When a Book Is an Ambulance

The updates, the emails, the posts—it all ends tonight.

After one month and half a dozen email updates, my Kickstarter campaign for Don’t Just Send a Resume ends tonight at 11 pm EST. Thank you to everyone who helped and prayed for the project. It was a huge success.

If you’d like to still help, go for it. Every extra $15 raised will help me get the book to a job-placement coordinator at new seminary.

As a final email, I thought you might enjoy reading the current preface to the book to see how I believe it will prevent pastors from floundering.

Thank you,
Benjamin

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“Preface” to Don’t Just Send a Resume

It took me five years to earn my seminary degree. It was exhausting. It cost thousands of dollars and took thousands of hours to learn what I needed to learn so I could help lead a local church. Eventually that training was complete, and it was time for my classmates and me to look for jobs.

This didn’t go well for many of us. In fact, some students—men I respected and thought would make great pastors—struggled to find the right church, or any church at all.

In a word, they floundered.

Why? Because they didn’t know how to find a job. They didn’t know what they were doing. I suspect there are valid reasons why this was the case.

First, they forgot—or they never learned—that the business world is different from the vocational ministry world. These differences startled me when I began interviewing for pastoral jobs. For example, during the interview process with one church, the pastors visited my home for a meal. They met my entire family, and even saw my laundry room as I gave them a tour of our house. Trust me, this never happened during my former career as a mechanical engineer.

Second, pastors struggle to connect with the right local church because many seminaries don’t have margin to teach students how to transition from the classroom. For every book a professor includes, there are ten others he or she wanted to add but couldn’t.

If you’re a seminary student about to graduate, it’s no guarantee you’ll have a pastoral job in a few months. You know the feeling—and it’s terrifying. In his book to help pastors during transitions, author John Cionca writes, “Occasionally, I meet seminarians who view a Master of Divinity degree as a union card. They figure that someone owes them a church upon graduation” (Cionca, Before You Move, 35). I’m not sure I’d go this far, but I understand the sentiment. All that effort, time, and money—in addition to a sense of calling that’s been confirmed by others—creates certain expectations, or at least certain hopes.

So, when the end of the tunnel starts to look more hopeless than hopeful, disillusionment and panic ensue. It’s overwhelming to think about all the steps involved in finding the right job, especially if you’ve never done it before. Where do I start? Who do I talk to? What do I send them? It’s no less terrifying when you’re currently in a church but considering a new role. How do I know my family and I will fit at the new church? How do I tell people I’m leaving?

For all those questions, we pastors need solid coaching. We need processes that are theologically informed and practically oriented. We need anecdotes from real hiring processes, and we need strategies for every step of the way.

This is what Don’t Just Send a Resume is about. Consider for a moment an Emergency Medical Technician (EMT). An EMT, though trained, needs an ambulance to get him to the accident. He’s been trained to help those who hurt, but he needs a ride to be able to do so. If he can’t get to the accident, he can’t help. In the same way, I’m not interested in pastors earning a lot of money or finding the flashiest job. I simply want to get those who are trained to help—pastors—on the path to those churches who need their help.

This whole project started with two e-mails. Joel, a friend from seminary, emailed me to ask for advice about what a pastor should do to find a job in a church. That was two and a half years ago. Joel was about to transition from one church to another, and he was looking for help. I sent him an e-mail with ten suggestions. Who sends a ten-point e-mail? I guess I do! Anyway, Joel actually appreciated my advice, as well as the subsequent coaching I gave him. After that, my e-mail response to Joel grew into a series of blog posts. Then came eighteen months of research with my nose in books on the topic, both church-specific and business books alike. Then came over fifty interviews with pastors of all different ages and roles and denominations who’d recently made a pastoral transition. And finally, then came this book—or, rather, this ambulance.

Let’s go for a ride.

* Photo by Zhen Hu on Unsplash

Will You be My First Kickstarter Backer?

I’d love for you to be the first person to contribute to the fundraiser I’m doing for my new book.

But you can’t be the first. Someone beat you to it. I’m sorry.

Let me explain . . .

Why Write a Book to Help Pastors?

For several years I’ve been working on a book to help pastors in the job-search process. It’s called, Don’t Just Send a Resume. The idea is that pastoral ministry is an embodied process (you go all-in), which means you don’t want to do the bare minimum in the interview process (i.e., just send a resume) because that’s not what you do when you pastor a church.

Even though right now several thousand pastors are contemplating a transition from one church to another, almost no books have been written to help them since before Facebook was invented. That’s too long. We need to change this.

As of this morning, there are 676 job postings on ChurchStaffing.com. I’d guess that for every opening there are several dozen applicants—in some cases many more. These numbers do not even consider the many other pastors who will do most of their job-searching through seminaries, denominations, or church-staffing firms.

This winter I made the decision to self-publish Don’t Just Send a Resume, which requires investing more money into the book for editing and marketing. I’ve already spent around $2,500 and 600 hours on it. Doing interviews with 50 local church pastors and recruiting a dozen top-notch contributors to the book (like Jared C. Wilson, Chris Brauns, and William Vanderbloemen) took a lot of work.

But to see the book launched successfully, it will take another $2,000. I’d love your help with that.

How Does Kickstarter Work?

Kickstarter is a crowdfunding website. It’s used by inventors, videographers, entrepreneurs, authors, and other creatives to share their plans to make something that they believe will help others. Participants in the community who get excited about the project are called “backers.”

I did a lot of research about Kickstarter beforehand, and here are two things I learned. First, Kickstarter fundraising is all or nothing. If you make your goal, you receive what was pledged. If you don’t reach your goal, you get nothing.

The second thing I learned is that you need to get a good, early jump on your fundraising, even if your campaign lasts a month as mine does. All the late comers to the project, want to see that the project is a “winner” before they’ll give.

So, to be very blunt, I’d love your help today. Or tomorrow. Or soon.

How Can You Back This Project?

Let me come back to where I started. Yesterday I finalized the project on Kickstarter and hit the launch button before breakfast. I wanted everything ready—no mistakes, no glitches—for when I let you, my blog readers, know how they could help get my book into the world.

However, two people already beat you to the chance to become the projects first backers. Someone on Kickstarter pledged $1 and another $25. But you can be the first FAN AND FLAME reader to give. It would mean a lot to me.

I typically only post once a week on Tuesdays at 2pm. However, you might see a few extra emails from me this month. Rather than getting frustrated by that, I’m praying that you’d be excited.

You can click here to see the campaign and watch the video I made. Thanks for your support!