MEGACHURCHES: The Coach in the Pulpit

By Kent Fillinger

College sports grow in popularity and appeal each year. The players on a team come and go, so the spotlight always falls on the head coach. The life of a college coach offers a good analogy for understanding the role of a megachurch senior minister.

The head coach is the face, voice, and personality of the program. He hires his assistant coaches to work with him. He evaluates talent and recruits players””sometimes taking a chance on a long-shot prospect when other qualified players are not available. The coach must address players who are discontent with the system or who are upset with their amount of playing time. Some decide to transfer to another program. But his primary job is to motivate and teach the players who stay to play better. The coach also attempts to protect players from unwanted outside influences.

The head coach is responsible for raising funds to support the program to buy equipment. He addresses discipline problems and manages conflict on multiple levels. He determines the vision for the team and sets goals for the season. Ultimately, he needs to achieve a reasonable number of those goals over a given period of time to demonstrate growth and progress.

The hardest part of the job is probably listening to the criticism and complaints of all those who think they know how to coach the team better. Successful head coaches who manage all of these tasks and build winning programs often attain iconic status and develop an intensely loyal following.

An Icon Culture

So goes the life of a megachurch senior minister. The research findings of this survey of 112 senior ministers were extremely telling. This article is designed to give you a look at the “coaches” in these pulpits.

The average tenure of a megachurch senior minister is 15 years, and the average tenure for emerging megachurch leaders is 13 years, while the national average for senior ministers in general is less than four years. Among the largest churches, Gene Carlson has the longest tenure, 41 years at Westlink Christian (Wichita, Kansas). Meanwhile, 21 percent of the senior ministers have been serving at their current church for five years or less.

In their book, Culture Shift: Transforming Your Church from the Inside Out, Robert Lewis and Wayne Cordeiro identify the following four church cultures: family, icon, archival, and replication.

Personality-driven effectiveness exemplifies the icon culture. “An icon culture is ultimately concerned with results. . . . An icon culture expects the pastor to symbolize in his public persona the character of the church and to be the face or voice through which people enter the church.”¹

The icon culture typifies the modern megachurch. One in five megachurches is still being led by its founding minister. Another 15 percent of the churches are being led by only their second minister. Following an icon is very difficult to do. Just ask Mike Davis who unsuccessfully tried to follow Bobby Knight as basketball coach at Indiana University.

The most surprising finding of this study was the trend linking the growth percentage of the church to the age of the senior minister. The average age of a megachurch senior minister is 51, while the emerging megachurch ministers are only slightly younger at 49. The two-year growth percentage was examined in relationship to the age of the senior minister.

The research demonstrated that the peak years of effectiveness for senior ministers in terms of growth percentage were the years 40-44 with a growth rate of 20.2 percent. When a senior minister turned 45, the two-year average growth rate dropped to 14 percent, then virtually held steady until age 55. The growth rate for senior ministers from ages 55-59 dipped to 7.2 percent and continued at this mark past the age of 65.

There are exceptions. In college football, Joe Paterno and Bobby Bowden are in their late 70s yet continue to win, but the majority of college coaches retire long before that. Barry McMurtrie (Crossroads Christian, Corona, California) at age 64, is a prime exception. Crossroads averaged 5,989 in attendance in 2005 and grew 13.4 percent.

Succession Planning

Combining an icon culture with long ministry tenures and the age/growth rate factor therefore requires strategic succession planning to ensure smooth transitions. The three churches that declined by more than 11 percent in 2005 all experienced a pastoral transition in the last two years. For the current group of ministers, 77 percent were selected from another ministry context to serve in their present position (that is, they were not promoted from within at the church they”re serving now).

Eighteen senior ministers on the list are 60 or older. Traditionally, churches do not think about succession planning until their ministers are only a couple of years away from retirement, if at all.

Based on the statistical findings, churches should start the succession planning process when their minister turns 50. The churches should consider hiring a potential successor who is in his late 20s or early 30s, preferably by the time the senior minister turns 55, to join in the preaching rotation. This provides the church and the successor about 10 years to establish a healthy relationship and also places the successor in the role of senior minister at the start of his peak years of effectiveness in his early 40s.

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¹ “Understanding Church Cultures,” Robert Lewis and Wayne Cordeiro, www.christianitytoday.com/bcl/areas/churchvitalsigns/articles/101205.html.

 

 

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