When most people think of running a church, they tend to think of the way in which pastors and other church leaders guide their congregations spiritually. They think about Sunday morning sermons and weekday programs and community outreach events. They often forget that, behind the scenes, a church is actually run a lot like a business. There are budgets to make, a building to maintain, staff to manage, and strategic plans to develop.
VitalChurch Ministry, a nonprofit that provides churches with interim pastors, knows the importance of churches having a strong organizational foundation. They work with churches throughout the country, sending in pastors from their team to help “right the ship” when a church finds itself in a season of transition or crisis.
Often, when the interim pastors from VitalChurch arrive at struggling churches, they find that there is a lot of work to be done on the organizational side of things. The church may not have good written policies and procedures in place; job descriptions for staff members can be incomplete or even non-existent; the role and authority of the church board may be unclear; and there is no vision or mission statement in place. Churches aren’t businesses, but there are certainly business-like aspects that a church needs to get right.
Every year, VitalChurch puts on an annual training event for individuals looking to get into interim pastor ministry. While much of the focus of the event is on training attendees on how to bring about genuine spiritual revitalization in struggling churches, there is also a good amount of time dedicated to teaching them how a healthy church should operate from an organizational standpoint. The training event touches on topics such as effective church governance models and strategic planning methods, among others.
The training seminar is led by seasoned interim pastors with decades of experience in churches throughout the country. They’ve served in churches from a wide variety of denominations and of various sizes. These pastors are considered experts in the field of interim pastoring, having produced some of the leading resources on the topic.
Due to COVID-19, the annual training event, which is usually held in-person, will be conducted online through Zoom. It will be held from Monday, May 24 to Thursday, May 27, 2021, in the afternoons. Early bird pricing is available until April 12. Participants will receive a copy of VitalChurch’s Interim Pastor Training Manual and many other valuable resources from one of the leading organizations in interim pastor ministry.
Here’s what a couple of last year’s event attendees had to say:
“I got more than I paid for, good connections with similarly situated practitioners, oodles and oodles of great ideas for helping churches.”
“The [included training manual] is the most comprehensive and integrated manual I’ve ever seen. [It] was thorough, practice-tested with a strong theological foundation…”
If you are currently involved in interim pastoring, or have ever considered this as a career path, the VitalChurch training event is definitely something you should look into.
To learn more about VitalChurch or the 2021 interim pastor training event, visit their website: https://vitalchurchministry.org/
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