Life transitions are hard. Particularly when it comes to the death of someone special to you.
When my two parents died within nearly a year from one another, I felt like the world shifted underneath my feet. I thankfully had some good friends over the years, along with numerous cousins, and I had been married for about fifteen years. However, these relationships only encompassed certain portions of my life. My parents on the other hand were there over the entirety of my life up to that point.
Though I was closer emotionally to my mom, losing my dad after my mom turned out to be harder. My mom remained pretty sharp until her cancer incapacitated her in her last two months. Yet my dad’s advancing dementia spanned well over a year. Seeing him slip over that period eventually led to my despair the day he died, when I finally realized that the only person left who knew me during my whole life was gone. What was going to happen next?
One of the last persons to visit with my dad before he died was pastor Travis Simone, just three days before I got the phone call that my dad was dead. As I recall, a few days later Travis came by my house and brought me a Tim Keller book on suffering. I appreciated that Travis was there to help me through my life transition at a critical time.
I think about that transition time as I have read Travis’ D.Min doctoral paper, Moses is Dead: Strategies for Pastoral Transition. Just as the death of Moses eventually allowed the “baton to be passed” to Joshua, Travis had experienced his own transition, just a few years prior to my parents’ death.
Our church had suddenly lost our then lead pastor for several decades, due to an uncomfortable and unresolved controversy. Though not a physical death, the loss of the lead pastor was still a kind of death, an experience that was both shocking and unsettling. Many congregants who had made the church their Christian home for years were traumatized.
As a less senior member of the pastoral staff, Travis was suddenly asked to step forward as the interim pastor of a rather large congregation. If there was such a thing as a “megachurch” in Williamsburg, Virginia, hardly a large city, it was our church: the Williamsburg Community Chapel. Travis had to help our church navigate that difficult period, and he eventually was selected by the church membership to be the next lead pastor of this independent church, which had no denominational backing or predetermined succession plan. The church had been a part of a loose network of churches, a “consortium”, made up of other “community chapels” in the greater Hampton Roads Virginia area. But for the most part, that relationship at that particular moment was rather quite loose, so our church was pretty much on its own. It was a tough task to take on.
Life transitions are hard. Sudden church leadership transitions included.
Pastor Travis Simone, leading a book club discussion for his recent D.Min. dissertation entitled Moses Is Dead: Strategies for Pastoral Transition in the summer of 2024, at the Williamsburg Community Chapel.
Veracity 