June 25, 2007 Silver Spring, Maryland, United States …. [Taashi Rowe/ANN]
Last year in Canada several of the Seventh-day Adventist Church’s administrative units attempted to entrench annual performance evaluations for pastors into the Church Manual, the church’s policy handbook. But many clergy balked, becoming openly defensive in meetings. Others started e-mail chains against the proposal, while some accused administrators of protecting the church “at the expense of the little guy.”
The evaluations were nothing to fear, says Dan Jackson, president of the Adventist Church in Canada. Instead, job evaluations were designed to protect the church from disgruntled employees who were fired and protect pastors from potential egregious actions from administrators.
Only one conference, the Maritimes Conference on the East Coast, implemented the change.
“I don’t know of any pastor who was relieved of responsibility as a result of an evaluation,” Jackson says. “That’s not the point of an evaluation. It’s supposed to build up our pastors, not to bring them down.”
Although the church’s Ministerial Association provides an evaluation manual for helping pastors, churches and administrators with the evaluation process, job evaluations for pastors are not required by the Church Manual.
In the last three years, Jackson says four fired pastors have filed suits requiring the church in Canada to shell out as much as CN$100,000. The cases were all settled out of court. Tying a performance evaluation to an employment contract could have protected the church from the suits, Jackson says.
Ricardo Graham, secretary for the church’s Pacific Union Conference in the western United States, can only recall three out of 130 pastors being fired in his 11 years as an administrator in that region. But those dismissals were not related to job performance evaluations.
“So as long as there was progress we were willing to work with pastors,” Graham says. “We even paid to have some of them retrained.”
Jackson says those who were let go from the church in Canada lost their jobs because of impropriety, laziness or fraud, and not because of a bad evaluation.
“We want to hope such things don’t exist in our church but the fact is we have had illustrations of every one of those things,” Jackson says.
In North America evaluations are usually a local issue because pastors are hired by local conferences, church administrators say. With the Adventist Church having more than 500 local conferences and missions worldwide, the differences in handling evaluations can vary.
Some conferences allow their church members or board members to evaluate their pastors. Others ask their pastors to evaluate themselves. In some regions of the world there is no check at all.
Some argue an evaluation doesn’t have to exist solely for administration to cover legal tracks but could benefit the person being evaluated
“I would be excited about being evaluated,” says Walt Groff, pastor of the Sunset Oaks Adventist Church in Rocklin, California. “I believe in a formal evaluation but give it some teeth. … Use this valuable tool to make our pastors the best in the world.”
In Canada, Jackson says he thinks pastors might have rejected a formal policy on evaluations because they didn’t have enough time to adjust to the idea. He also believes pastors saw it as an attempt to move the role of ministers into “just another profession,” and less of a sacred calling.
Such a trend would be disconcerting for Mark Johnson, vice president of the Adventist Church in British Columbia, Canada. He believes sacrificing spiritual emphasis will result in ministry like “running a Wal-Mart chain.”
But good management skills are desirable in a pastor says Skip Bell, professor of church leadership and administration at the Adventist Theological Seminary at Andrews University and former president of the church’s New York Conference. He says the school is equipping pastors with an arsenal of skills that puts them on the same tier as leaders who run successful businesses.
“Spiritual and theological formation are key to the development of the pastor,” Bell says. “That means pastors must develop characteristics that equip them for service.”
Qualifications, he says, should include effective preaching, empowering people, listening and caring, working well with different age groups, and changing the status quo.
“We feel we develop people along these lines and don’t believe we’re asking too much,” Bell says. “A well-prepared pastor has the potential of responding to the greatest leadership challenge in the world.”
While not everyone agrees with evaluations, Jackson says he feels all members have the right to expect a certain level of performance from church employees.
“There has to be a way to ensure that,” he says.
Trevor Kunene, secretary for the church in Southern Africa, says the church there conducts regular evaluations of its ministers.
“Evaluations are not about helping you keep your job,” Kunene says. “They are supposed to help you improve your performance in helping prepare people for the Second Coming of God.”
Copyright (c) 2007 by Adventist News Network.
