man.
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You know, you need to kind of examine his whole life and make sure you're getting the right guy. Okay, good advice,
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Pastor Steve. Let's think through this from, you know, 35 ,000 -foot level.
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How do we hire a pastor? What do we do? How do we go about it? Probably the first thing
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I would ask the church to do, and this is all, like you said, elder board driven. They're the leaders, and of course, they can bring in deacons and other people to help assist.
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What do we need as a pastor? What does the pastor do?
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What's our philosophy of shepherding and preaching? And this would make people run away from, he needs to be a good team builder, his wife needs to be able to play the piano, he needs to be a
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CEO, he needs to be a good fundraiser. We've got a building committee going on. One of the top of the things that the shepherd has to do is he has to be able to preach.
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Of course, the moral qualifications of 1 Timothy 3 that you talked about must be there, above reproach, et cetera, but don't you want somebody who can preach?
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Skilled in preaching? Well, let's put it this way. You're going to be listening to that guy every single
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Sunday, so do you want to come in and go, eh, it's another snoozer, you know? So, Steve just rolled his eyes.
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Let's parse that out a little bit. Let's tease that out some. When you have an opportunity to listen to the best of the best preachers, because of the internet now, right?
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It's just so easy. It's free. You can listen to Lloyd -Jones, you can listen to MacArthur, I almost said
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Heck, but I don't try to say Heck. You can listen to Spurgeon preach, not with his voice, but just people reading
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Spurgeon sermons. Well, someday they'll have his voice. They have his brother's voice, and they said that his brother sounded like him.
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What they'll do is, you know, they'll come up with some genetic way of, you know, exhuming him and then recreating his voice.
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That's a good idea. I'd like to invest in a company that could do some body snatching, and they take a few of the
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DNA strands of the dead body, and then we can figure out what they sounded like. They call it theologic park or something, you know?
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How about theological parkour? We could do that. So what you want to do is you want to say to yourself, besides the obvious, is he orthodox?
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If you're Calvinist, he's got to be Calvinistic. If you're cessationist, he's got to be cessationist. There's a lot of the nuances that go there.
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But you should be able to listen to him every week, and that means some of his sermons might not be so good.
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Some of them might be excellent, but down the line, he is a better -than -average expositor, and you could say, you know what?
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I could listen to that every week because what you just said, Steve, is true. You are going to listen to him every week. That's right. Multiple times.
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That's right. And if, you know, after a few weeks of him preaching, you're just going to go, what have we done?
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Well, not enough homework, obviously, because— Steve, in the old days, I mean, for me,
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I sent, I think, three cassettes off to churches. And do you think I picked what
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I thought to be my best sermons or my worst ones? Well, I don't know. I listened to them, and each one of those 90 -minute jammed full sermons was the best
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I'd ever heard. Of course I'm going to send the best. That's why if the pastor's already a pastor, has been a pastor, is a pastor, and you're trying to hire that person, just listen to the last 10, and there'll probably be one or two excellent ones, one or two kind of, okay, they're biblical, but not really crafted that well.
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And the rest, you'll know, here's his average sermon. I think you might have got hired sooner if you didn't have the special effects in the background.
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You know, the explosions and stuff like that. The ambulances and stuff?
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Yeah. Yeah. That was—you hear that siren? That's for you. How about asking this question?
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You've got the sun in your eye there. Yeah, that's right. All right. How about asking this question? After we know what we're looking for that is biblically, do we have someone in -house that could take that position?
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Why would that be an important question to ask? Well, I think it's an important question to ask because that's like shooting fish in a barrel, right?
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You already know the guy's family. You already know his life. You've already seen him serving in the church.
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So, why wouldn't you want that guy? It's easy. Plus, you know, there's not the big transition.
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There's not the big problem and everybody already likes the guy. So, that's pretty easy. What if you see some kind of blind spots that the guy has, weak spots?
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Wouldn't you know those as well? Yeah, you would know his strengths and weaknesses. And so, you can kind of, you know, roll with them or maybe even because you've known him for so long, kind of say, you know what?
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Did you ever think about this or that or the other thing? And maybe this kind of thing would help, you know, as we go forward.
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And, you know, so yeah, I think that'd be a lot easier. Well, let's put it this way. You hire a guy.
