Bud Brown

If Church Planters need mentors and coaches, how about pastors?

Brian Howard has an interesting post over at Missional Challenge entitled “Church Planters Need All 3: Coach + Mentor + Supervisor” that’s well worth reading. It has been my privilege to have been coached by a seasoned veteran in several of my past intentional interim positions. My coach worked with me to solve problems and

Read More »

Church Discipline is NOT Optional

Every pastor – transitional practitioner, interim or permanent – can quickly break the ministry down into categories of “things I relish”, “this I do” and “things I hate”. I’d wager that you won’t find conflict resolution or church discipline on anyone’s list of favorites! Most of us see them as somewhat akin to a colonoscopy:

Read More »

You gotta measure the right things!

Although various associates of the Transition Ministries Group have had opportunities to provide transitional leadership in large and very large churches, the bulk of our experience is with smaller congregations. I don’t have the stats at hand but my guess is our average client church is somewhere in the 200s. I have learned – and

Read More »

Letting the Father welcome your guests

Making guests comfortable – even when they are few and far between! – is a “mission critical” task for churches in transition. In fact, failure in this area is often one cause for the decline that led to securing the services of a skilled transition pastor in the first place. In the various churches I

Read More »

Church leaders can learn a few things from Microsoft.

About what NOT to do! The church, like any other human organization, goes through a lifecycle. In that lifecycle there is a tipping point. It is reached when the original vision that motivated the church’s pioneers is replaced by a focus on maintaining the machine. When that happens procedures, policies and operations become more important

Read More »

Selling Vision

One of the toughest yet most important church leadership tasks is communicating God’s vision for the church in ways that are easily understood and that create passion and momentum. Whether you are serving in a “temporary” position as an Interim Pastor, a bona fide Transition Pastor or in a permanent pastoral position you’ve faced this

Read More »

The Transition Pastor’s Authority

The Transition Pastor serves a unique role, distinct from that of Interim Pastors, church consultants and Senior Pastors. The Interim Pastor provides pastoral care and pulpit services while the Pastor Search Team seeks the next full-time Pastor. The church consultant provides diagnostic services and recommends remedial solutions that are executed by the Pastor and the

Read More »