Wade Hodges’ “Before You Go”

I’m a Wade Hodges fan. I’ve subscribed to his blog for over a year now. I think I started reading his stuff because of my interest in church planting, and Wade had just left an established church to lead a church planting team.

Wade posted about his experiences with brutal honesty as he eventually realized the effort wasn’t going to work. You know, anyone can write honestly about his fabulous success, but only a few can write about failure and keep it both real and interesting.

Wade has put his newly found free time to good use, publishing Before You Go: A Few Sneaky-Good Questions Every Minister Must Answer Before Moving to a New Church as a Kindle book on Amazon ($2.99). It’s 57 pages of advice to a preacher about moving to a new church — how to prepare himself, how to anticipate and avoid problems, and mainly how to make certain the new church will be a good match.

Wade writes from the perspective of a preacher who’s gone through a few hiring processes — and been burned. I’m no preacher; just an elder — and so the book is kind of a backward read for me. It doesn’t so much speak to my needs as the needs of those I interview. And that’s a very good thing. The book helps me understand where the interviewee is coming from. It might even help me help him avoid making a mistake.

Here a few quotes from the book —

Most churches deceive themselves about how healthy they are. Most ministers deceive themselves about how capable they are. Too many interviews boil down to two self-deceived parties trying to convince each other of how much they can accomplish if they work together.

The question that gets lost amid the excitement over how the new church will be better than the one you’re leaving is: How will you be different?

Can you love the church as it is? Here’s one way to test your love for the church you’re interviewing:

1. Make a list of all the things about the church that you’d like to change once you get there.

2. Now look at the top three items on your list and assume those things will never change. No matter how long you’re there or how hard you try, these changes will never happen.

3. If you can’t stand the thought of these things never changing, and if you don’t think you could ever really love and serve a church that couldn’t embrace these changes, don’t go.

Because it’s likely that the things you most want to change about your new church will be the hardest things to change. If you can’t love the church as it is without these changes ever happening, then you have no business going there. You’ll be miserable and you’ll make them miserable by trying to change them into the kind of church you want them to be.

And here’s the really big thing I learned: An interviewee doesn’t get to see that much of the church during the interview. There’s no way he can know a congregation in any real depth because the process just doesn’t allow for it. Therefore, a smart preacher like Wade will size up my church based on just about everything he sees — even the church’s choice as to who picks him up at the airport.

Not only are the elders interviewing the candidate, the candidate is interviewing the elders and the church — by much more than the questions that are spoken. Those of us who plan the interviews need to be very careful that we communicate what we want to communicate. And that we don’t fool a preacher into agreeing to a hire that we both later come to regret.

Buy the book.

PS — I got the book for free. I can’t be bought for $2.99.