Churches, Pastors Build Relationships Faster with 'Onboarding'

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A United Methodist Insight Special

Every year, some 30 to 40 percent of United Methodist churches receive a new pastor through the process known as "appointment." Unlike churches that "call" their pastors, United Methodist clergy are "appointed" by a bishop to a church in an annual (regional) conference.

Many pastor changes occur because of retirements. Sometimes a change in pastors comes because a congregation has asked for a better fit for their DNA. Often, a change is made because a bishop and his or her cabinet, who act as the conference's personnel committee, try to match a clergyperson's skills with a church's ministerial needs in their community. However a pastoral change comes about, a new pastor and a church typically spend their first year building enough partnership to move forward together in ministry.

Now a process known as "onboarding," created by a United Methodist laywoman experienced in human resources speeds up that process while it uncovers the unspoken aspects of a congregation's and a pastor's identities so that they can fit together better from the start.

A video for the Candler Center for Christian Leadership where the program is housed describes onboarding's two goals:

  • A church gains "deep knowledge" about its new pastor.
  • An incoming pastor receives "early information" about the church's culture, hopes and dreams.

United Methodist-style "onboarding" is the inspiration of lifelong church member Claire Bowen of Atlanta. As an HR professional, she spent more than 30 years in the corporate world helping newly hired top executives connect with their staffs more quickly by honestly identifying mutual expectations, work-culture quirks, and other details.

Bowen grew up in Statesboro, Georgia, at First UMC, and later, after college, moved to Peachtree Road UMC in Atlanta. After a 20-year pastor retired at her church, the new pastor, the Rev. Dr. Bill Britt, discovered Bowen's corporate work but too late for his early years. Britt had seen the perfect fit for this corporate process for the UMC’s itineracy system. So, she offered to conduct an onboarding for one of his pastor friends.

That's how Bowen ended up in 2013 "onboarding" the Rev. Davis Chappell at Brentwood UMC in Nashville, Tenn., one of the city's most thriving congregations. That experiment went so well that as she drove home to Atlanta from Nashville, she remembers thinking: "God, this is what I want to do for the rest of my life."

UMC unique personnel process

In the 10 years since her revelation, Bowen perfected onboarding for the unique United Methodist personnel process, which she acknowledges “has challenging pieces for including everyone in the UMC structure." The process now works like this:

When a new appointment is set, the conference helps the incoming pastor issue an invitation to the congregation's lay leaders to meet with a certified onboarding facilitator about their hopes and concerns for the new pastor. If the church has a large staff, a separate session is set up to hear the staff’s questions and advice so they can educate the new pastor about their church and community.

The new pastor welcomes the laity to the session, invites them to be completely honest about their concerns, and then leaves, turning the meeting over to the facilitator. In turn, the facilitator asks participants a set of 12 pre-determined questions such as:

  • How would you describe your church's DNA?
  • Where are the "landmines," the "sacred cows" of the congregation?
  • What do you already know about your new pastor?
  • What do you wish to know about your new pastor? "On this question, they can ask anything," said Bowen.

Questions, which often are adapted to each congregation's identity, aren't published in advance so there's no possibility of one perspective dominating the conversation, Bowen said. Answers are written on a flip chart, and cellphone photos are taken of each sheet and sent to the waiting pastor.

When the facilitator's conversation with laypeople is complete, the facilitator coaches the pastor to see if there are any issues needing clarification. The pastor returns to the group and the facilitator sits in the back allowing the pastor to be in charge now. The give-and-take of the meeting ends with a group prayer for the leadership of the new pastor.

A gift for Candler

In January 2023, Bowen took her program to a member of her church, Jan Love, then dean of UMC-related Candler School of Theology at Emory University in Atlanta. She gave Candler the copyrighted program and agreed to create more opportunities to certify conference UMC leaders in Team Building models and Strategic Vision work. By September 2023, Love, who recently retired after 17 years as dean, set up the Candler Center for Christian Leadership, complete with initial funding. Celeste Eubanks, a human resource professional from the Alabama-West Florida Annual Conference, joined Candler as the center's director at the same time.

Since she began the process for pastors, Bowen estimates she's personally conducted at least 150 onboarding sessions, and the program has trained at least 230 facilitators to guide the "new-leader" process throughout all five U.S. jurisdictions of The United Methodist Church.

One of those first "new leaders" was Bishop David Graves, who in 2016 was headed for his first assignment as a bishop in the Alabama-West Florida Annual Conference.

