Since April 22 the search team and elders have reviewed over 30 resumes, interacting with over a dozen candidates and focusing on five top prospects. Easily the strongest leader in this field is a young man named Jason Harms who most recently served as a youth pastor in Springfield, MO. Jason and his wife, Emma, will be flying in for live interviews with us the weekend of August 9-11. The whole church family is invited to stay after church on Sunday the 11th to hear Jason’s story and call to ministry in an open Q&A.
We chose to call this role a pastoral resident (see the job posting for details here). The resident will focus on outreach, connections and leadership development. As with a medical residency, this position is designed for someone who has completed his academic studies in pastoral ministry (Jason has an M. Div. from Columbia International University) and now needs to apply what he has learned in a supervised environment. While an internship is usually half for the training of the intern and half for the benefit of a church, a residency is more like 80% for the church and 20% for the trainee.
Part of our intent with this hiring approach is to formalize a program for developing future pastors, church planters and missionaries. This pastoral residency will serve as a template for future interns and residents as we put together training modules for godly living, theological clarity and ministry skills. “
“Be diligent in these matters; give yourself wholly to them, so that everyone may see your progress. Watch your life and doctrine closely. Persevere in them, because if you do, you will save both yourself and your hearers.” 1 Timothy 4:15-16
The apostle Paul implemented this approach with Timothy and others on his missionary teams, patterned after Jesus’ strategy with his twelve disciples. “Jesus’ concern was not with programs to reach the multitudes but with men whom the multitudes would follow” (Robert Coleman, The Master Plan of Evangelism). This is our focus as well with vocational staff and with lay leaders in all of our small groups and ministry teams. We seek to invest in and multiply godly leaders as the top priority for all of our staff, elders and other leaders.
So the pastoral residency represents both the next step for building our vocational staff at Oakwood and formalizing our approach to leadership development overall.