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Leadership Lab: "Five Essentials for New Lead Pastors"

Posted by Reimagine Curator on June 10, 2026 at 17:32

Leadership Lab Profile

Five Essentials for New Lead Pastors

Notes From the First Four Years of Pastoral Transition

Featuring reflections by Glenn Packiam


Leadership transitions are never merely about filling a position, launching a vision, or gaining organizational momentum. They are spiritual, relational, emotional, and cultural moments that reveal what a congregation has carried, protected, feared, hoped for, and sometimes avoided.

This Leadership Lab takes Glenn Packiam’s reflections on his first years as a lead pastor and expands them into a guided learning experience for pastors, elders, ministry teams, search teams, and church leaders navigating transition.

The five essentials—acknowledging the real weight of leadership, placing health before vision, taking time, building the team, and setting culture—invite leaders to slow down long enough to discern what is actually happening beneath the surface of ministry.

This is not a lab about leadership technique first. It is a lab about shepherding wisely.

It asks leaders to resist the pressure to arrive with quick answers, instant strategy, or premature vision. Instead, it calls them to listen, grieve, discern, build trust, interpret culture, and lead from spiritual health rather than personal urgency.

The central insight is simple but demanding:

Culture and health precede sustainable momentum.

For new lead pastors, this means the first work is not proving oneself. It is learning the people, absorbing complexity without being crushed by it, naming the emotional weight of transition, and giving that weight back to Jesus.

For churches, this lab offers a way to reimagine transition not as a leadership handoff but as a discipleship moment. What kind of people are we becoming? What kind of culture are we creating? What anxieties are shaping us? What stories, practices, language, and values are forming our shared life?

The goal is not merely a successful pastoral transition.

The deeper goal is a spiritually healthy church, led by shepherds who are learning to follow the presence, character, timing, and wisdom of Christ.

Continue. . .
________________________

Five Essentials for New Lead Pastors

Notes From My Journal
Nearly Four Years In
By Glenn Packiam

{ Expanded as a Leadership Lab Mini-Course for Reimagine.Network }

About Glenn Packiam

Glenn Packiam is the Lead Pastor of Rockharbor Church in Costa Mesa, California, and a Senior Fellow at Barna Group. He previously served as Associate Senior Pastor at New Life Church in Colorado Springs. Glenn is a pastor, theologian, songwriter, author, and ministry leader known for his work in spiritual formation, resilient leadership, worship, and the renewal of the Church.

Original article used with permission. Full credit belongs to Glenn Packiam.

Mini-Course Introduction

Leadership transitions are not merely organizational shifts. They are spiritual, emotional, relational, and cultural moments that reveal the soul of a congregation.

This Leadership Lab expands Glenn Packiam’s reflections into a guided learning experience for pastors, elders, ministry leaders, search teams, and church staff navigating leadership change.

The deeper lesson beneath these five essentials is this:

“Healthy leadership transitions are less about taking control and more about discerning culture, absorbing complexity, building trust, and shepherding people wisely.”

1. The Weight Is Real

Original Commentary by Glenn Packiam
I wrote previously that your first job in a leadership transition is to discern and discover — to be a cultural anthropologist before you try to be a visionary. That’s true. But what I didn’t say is that the discernment process itself has a cost.

You absorb a lot. People’s stories. Unhealed wounds. Unmet expectations. Loyalty conflicts that were there long before you arrived. And when things turn upward, excitement grows and pressure mounts. You might feel the need to keep it going.

The weight is real. Don’t pretend it isn’t.

There are three moves I keep coming back to:

Acknowledge it — name it, at least to yourself and a trusted few. Suppressed weight doesn’t disappear; it finds another way out.

Grieve it — some of what you’re carrying isn’t just responsibility, it’s loss. For those who took over after occupying a different role in the same church, it’s the loss of how the dynamics used to be between you and the team you’re now leading. Grieving isn’t weak; it’s honest.

Give it to Jesus — the Hebrew word kavod, usually translated “glory,” carries the ancient sense of weight. When we give glory to God, we are literally handing the heaviness back to the only One strong enough to hold it.


Leadership Lab Expansion
Teaching Notes

• As Glenn Packiam writes, “The weight is real. Don’t pretend it isn’t.”

• Every church has an emotional history. A new pastor inherits unresolved conflict, nostalgia, hidden expectations, fear of change, and lingering disappointments.

• Leadership includes emotional labor. Pastors often absorb stress, anxiety, criticism, grief, and unrealistic expectations while simultaneously trying to inspire hope.

• Discernment is spiritual work. Listening deeply to stories, tensions, fears, and loyalties helps reveal the actual culture of a church.

• Jesus never intended leaders to carry the Church alone. Christ is the Head of the Church; pastors are under-shepherds, not saviors.

Discussion & Reflection Questions

1. What emotional weight am I currently carrying?
2. What expectations am I trying to fulfill?
3. What losses have I not grieved?
4. What anxieties in the church am I internalizing?
5. What would it look like to truly “give the weight to Jesus”?

2. Vision Comes Second. Health Comes First.

Original Commentary by Glenn Packiam
The reason vision has to wait isn’t because of strategy; it’s because the system. Family systems theory teaches us that anxiety doesn’t disappear in an organization; it migrates.

In a relational system, anxiety (think: stress, unrest, fear or angst) flows toward the most powerful and the most vulnerable.

If you walk in with an urgent need to prove yourself, you will send that anxiety cascading through your whole team before you realize what’s happening.

