Summary: Personal Experience At St. Paul African Methodist Episcopal Church

Four years ago, I departed my first pastoral assignment at St. Paul African Methodist Episcopal Church in Dickerson Maryland after serving for three years. In that time I learned a lot about leading, interacting with people, communication, cultural expectations, and how both leaders and congregations can either fuel the immunity to change environments within a church or encourage it remain unchanged all but killing any potential for growth and advancement. Change can often fail in the church context because of a lack of trust and confidence in the leader. This accord to author Rick Maurer is one that can kill and otherwise fine idea.

In April of 2016 the week before Easter I was appointed to New Creation AME Church in Washington DC suburb

Like Peter, I arrived at the church without much background and assumed that things were supposed to fall into place. That said, I didn’t create the best spiritually corporate environment for the entire congregation to evolve. My heart was in the right place, but the reality is that even though I have my talents and gifts; the initial goals I developed were my own and not necessarily what the church wanted. I now know that I was not adequately prepared nor experienced enough in this area to encourage the change that church needed. And at the end of the day most people automatically default to what they know best; their own desires. We most often start by setting goals through the limited purview of the eye of personal individualism. In short we do or set goals and makes decision the way we prefer to see things. “It’s our way most often, because we want things done that way.” And I believe this is also an area of concern for the African Methodist Episcopal church as its policy of changing pastor and educating them seemed fallen short. With denominational churches failing at an alarming rate; no one has ever really address the need to prepare pastors in the area of church transition and change prior to assigning them. So in my new assignment at the time I knew

There were no choirs; the music sounded like a cross between “the 700 club meets and Lutheran funeral music. At the time, I should have viewed the two musicians as the author suggests as a precious resource or commodity full of valuable insight and information to help aid in determining the roots cause of what plagued the church, but inexperience won the initial battle. Looking back at some of my actions and decision making, I believe what the author’s was suggesting was to not always everything through sorrowful or negative eyes. Well in terms of trying to see thignsanother way I pulled back and asked the main musican a woman who was not a member of the church, in her roughly her early 70s if we could meet. I poured my heart out to her and told I needed her to the minsity of the church forward. My only requests was to selet specific church hymns that most AME congregation know abd have commited to memory to present a more cohesive worship service. I handed her a list of roughly 40 hymns. She looked at the list and resistantley told me she would not allow another person to tell her how to utilize her musical gifts for ministry. This erratic departure immediately caused a scare among the declining handful of people I had within the church. Eventually I found a very spirit filled musician and hired him to support our Sunday worship services. Most people loved the new change, but a