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More than likely you will be asked to either participate or lead out in the interviewing of potential pastoral candidates for open positions in your conference. Sometimes these interviews are done one-on-one, sometimes with a group of conference officials, or with a local church's board or search committee. You'll likely find that even if your conference has some published guidelines on how pastoral positions are filled, these guidelines may have some fluidity depending on the church involved and the nature of the position. In practical terms, what this means for you as a Ministerial Director, is that you will need to learn to be adept at modifying your interviewing practices, techniques, and leadership to suit the immediate situation.

 

There are at least five distinctly different interview scenarios you are likely to encounter:

 

•A seasoned pastor from within your conference who is already known at least to the conference, if not the potential local church. Your knowledge of the pastor will make it easier for you to handle the interview. You can speak more to some questions a search committee or church board may ask when the candidate is not present for the discussion. If you know of some strengths that the pastor has that did not surface during the interview, you can share them. If you know of some reasons why the pastor may not be the best fit for this church at the time, you will need to weigh carefully if you should share that or not. If some work pattern or pastoral interest turns out to be other than that for which the church was explicitly looking, it could come back on you for not having shared that with them.

•A seasoned pastor from outside your conference. In such cases, do the best you can to develop a rapport with the potential pastor prior to the interview. The better you get to know them, the better you can facilitate the interview. Prepping for an interview for a relatively unknown candidate will also require due diligence prior to the interview to carefully check references. It would be best to not proceed with any interview with a local church if the references give you pause.

•A senior Theology/Religion major who is about to graduate with their B.A. degree. You will either be deciding on sending them on to the seminary directly from college, or you'll be placing them in the field for a couple of years before sending them to seminary. Important: some conferences skip interviewing seniors because they don't have any openings at the current time. This is potentially self-defeating in a couple of ways: first, if seniors don't even get interviews, word of that gets around and it could depress your college's efforts to attract students into their theology program. Secondly, you may have unexpected openings sometime later, and if you do not know who is available and what their ministry skills and potential might be, you might well be passing over just the right candidate.

•A seminary student who is finishing up their MDiv or other graduate-level degree. This group is different than a senior on the college level because they are employable right away with their education behind them. The same advice give in the prior point is applicable to this group as well.

•A potential pastor without a college degree of any sort or who has a bachelor's degree in an area other than theology/religion. In some rare cases, you may find that you have a need to hire someone without the needed educational background. We suggest that you enter into this carefully and rarely. If you find a diamond in the rough, make sure they have the thirst for increasing their knowledge in Biblical studies and theology. Don't hire such a person without a concrete education plan that you can put in place that allows them to become adequately equipped over time.

 

A few important things to remember:

 

•Make sure that the vetting of a pastoral candidate goes much deeper than an interview. Many excellent pastors have lost out on the chance to pastor a church because they did not interview well.

•Talk with the candidate before the interview to gain insight on their past experiences with interviews. If they have had little or no experience, take the time to coach them a bit in advance so that they will be more comfortable and thus do better during the actual interview.

•Have a conversation with the search committee or church board ahead of time to let them know how the interview will be conducted. Make sure they are given a list of questions that they are not allowed to ask in an interview. If you are unsure about which questions are out of bounds, seek guidance from your administration and/or HR persons.

•If there are specific questions that are important to the local church to know about, ask them what they are so that you can make sure they are included, and that they are asked properly. *

•Don't cede control of the interview to local church members. They are likely to venture out into areas that are either out-of-bounds or that are not germane to a person's pastoral work.

•There are two general ways of conducting a search process for a pastor in a local church: gather a list of names, sort them in order of highest preference, and then interview their top choice, followed by a vote up or down. The second option is to interview several top candidates before a decision is made. While this author (Mic Thurber) prefers the former option as a general rule - and I'd be happy to share why if you ask - many churches, particularly larger ones will insist on it. In such cases, do your best to make sure that all the interviews are conducted in as similar a way as possible. Interviews tend to take on a life of their own, and sometimes a candidate's answers might lead to other questions that the other candidates never had a chance to address, thus potentially unleveling the playing field.

•Make it clear to those in the potential church that they are not to do their own ad hoc reference checking or show up at the potential pastor's current church and let it be known that they are there to hear him/her preach because they are being considered for their church. These kinds of activities on the part of well-meaning potential church members can create serious problems with which the pastor will be forced to deal.

 

Click here for Rick Lebate's very helpful Vetting Questions, which will be useful for seasoned pastors.

 

Click Student Interviews for some excellent tips from Ernie Furness on how to interview a student.

 

* A personal anecdote: I (Mic Thurber) once interviewed for a church along with one other potential pastor. For reasons I do not know, no one from the conference was present at the interview. My first question: "How will you go about prioritizing your ministry to the children of our church?" The position for which I was interviewing was senior pastor in a church with 4 associates, including one whose assignment was children's ministries. I admit that the question caught me completely off-guard.

 

I had a couple of ways to attempt to answer this. I could have simply said, "I'm not exactly sure what you are asking here, so could you rephrase the question, please?" I could also give a laser-focused answer on what I thought they were asking, or I could give more of a "buck shot" answer that covered a lot of potential ways of looking at it.

 

Though the best choice would seem to be to simply ask for a rephrasing of the question, I was reluctant to do that because I didn't want them to think I didn't get it. I didn't want to give a laser-focused answer in case I did totally miss it, so I went with option 3, a buck shot approach.

 

They patiently waited until I was through pontificating on all things relating to children's ministry. With no feedback on my answer, they went on to their next question: "How will you go about prioritizing your ministry to young adults?"

 

The light dawned. All they really wanted to know was, "Will our children and young adults be important to you?"

 

If they had just said that, I would have had completely different things to say. In their minds, they knew what they were asking. But they did not relay that to me. It took me quite a while in that interview to dig out from the hole they and I dug. That's why it's extremely important to make sure the questions are unambiguous and are designed to elicit the information that's truly being sought.