Do you feel called? Are you being led? Are others encouraging you to consider if God can use you in such a way? All of these questions are referring to the same situation—the possibility of being a new church start pastor. How do you know if you have the skills, the traits, the attributes needed to lead such an important, yet difficult, task in expanding God’s Kingdom?

The Florida Annual Conference has a discernment process developed over several years to help clergy discern if they are gifted and equipped to start a new community of faith. The total process takes about eight to 10 months to complete. The process can be stopped at any point either by the candidate or the director.

It begins every December when the Florida Conference Cabinet considers names of persons to be invited to participate in the process. These names come through several routes—pastors who work with potential candidates, district superintendents, the Episcopal Office and clergy themselves who feel they are called to this kind of ministry. Each person receives a letter with an explanation of the process. Potential candidates indicate if they are interested in pursing the process. If so, an application is made to begin the process and both lay and clergy references are checked.

If the indication is positive, then a one-on-one interview with the candidate is scheduled. Upon completion of the interview, the candidate then takes a battery of two tests administered by the Lutheran Counseling Services of Winter Park, Fla. The executive director of New Church Development then interprets the report to the candidate. If both tests indicate the candidate has the appropriate skills, gifts and aptitudes the next step is to attend the United Methodist National School for Congregational Development. The last several years this school has had between 500 to 600 people from across the United States in attendance. This time provides training in the methodology of starting a new church, and it usually takes several weeks after the school to begin to absorb all that has been presented. The school usually creates a sense of excitement, as well as anxiety, about the urgency and importance of starting a new congregation.

The final step is to engage in a final one-on-one with the executive director to see if skills, gifts, leadings, prayer and training are all in alignment for this kind of ministry. If such an alignment is discerned, then the candidate’s name is entered into the pool of nominees from which the cabinet selects a pastor for a new church.

The cabinet has made several strategic decisions to help insure the successful beginnings of new congregations: 1). All new church pastors must be in the pool of persons who have completed the process, and 2). Everyone who gets placed within the pool will not necessarily have an opportunity to start a new church. They may be the second pastor of a new church start, for example.