A Change Is Here

Stepping into a leadership role during a pastoral transition poses challenges. Consider the following questions as you navigate this journey:

  • Where do you begin?
  • What tasks should be on your to-do list?
  • How can you remain faithful to God while encouraging your congregation?

Keep in mind that this time of change presents an opportunity for growth and renewal within individuals and the congregation. Approach the transition with faith, organizational skills, and the congregation’s support to navigate it successfully.

How Do You Ease Anxiety While Increasing Hope

We are here to help you through your role in a pastoral transition’s initial, critical moments. Our tools and processes can help ease congregational anxieties and increase hope about what God can do next in the life of your congregation. 

We work with you to design a path forward, leveraging wisdom and expertise guided by the leadership of God’s Spirit.

 

One of the most significant opportunities for enhancing the health of a church comes during a time of leadership transition. Some leadership transitions in churches are planned, while others are unexpected. How your congregation travels into, through, and out of a transition is often a key predictor of future health.

Whether for better or worse, a change in leadership is challenging for everyone in the church, from congregation and staff to clergy members. The Center for Healthy Churches-PneuMatrix can help you successfully transition through any period of leadership change or trauma.

A sample of the types of leadership transitions we have helped congregations and ministers manage include:

  • Retirement
  • Resignation and transition to a new job
  • Forced exit of clergy
  • Staff downsizing
  • Staff rightsizing
  • Staff expansion
  • Congregation growth and enlargement
  • Congregation shrinkage and implications
  • Graduation from Divinity School
  • Entry into a new position

Contact Us

If your church is going through a transition or planning to go through a transition in the near future, contact The Center for Healthy Churches-PneuMatrix for more information on how we can help.

What Others Are Saying

Using the Center for Healthy Churches to help our search team identify a new senior pastor gave us access to a professional consultant who led our congregation in three listening sessions, guided our team in creating a Congregational Profile and Senior Pastor Profile, and showed us the how-tos on corresponding with and interviewing potential candidates. This assistance with the mechanics of the process freed up our search team to spend more time in prayer, seeking God's will for our church.

- Kathy Rosenbalm Search Committee Chair, Central Baptist Church of Fountain City, Knoxville TN

CHC became partners and then quickly friends. Dr. Matt Cook not only served as our interim pastor but also fulfilled the role of consultant and held our hands from start to finish. Always available and easy to work with, Dr. Cook was a wealth of information for a job that was unfamiliar to our search team. Their vast network and the time they invested in vetting candidates made our job manageable and we could not be more grateful for their work! We trusted the Lord with an unwavering commitment to prayer and felt the love and support from CHC during the entire process. “Not to us Lord, but to Your name be the glory”- Psalm 115:1

- Lee Whitlock Pastor Search Committee Chair, University Baptist Church, Houston TX

As our pastor search committee began the task of finding a new leader after the long and very successful tenure of our previous pastor, we began with a sense of excitement about the future but also anxiety about how to engage in the challenging work ahead. We are very glad that CHC was recommended to us. From our first investigative meeting through every step of the process with vision, realism, hope, and wise counsel guiding us to have a healthy balance of trust in God’s guidance, insight into best practices, wisdom about how churches work, and insistence that we take steps that we think are best for our church.

- Dr. Bob Ellis, Chair of the FBC Abilene Pastor Search Committee

Healthy Transitions Recent Interview

BNG Executive Director Mark Wingfield is joined by Bill Wilson, Founder of the Center for Healthy Churches (CHC), and Matt Cook, Executive Director of CHC, for a conversation about how they and their team of consultants frequently work with churches in leadership transitions, and how they’ve been through one themselves.