Bowen told United Methodist Insight that initially she wanted to conduct Bishop Graves' onboarding first with district superintendents, who make up the appointive cabinet. Instead, Bishop Graves asked her to conduct the process initially with district administrative assistants, whom he called the conference's "information centers." Once the bishop and the administrative assistants got to know each other, Bowen repeated the process with conference leaders, district superintendents and pastors of the conference's largest churches.

Bowen said Bishop Graves – who moves to lead Kentucky, Tennessee-Western Kentucky and Central Appalachian Missionary conferences on Sept. 1 – found onboarding so successful that he's now the advising bishop for the Candler Center for Christian Leadership. In a brochure for the center, Bishop Graves states: “I believe the onboarding process put me two years ahead in determining leadership and strategic priorities.”

Now the Candler-housed process is able to train more UMC conference people to conduct these onboardings with the help of Celeste Eubanks’ leadership and guidance. Her help allows Bowen to train more conference staff to deliver onboarding because trained clergy on conference staff often go back into the local church, requiring others to be certified to take their place.

Great success in Iowa

Iowa Annual Conference used onboarding to great success this summer, said the Rev. Dr. Jaye Johnston, conference superintendent for congregational excellence and new communities of faith. He said his first experience with the onboarding process was the assignment of a new bishop, the Rev. Kennetha Bigham-Tsai, following her election in November 2022. After a bishop benefits from the process, they want to provide it for their pastors going to new churches, said Johnson.

"We use a Congregational Assessment Tool to make appointments with all our churches," Johnson told United Methodist Insight. "About 47% of our churches score what we call 'clergy focused,' which means that that they're not dominated by clergy, that the church thinks well of itself (no matter who's appointed their pastor).

"We know from the CAT that once the relationship between the pastor and that kind of congregation starts to go downhill, it's nearly impossible for it to go back uphill," Johnson said. "So, it's really critical in those churches to start well and continue that relationship well."

Johnson said Iowa has conducted 10 onboarding sessions with these critical churches this year. He said they've had enough positive results that conference leaders want to expand the program over the next few years to include all full-time appointments among the 522 churches in the annual conference.

"The ideal time for onboarding is between is June and August," Johnson said (appointments typically begin July 1 each year). "The further you get into August, the harder it is because the school season begins, and activity goes up.

"My goal is to get enough people trained in onboarding to be able to offer it to 30 or 40 churches within the June to August time frame," he said.

Johnson said onboarding proved highly instructive to Iowa church leaders because the new pastor and church members "address all the things that came up that are on the flip chart as they go through the process."

"If one person says it, there are 10 people thinking it," Johnson said. "The process allows us to have a really good conversation about questions that people have.

Two onboarding examples

For example, he described two onboarding sessions that took place this year.

"A pastor came in from another annual conference to one of our larger churches, which with the conference's help provided a significant increase in pay," Johnson said. "What came out in the conversation with church leaders was, 'Hey, we're taking a big step up. How's this going to be worthwhile to us?' And the pastor said, 'I want you to know that I've taken a pay cut about equal to what you've put up, so we're all in this together and we're going to move forward in relationship and make a difference in our community.'

"Onboarding gave the pastor a chance to put his issue together with the church's issue and turn it into something more productive," Johnson said. "Otherwise, they may have stewed about it for months, or it may never have gotten out."

In the second example, Johnson said, a pastor was on renewal leave before he was appointed to a church. The laity wanted to know why he went on leave and why he came back.

"Those are really good questions," Johnson said. "That allowed him to talk about how he started to get burnout, and what frustrated him about the church. Then the pastor said renewal leave gave him a great time to name and claim the things that are important about ministry."

Every United Methodist church receiving a new pastor is onboarded "whether they know it or not," Johnson said. He said that longtime United Methodists who are familiar with the ways that pastoral appointments can go right or wrong are enthusiastic about the Bowen-Candler process.

"The beauty of this is laypeople have said things to me like, 'this was the best start of a new pastor that we can ever remember'," Johnson said.

The next training session for becoming an onboarding facilitator is scheduled Oct. 29-31 at Candler, said Bowen. Interested persons may contact Celeste Eubanks, director of the Center for Christian Leadership, for details.

Veteran religion journalist Cynthia B. Astle serves as Editor of United Methodist Insight, an online news-and-views publication she founded in 2011 as a media channel for marginalized and under-served United Methodists. Please email Insight for permission to reproduce this content elsewhere.