Myth #4: God will Show Us our Next Youth Pastor

If you don't read this whole post you might misunderstand my point, so please don't jump to conclusions.

I spend a lot of time around search teams, senior pastors and church leaders responsible for hiring a churches next youth pastor(s). I often ask the question, "How will you know when you've found the right person?" Almost always the response is, "God will show us." Sometimes it's said, "We're trusting the Holy Spirit to lead us." and theirs the occasional, "We'll just know."

For clarities sake, I believe that God does speak to people and that God does connect pastors and churches in often mysterious ways. God is greater than our search process and can and does orchestrate a good deal of good things in the hiring process.

That being said, the idea that God will just "show us" sounds very weak from where I'm sitting more often than not. Can I be frank here? It's just lazy not to have a better explaination than that. To be fair, most search committee's have never been a part of a search team before. In the truest and most noble sense they don't know what they are doing. Some churches throw parents in to lead the team because there is a particular issue that parents have been vocal about in the past and they are available to lead or need to be appeased in someway. Some churches throw a business person in to lead the team. These are the more sophisticated churches. They probably do everything by the book. But it comes off feeling like a business... and churches should rarely hire like a business. Some churches throw a volunteer youth worker in to lead the team. Regardless of who is on the team, or what variety of folk, most churches are not good at hiring staff, especially youth pastors. This can be disasterous in the long run for everyone involved.

After I ask, "How will you know you've found the right youth pastor?" and the response is "God will make it clear to us." I've started asking a follow up question.

My response. "Yes, God will show you. But you have more criteria than that for making such an important decision. What is that critiria?"

Often there is extended silence.

The reality is this. Most search teams have very specific ideas about what they are looking for in a youth pastor, but they are not aware of them. (or most of them)

"God will show us" sounds very spiritual, but it comes across as lazy.

Saying, "After spending hours in prayer together, and days in a prayer on our own and after hours of conversations and evaluations of our situation here is what we feel God is leading us to and here is the kind of person who we believe God will bring to us." Then specific characteristics follow. Specific vision follows.

For those of you who are still upset that I called this a myth. Let me use a common subject for pastors and preaching from a few years back.

Pastor #1 would say, I'm not preparing for my preaching. I'm going to show up and talk about what God inspires me to say. The problem with this is that ironically the preaching becomes very pastor focused because he says pretty much the same thing every week.

Pastor #2 would say, "I'm preparing very thoroughly for my preaching with detailed notes and stories or even an outline. I'm going to trust that God will show up in my preperation and will be present as I'm actually preaching. If I need to I can deviate from my notes.

Search teams who can only really say that "the Holy Spirit will show them" as their criteria are like pastor #1. Their hearts are in the right place, they genuinely want to follow God and hear his leading, but when the rubber hits the road, because they failed to do the hard work of preparing, they end up being dazzeled by the most compelling candidate, not the best fit for their congregation.

So if you are searching for a youth pastor right now, what is your response? How will you know when you've found the right candidate? How are you preparing the people of your church to search for this person?