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Well, he's got weak spots too. You just don't know what they are fully. And so, then when you figure them out, it might be a lot harder to come alongside him than it is somebody that you've known for years.
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Absolutely. Mike and Steve here talking about churches and different questions to ask when you're trying to hire a pastor.
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It could be, I don't know, a youth pastor. It could be an associate. It could be pastor of vision. Just kidding.
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That's my new title. You know that, right? Vision casting pastor? Yes. Uh -huh. How about this?
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Let's ask ourselves, are we going overboard in the opposite fashion?
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In other words, let's say your last pastor, he did a lot of good visitation, but he wasn't good in the pulpit.
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And now we're going to pick somebody who's the exact opposite. Or he was a very charismatic person in his personality.
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Let's hire somebody drier. He was very authoritative. Let's hire a consensus builder.
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Is there an error that needs to be avoided so you don't swing too far picking the opposite kind of guy?
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Sure. I mean, I think that's fairly obvious. But it's not obvious when you're in it, right?
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If the last guy was a big problem and you have all these reasons why he was a big problem, then you're going to be looking for somebody who doesn't have any of those kind of qualities.
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And you might run into a problem in the opposite direction. He was so gifted as an orator that he couldn't be bothered to talk to people or whatever.
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And so you're like, okay, we don't want anybody who speaks really well. Well, duh, talk about shooting yourself in the foot.
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Yeah, and the way I think it would come across would be, all right, well, we really have to get the visitation kind of kind, gentle visitor kind of pastor versus, you know, he doesn't really preach that well, but we're not really looking for that anymore because we've had the preacher orator, but that didn't really work out either.
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Well, he's got to be – like I said, he's just got to be able to preach because if you think about it, if you paid him to do nothing else, then you'd want to make sure that you had a solid preacher.
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Well, that is his primary job. That's the primary reason why the church is paying him is to be able to spend the time and the study and to produce a coherent, cogent, clear exposition of the text.
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And if he can't do that, then you probably shouldn't hire him. All right. What else do we need to consider when we're trying to hire someone?
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Steve, it's difficult for churches because they're full of volunteers. They all have full -time jobs.
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They wake up at their job, mothers, and they have to go off, some of the men to work. What kind of time frame should we be looking at?
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And here's my underlying motivation for asking this question to you. Churches can go for so long without a pastor.
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They begin to function like they don't really need one, and some of the committees get so much power, and you don't really need a pastor anymore because you figured it out how to do this without a pastor.
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What kind of time frame are we looking at? I don't know, but I wouldn't want to take too long.
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I mean if you're in six months, you know that you've been trying to figure out who to hire or whatever, you've gone too long.
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I mean I think certainly unless you can do an in -house hire, I think you'd be foolish to do something like in a few weeks.
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So, you know, somewhere in the middle there, but I think there has to be a consensus among the elders that they actually have the right guy, you know?
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And so I think until you get to that point where everybody's unanimous that this is our guy, then
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I think you have to kind of continue the process. Now that may not be easy to get to, but I think that's absolutely necessary because if everybody isn't enthusiastic, you're going to run into problems.
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Steve, if a church doesn't have someone in -house that they could hire, do you think it's wise to say, well, you know what?
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Why don't we call seminaries and go to their websites and say, do you have any men that have recently graduated that have the same theology of said seminary and give us their information?
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Is that a good way to go? Well, I think it's a way to go. I mean I think it certainly can work out well, you know, but then you never know.
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You might hire some guy who might turn out to be Mike Abendroth, you know? So you have to be careful.
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It's so true. No, I think that is a good way to go. For example, I mean there are some seminaries that you're just not going to call because you're going to be like, okay,
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I would not probably call Fuller Seminary and say give us your best. Now I'd call them liberals.
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But I mean, you know, you have somebody like James White who manages to squeeze through the doctorate program there.
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But, you know, I'd say for the most part, you're probably going to want to stick with thoroughly conservative, you know, seminaries like Southern or Masters or a few others.
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But so that would be a way to go. I absolutely would say that that is a way to go. And I think probably unless you know somebody, you know, unless there are people who are kind of in your larger circle of friends or whatever that you think, well, that guy might be the right fit or whatever, then you're probably going to do that.
