I heard about a free lunch, that’s how it always starts, right? I was a seminary student scraping by and trying to grow in my understanding of Jesus but also hoping for some fresh loaves and fishes. Christ Community sent some of their staff to share during the luncheon and invite us to apply for what they called a Pastoral Residency.
In their description of the pastoral residency, I heard three innovations converging. First, they talked about a two-year pathway of intensive pastoral mentoring and training with real pastoral work aimed at establishing healthy pastoral rhythms. Second, they highlighted how the church ought to be a place that equips every follower of Jesus to be on mission in all of life, and lastly, they spoke of their partnership strategy in outreach as an extension of the ministry of the church for the good of the city. It’s rare to find one of these frameworks, but to find a church that was attempting all three nearly had me forget about the food completely. A deeper hunger was being stirred, and Christ Community was offering a feast.
At Christ Community, we believe the local church as God designed it is the hope of the world and God’s “Plan A.” The pastoral residency is crucial for any missional church longing to have sustained generational and multiplying effect for the flourishing of neighborhoods, our city, and the world.
Residency as Outreach Multiplication
The rise and fall of any organization comes down to the quality and quantity of its leaders. When we look at the outcome of church leadership failures, we see that vulnerable individuals are worse off, development strategies are halted, fewer people are curious about the gospel message, and those who are actively involved in serving in and through their church family find themselves sidelined by wounds rather than catalyzed for further missional community development work.
The pastoral residency at Christ Community is anchored firmly within our outreach strategy because this is how we continue to multiply missional churches and healthy pastors who carry out God’s holistic mission both locally and globally. While the pastoral resident is a gift to the congregation, the primary goal of the pastoral residency is to train up and send out pastors to influence our neighborhoods, city, and world for Jesus. This initiative contributes to a collective outreach strategy that has a lifetime of benefit for God’s mission.
Below are three ways the pastoral residency specifically develops pastors for missional impact generation after generation.
- Missional model modeled. No matter how many books we read, there’s no substitute for participating in a missional ministry being modeled in real time. Tacit knowledge—knowledge that comes through experience—is the rarest and most valuable of knowledge available. Pastoral residents who learn the ins and outs of not only the obvious aspects of missional ministry (e.g., preaching, counseling, care) but also the paradigm shifts of missional ministry (e.g., workplace visits, organizational partnership assessments, cultural analysis, volunteer coordination) are exposed to modeled missional leadership. We shouldn’t expect pastoral leaders to simply launch missional churches and do it well. Pastoral leaders need to see missional models demonstrated before them.
- Making mistakes safer. The burnout or pushout of pastoral leaders within their first five years is alarmingly high. These first years of pastoral ministry are a time of continued self-discovery and organizational learning. Mistakes are often made, or the culture of a church is such that those who once felt called to engage in pastoral ministry leave disillusioned, frustrated, or even wounded. The church suffers when this happens and so does the broader community and city. A pastoral residency empowers younger pastors to have real responsibilities and make mistakes in an environment that can both absorb those mistakes and create space for reflective growth. The theological axiom is crucial here: action without reflection voids transformation. A stable missional church can be an institution for growth, especially when everything feels new.
- Cultivating lasting pastoral health. Every leader knows that starting well does not necessarily lead to ending well, and the stories that litter church history and our contemporary context are painful reminders of this reality. A residency not only creates a space where new pastoral leaders can lead in a missional church but where they can also cultivate healthy rhythms that empower leaders to lead over a lifetime. This is the deep, often unseen, work of the pastoral residency that strengthens the legs of young pastoral leaders for a long walk of obedience in the same direction. If it is true that we often overestimate what we can do in a year and underestimate what God can do in a decade, then we need healthy pastoral leaders to last decades instead of just years. We need pastoral residencies to dig deep and thoroughly train pastoral wholeness.
- Multiplication experienced and engrained. The primary goal of the residency is to develop healthy pastoral leaders with this robust missional paradigm shift and send them out to serve in other churches. Having experienced the growth and opportunities of the residency, Christ Community, with the help of our national partner, Made to Flourish, encourages new churches across the nation to start residency programs. Healthy missional leaders develop healthy missional leaders with a missional mind for the sake of the flourishing of all. This is the deep work of reaching out to the world with the gospel.
Multiplying More
If all someone wants to do is save souls now, this won’t make sense. If someone just wants to relieve one instance of poverty now, this won’t make sense. If someone thinks the church is irrelevant to God’s mission in both global and local faithfulness and fruitfulness, this won’t make sense.
However, if we want leaders to be sent out to build missional institutions that birth missional institutions (ones that cultivate flourishing for their cities by sharing the gospel in word and deed) that both proclaim and demonstrate the uncommon news of the gospel for generations to come, then we’d be crazy not to see this as crucial to our long-term outreach strategy.
Pastoral residencies may not look “the coolest” or get the most likes on a social media post, but it will last longer and go deeper into actually cultivating God’s kingdom on earth as it is in heaven than almost anything the church can be doing right now. Maybe this is why Jesus himself chose 12 apostles to follow him and watch him. And he invested more time in them than any others.
I know for me, what started as a free lunch became a feast that I love to invite others to enjoy. I am so grateful for my time as a pastoral resident, and I can’t wait to see how much God expands the table over the years, not only for the leaders he empowers us to develop but also for the people these healthy pastoral leaders will guide to Christ and his abundant life in all dimensions of life.
