they love me. And we honestly all did the best we knew how to do. But navigating a succession plan is a minefield of potential problems, and we stepped on quite a few of them.
I’ m an activator— I see things that need to happen, and I make them happen, usually pretty quickly. Sometimes that is exactly what my
surroundings need to get them unstuck. But I’ m not sure if a succes-sion process goes very well when the potential successor is an activator. I flared my nostrils too many times. Sometimes I was too eager to be the next senior pastor and not eager enough to be the associate pastor.
There were times when my desire to possess that title( senior pastor) was silently killing off the gentle breeze of my real self, which doesn’ t have a title. But it was so alluring.
Terry, the executive director( and my good friend), said that working with me was sometimes like sitting in traffic, when nothing is moving and everybody is frustrated, but some guy keeps honking his horn anyway. Another time he told me that I kept veering into other people’ s lanes, merging into their areas of respon-sibility. He was right on both counts.
After about four years, Dave and I were preaching roughly the same number of weekends per year. I saw this as the natural progression toward me becoming the next senior pastor. Then one day, during a board meeting, they said they wanted Dave to significantly increase his preaching load. This came out of the blue( at least for me), and I balked.“ But that means I’ ll be preaching a lot less,” I blurted.
I felt as though something had been ripped from my hands that had previously been given to me. I did the math in my head. Instead of preaching 20 or so times a year, I’ d be preaching 12 or 13 times. I loved preaching. It was hard to swallow a reality in which I’ d preach less.
As time went on, my dream was dissipating and my mood grew dark. I kept telling myself to have patience, to do the job that was my actual job, instead of working so hard to earn a job that hadn’ t been offered to me yet. Sometimes that worked.
At one point, some members of the board gently asked a question of compatibility. I
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