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Steve, what about churches that have several pastors and then one of them is going to get hired away by another church?
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How should people think through that in terms of this is God's kingdom. He's building churches.
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You know, in corporate America, everything would be hush hush and don't say things and recruiting and backdoor deals.
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How should a church think through those issues? I think a church should be looking for an associate pastor with 12 years or more of experience, that kind of thing.
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Oh, so this is kind of like a job. What Steve doesn't know is I've given him six months to find a new job.
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He's got to move on and it's been nice. Oh, well, thanks. 12 years experience.
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Right here on the radio, live, in front of millions of people. We talk about firing people all the time and having to hire them back, you know?
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So. Well, I think I'd like to apply for my old job. Listen, we're joking around, but this is a very, you know, a very serious thing.
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And, you know, what about hiring from another church? Well, I think, you know, that should be done openly. I think a lot of times these days it's kind of done on the, you know, hush, hush.
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I've seen some churches go to the extreme, though, where the new church will send members to the old church to kind of scour around the congregation and see if there's any scuttlebutt about the guy before they hire him.
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And I'm like, no, that's not right, you know? Now, we have had, as an elder board, just open discussions.
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What about this elder maybe moving to this other country? And what about, you know, this other elder maybe wants to get a full -time job?
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What if I were ever to leave? What if Steve were ever to leave? How do we work through those things? Isn't it nice just to think the
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Lord's building these church, his own church. We don't have agendas. And I think
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I've said to you men, and I hope it applies to you as well, if I get asked by a church, hey, would you consider being the pastor?
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I would tell you. I don't have to sneak around. But thankfully, you know, that's rarely happened.
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Yeah, but I think that's right. I mean, why would you want to be, you know, we look at the qualification of being above reproach, but then we're going to sneak around, you know, to get a job.
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And there may be something to be said at an elder level where the elders say, until this is all going to happen, we're not going to disseminate the information.
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Why cause trouble and say pastor's candidating someplace else? You know, stand up in front of the church and say, hey, just FYI, pray for Pastor Mike as he's preaching in Indiana or whatever, before a big church that's looking to hire him.
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So, you know, we want to wish Pastor Mike the best, and everybody's like looking around like, what? Yeah, that is so true.
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Steve, when I first became a pastor in 97, I was told that if you're faithful for a few years, just preach the
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Bible, a lot of churches will try to snag you. Uh -huh. And so now it's been 20 years.
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So what do you do with all those? Do you just automatically throw those away? Do you, you know, just see church of this and church of that and go, oh yeah, another one of those job offers coming along.
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I better shred it. Steve, in 19 and a half years, two churches have formally asked me if I would consider going to pastor them.
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I mean, I've had no co -listeners say, hey, you know, come and do this, that or the other. They don't know what else to say. But one was some church, and it was
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Minnetonka Bible Church, and it was a letter written by Tim LaHaye. Oh. And it was to, you know,
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Mike Avendroth. I showed it to the elders. Tim LaHaye at the time was the number one selling author in the world.
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And Dr. Mayhew had said to Tim LaHaye, here's all the master's guys, write them. And so Tim LaHaye said, come on out here and candidate.
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You don't want to be left behind. Oh. And actually they had a personality test that went along with that.
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I think the Briggs -Myers or something like that. I totally don't respect that. And there was another one here recently.
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There was a pastor that was leaving his church, and somebody asked me, but I said no.
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That's it, two in 20 years. When is this? I've defined the odds. And in 12 years, I've had zero. So that's pretty good.
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Okay. Well, I think it would take me like 13 before I got my first offer. Oh, really?
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So next year then. We would suggest that if you're looking for a pastor, your elders, shepherding your souls, will probably look to other churches within their own body, art of seminaries.
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And I'm sure you'll get to know that pastor. And I think God's church is going to be built no matter what.
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Well, it's really a matter of prayer too for the congregation. I think the one thing
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I would caution against is any kind of gossip or campaign against leadership in that sort of situation.
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Mike and Steve, today it's Tuesday. No Compromise Radio, Tuesday edition. Talk to you soon.
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No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Abendroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.
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Bethlehem Bible Church is a Bible teaching church firmly committed to unleashing the life -transforming power of God's Word through verse -by -verse exposition of the sacred text.
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