GraceLife Transition Team

A Letter from the
Transition Team

A lot of thoughts and emotions accompany any time of transition. In this particular time, we know we will miss the leadership and encouragement we all receive weekly from Pastor Tim. We really appreciate his willingness to delay his retirement until God shows us the next step in His plan for GraceLife. Here’s an overview of the process we will follow.

The transition team has been meeting, discussing and, most importantly, praying about God’s direction in this search for the past several months. Now, we ask the church to join us in that effort.

Over the next few months, the transition team will review the resumes we receive and pray for those men. We will review what we can from the man’s current appointment and the journey that brought him to his current position. We will listen to his sermons to see how God is currently using his preaching and how God might use his preaching at GraceLife. One of the signs we saw when God pointed us to Pastor Tim was how mightily God used those “sample” sermons that we listened to from Pastor Tim. Aside from the preaching style, we were struck at how God orchestrated the request for some typical sermons to work through the lives of the committee members with those messages.

Once we identify a man that God may be calling, we’ll reach out to him directly to learn more about him and determine if he senses God preparing him for a change. It’s possible we will speak to several individuals before God gives us a definitive direction to follow.

When we come to a point where we, and the candidate, feel God wants us to proceed, we will bring him and his family to Christiansburg to meet our members, see the community and speak to us from God’s word.

If, after all that, there is a sense that this is God’s plan for our next senior pastor, we’ll ask the church to affirm that. Based on that affirmation, we’ll work with this man and his family to bring them to Christiansburg and begin the next phase in living the GraceLife.

It might be helpful to share some thoughts about “expectations or qualifications”. As a team, we have already seen the difficulty of recognizing what some of this man’s characteristics will be without imposing our own expectations on that person. We know that God has some specific requirements for a pastor that He has revealed in His word. But we also struggle with trying to impose our own description or qualification on this individual. The transition team has recognized the reality that the question is not “Is this who the team wants?”; it’s not even “Is this who the church wants?”. The only question that matters is, “Is this who God wants?”

If we answer that question successfully, we believe God will continue to bless GraceLife as we live out our mission to help people who don’t know Jesus come to know Him and those who do know Him come to know Him better.