I’ve also had to learn this:

What people say and how people react says more about them than about you.

Their defense mechanism may be a diagnostic. Understanding what a reaction reveals about a person’s history, their fears, their loyalties makes you a far better leader than taking every response personally.

This is the difference between arriving as a leader and arriving as a shepherd.

Don’t arrive declaring, “Here’s where we’re going!” Start by asking, “How are you doing?”


Leadership Lab Expansion
Teaching Notes

• As Packiam observes, “What people say and how people react says more about them than about you.”

• Churches are relational systems, not machines. Anxiety spreads quickly through uncertainty, insecurity, fear of change, and power shifts.

• Shepherding begins with listening before announcing.

• Wise leaders interpret reactions before responding to them.

• Emotional health precedes sustainable vision.

Discussion Questions

1. What creates anxiety during church transitions?
2. What behaviors communicate safety?
3. How do we react when criticized?
4. Are we leading like CEOs or shepherding like pastors?

3. Take Your Time

Original Commentary by Glenn Packiam
I said it in Lesson 1 of the earlier post, but it bears repeating with more urgency: slow is smooth and smooth is fast.

Rich Villodas, one of my dear friends and one of the leaders I respect most, shared some wisdom a consultant told him during his leadership transition roughly 15 years ago: It takes 4 years.

Year 1 = Orientation

Year 2 = Experimentation

Year 3 = Evaluation

Year 4 = Acceleration

This may sound absurd until you’ve watched leaders try to rush it and create disruption that takes twice as long to undo.

Remember, the train can’t pick up speed when there are no tracks for the train.

The instinct to accelerate never fully goes away, which means the discipline of slowing down has to become an ongoing practice not just a posture you adopt in the early days.


Leadership Lab Expansion
Teaching Notes

• Glenn Packiam reminds leaders that “slow is smooth and smooth is fast.”

• Sustainable change requires trust.

• Leadership transitions unfold in stages:
Year 1 = Orientation
Year 2 = Experimentation
Year 3 = Evaluation
Year 4 = Acceleration

• Slow leadership is not passive leadership. It reflects wisdom, timing, patience, and discernment.

Reflection Questions

1. Where am I rushing unnecessarily?
2. What pressures are making me hurry?
3. Have I built enough relational trust?
4. What needs patient cultivation rather than rapid expansion?

4. Build the Team

Original Commentary by Glenn Packiam
In a transition, there’s a temptation to either make staff changes immediately or to drag your feet too long. The timing is crucial, but eventually you will need to build the team that can take you where you want to go. It cannot rest on you.

Most leaders in church circles know the foundational three qualities of a good hire:

Character (Does this person demonstrate spiritual and relational maturity?)

Competency (Do they have the skills the role requires?)

Chemistry (Do they gel with the team?)

Those still matter. But I’ve come to believe they’re not enough, especially for critical hires in a season of transition.

Calling — Are they called to local church ministry broadly, and to this church specifically, in this season?

Culture — Do they naturally resonate with our values, language, and rhythms — not just get along with a few coworkers?

Charism — Do their particular spiritual gifts align with what this church needs right now?

Clock — Does their timeline of development match the church’s current season?

The right hire is not just an addition; they’re a multiplication. A good team produces fruit exponentially.


Leadership Lab Expansion
Teaching Notes

• As Glenn Packiam states, “The right hire is not just an addition; they’re a multiplication.”

• Healthy ministry requires healthy teams.

• Hiring is spiritual discernment, not merely organizational staffing.

• Alignment matters as much as competency.

• Good people can still be wrong fits for a specific ministry season.

Discussion Questions

1. What destroys team health fastest?
2. What behaviors build trust among staff?
3. How do we discern calling rather than merely talent?
4. What gifts does our church need most in this season?

5. Set the Culture

Original Commentary by Glenn Packiam
Culture-setting is not a just phase. It doesn’t end after year one or year two. It’s the ongoing work of leadership.

As I wrote in a recent post, culture evaporates.

Mission drifts. Vision leaks. But culture evaporates.

This means you have to keep refilling the fountain of culture, deliberately and repeatedly.

Here’s the simple framework I use — it takes a few LAPS:

Language — The words you use signal your values in small but powerful ways.

Artifacts — Everything you create reinforces or undermines your culture.

Practices — The things you do repeatedly and collectively.

Stories — What you celebrate shapes what people believe you value.

You don’t have to engineer strategy or manufacture momentum. Those follow. They always follow culture. Culture is upstream of everything.


Leadership Lab Expansion
Teaching Notes

• Glenn Packiam writes, “Mission drifts. Vision leaks. But culture evaporates.”

• Culture must be continually reinforced.

• What leaders celebrate shapes organizational values.

• Practices are culture made visible.

• Culture shapes mission more deeply than strategy.

Reflection Questions

1. What culture are we actually creating?
2. What stories dominate our church?
3. What practices unintentionally undermine our mission?
4. What invisible values currently shape us?

Final Leadership Reflection

One of the most important insights in Glenn Packiam’s reflections is this:

“Culture and health precede sustainable momentum.”

The modern church often prizes innovation, speed, branding, visibility, and expansion. But the New Testament repeatedly emphasizes character, endurance, shepherding, wisdom, unity, and maturity in Christ.

The goal is not merely successful transition. The deeper goal is a spiritually healthy church shaped by the presence, character, and leadership of Jesus Christ.

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