Over the twenty years I was a pastor, I endured several candidating experiences. I say “endured” because I liken candidating for a pastorate at a church to getting a wife through a mail order catalog. One of my pastorates had four hundred applicants for the position. And no church I applied for had less than one hundred. The process was often intrusive, artificial, nerve racking, humbling, and sometimes humiliating.
The questions I was asked while candidating at various churches ranged from the standard – What is your philosophy of ministry? How did you become a Christian? etc. – to the weird and crazy – Have you ever jumped out of an airplane? On a scale of one to ten, how humble are you? Have you ever back dated a check?
Once a search committee member, who was in HR at his company, stated that if he asked the kind of questions of his hires that they were asking me, his company would get sued and he would be fired!
I understood the purpose of those questions, of course: churches were simply trying to discover the real me. And truth be told, I often asked similar questions when I was hiring my own staff.?Over the years, I discovered one question that told me more about who the person I was interviewing was than any other. With this one question I could predict with amazing accuracy what kind of relationship I would have with them as a staff member.
So here’s the question all pastors should ask prospective staff: What kind of relationship did you have with your father when you were growing up?
The reason this was such an important question for me to ask is because I knew that, as the senior pastor, I was a father figure to my staff. That meant that whatever kind of relationship a potential staff member had with their father, they would most likely eventually duplicate it with me.
And it was true. In fact, it was uncanny. I witnessed the process work out with my staff again and again. If they had a positive and loving relationship with their father, then my relationship with them would very easy and productive. But if they had a negative and hurtful relationship with their father, then there would often be relationship issues we would have to work on.
This is just one more example of the importance of fathers, not only in our family life, but in our work life as well.
This post first appeared in NewCommandment.org.
How about you, Pastors? What questions are most important for you to ask when hiring staff? Leave your comment below.
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