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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