Team players: what do associate pastors want?

MY FRIEND HAD a dazed look when I asked how his work as an associate pastor was going. Then he ripped into his senior minister: "He won't communicate! He thinks ministry is only for ordained people--preferably him alone! He doesn't even seem interested in what I do at his church!" Then he grew pensive: "We're like strangers passing on the street--in the same place, but not connected at all."

Another associate minister in the room tried to comfort him: "Hey, it's not his fault--seminaries were terrible back when he came through. Anyway, you're smarter than he is."

When I told a senior minister about this exchange of commiseration, he sighed. "Sometimes with my staff I feel like my dad did during a long car trip with the family. When the kids would get rambunctious in the back, he'd take just so much before turning around to give us a good whack."

The metaphors--strangers in the street, rambunctious kids--suggest lonely young associates who are alternately insecure and arrogant, unsure of how to take those first toddling steps out of seminary and onto a church staff. They also suggest the plight of senior ministers who've-been given no resources for handling a staff other than whatever people skills they happen to have.

The relationship between a senior pastor and associate pastors is often key to the health and ministry of a church, yet it receives next to no attention in seminaries or in the literature on ministry. The attention it does receive is often thin theologically--a pinch of God in a broth of dated managerial theory.

I spoke with several associate and senior ministers, hoping that what they've learned can help other pastors think through their lives and ministries more thoroughly and theologically.

What do associate pastors want from a senior pastor? The associates invariably mentioned "communication" first. They do not want micromanagement, or a senior pastor constantly glancing over the underlings' shoulders. Instead, associates want clear direction for the areas of ministry over which they have charge, and then they want to be left alone "to make the church's vision a reality" in that area.

This concern suggests the importance of having a well-articulated vision toward which all can aspire, and a certain amount of freedom for each staff member as he or she works toward it. Carol Madalin sees this happening at the church she serves in Naperville, Illinois. She compares her senior pastor to Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation, who regularly tells his first officer, Commander Riker, "Make it so!"

Says Madalin, "When I say I'm thinking about doing something new or different, he listens, and then says, 'Great, I like it!"

Another associate struggles with a head pastor who doesn't communicate as well. "He's not into details; he just wants to cast the vision. But when I come back with details worked out, he's not happy. You have to be OK with the way an associate achieves your goals or else the associate just spins her wheels."

In addition to being able to communicate, ministers have to be able to get along well with other staff members. Kelly Lyn Logue, an associate in Cary, North Carolina, worked for a senior minister in her first job. When the senior pastor was moved to another church, the two ministers petitioned their bishop to move Logue so that the two could work together again. Clearly something had gone right! Her secret? "We just hang out with each other--shooting the breeze. It's no fun to work with someone you don't want to be around." The willingness to talk about trivial and personal matters builds the trust that allows colleagues to be blunt with one another. "When something negative is brought up about one of us, we tell each other."

Associates often become sounding boards for unhappy members who don't want to confront pastors directly. This can lead to unhealthy triangulation. A senior minister of a large congregation in suburban Chicago compared the associate's job to a sewage treatment plant. "The associate takes in all the crap and people imagine he or she will filter it before passing it on to the senior."

Other seniors and associates responded to stories about unhappy staff members by insisting that triangulation between associate pastors, unhappy members and senior pastor must be stopped if the associate pastorate is to be successful. And trust is crucial. Both senior and associate pastors often compare their relationships to friendship and even marriage.

Les Longden, a professor at Dubuque Theological Seminary and formerly the head of a large church staff in Michigan, said that the social times his staff spent on retreat were "worth their weight in gold. If I were a senior again, I'd be even more intentional about having fun."

Many clergy don't have many positive staff experiences to share. William Willimon says, "We preachers have no training in how to supervise other human beings, and it shows most dramatically in a multiple staff church." Willimon, a United Methodist bishop in Alabama, suggests that a staff find a management coach who will observe and help the senior pastor through such headaches as job evaluations, budget management, and hirings and firings.