Questions to Ask a Prospective Pastor
Questions for a search committee meeting a pastoral candidate, covering preaching and preparation, pastoral care, safeguarding, governance, conflict, worship, and the practical terms of the call. Written for congregations doing the interviewing rather than for candidates preparing answers.
The questions
Open any question for the note
What did you learn about us before today, and what still puzzles you?
Why ask it
The homework shows the work habits. Candidates who have read the annual reports, listened to a service, or driven through the neighborhood arrive with specific questions, while others arrive with a description of themselves that would fit any congregation.
Take us through a sermon you preached in the last month. How did you decide what to say?
Why ask it
Preparation shows up in the detail: what they read, how early they started, whether anyone saw it first. Ask also for one that did not land, because how a preacher recovers from a bad Sunday tells you more than a strong example does.
Which parts of Scripture do you find hardest to preach, and what do you do with them?
Why ask it
A candidate with no hard passages has either preached very little or is managing the interview. This is where the congregation will actually notice their interpretive method, since it is under strain rather than on display.
What does an ordinary week look like for you, roughly in hours?
Why ask it
Ask for the split between preparation, visiting, meetings, and administration. If their week and the committee's assumptions differ by ten hours in either direction, you have just found the first conflict of the appointment, and it is better found now.
If you took this call, how would you spend your first six months here?
Why ask it
Look for listening before restructuring: home visits, funerals, learning names, reading the minutes of the last three years. Candidates who arrive with a program to install usually collide with the people who built the last one.
How would you find out that someone in the congregation is in the hospital?
Why ask it
Pastoral care fails on information more often than on willingness. Answers worth having involve a system: a rotation of visitors, a phone tree, a deacon who reports weekly. Waiting to be told means the isolated members are the ones missed.
Tell us about a funeral you took for someone you barely knew.
Why ask it
Half of funeral ministry is with a family you meet three days beforehand. Listen for what they asked the family, how they handled a life that was complicated, and whether they stayed in contact in the months afterwards.
If someone tells you something in confidence, where are the limits of that?
Why ask it
A candidate should be able to state the limits without hesitating: risk of harm to a child or vulnerable adult, and the reporting duties that apply where you are. Vagueness on this point is a serious finding, not a small one.
What is your practice on safeguarding, and what would you do if an allegation were made about a volunteer?
Why ask it
You are listening for reporting first and investigating second, together with concrete habits: current background checks, two adults present with children, records kept. Anyone who frames it as paperwork, or who would handle it internally to protect the church, should not go further.
Who supervises you here, and who is able to tell you no?
Why ask it
Their answer maps how they see the elders, board, or session: as accountability they want or as an obstacle to route around. Ask for an occasion when a lay body overruled them and what they did the following week.
Describe a conflict in a previous congregation that you handled badly.
Why ask it
Everyone has one. What you are testing is whether they can state the other side's case fairly, and whether what changed afterwards was their practice or only their vocabulary.
How do you decide when to preach on something contested and when to leave it alone?
Why ask it
Politics, sexuality, and money are the usual candidates. You want a stated threshold rather than a reassurance, because a committee that does not ask this tends to find out in month three, from the pulpit, alongside everyone else.
Where do you differ from our denomination's stated positions?
Why ask it
Almost every minister differs somewhere. The answer to trust names the differences plainly and describes how they intend to serve inside the tradition anyway. Silence here means the differences will surface later without warning.
Our congregation disagrees about music and the shape of the service. What would you do with that?
Why ask it
This is the most common flashpoint in congregational life and rarely the one committees ask about. Useful answers name something they would leave untouched, something they would change slowly, and who they would consult before doing either.
How do you work with paid staff and with volunteers who have held their roles for decades?
Why ask it
Ask specifically about a time they had to end someone's volunteer role. That conversation is among the hardest in church life, and how they handled it predicts how the next twenty will go.
What has the church's obligation to this neighborhood looked like in your hands?
Why ask it
Ask for one thing they started and one thing they ended, with the reasons for both. Ending a tired program well is harder and rarer than launching a new one, and it says more about their judgment.
What keeps your own faith and rest intact when the job is relentless?
Why ask it
Look for something already in place and specific: a day off actually taken, a peer group, a spiritual director, a counselor. General assurances about trusting God, with no practice behind them, are a familiar prelude to burnout and a short tenure.
What would you need from us for this call to be sustainable for you?
Why ask it
Housing, a protected day off, study leave, moving costs, and the treatment of a spouse or family are the unspoken expectations behind many early departures. Note that in some places questions about family circumstances are legally restricted, so leave it to the candidate to raise what they choose.
What are your expectations on compensation, and what else forms part of the package?
Why ask it
Salary, housing or an allowance, pension, continuing education, and sabbatical provisions are all separate items, and assumptions differ widely between denominations. Getting the whole list on the table now prevents a first year spent renegotiating.
What would make you leave a congregation?
Why ask it
Candid answers describe a limit: a governance structure they could not work within, a safeguarding failure, a family need. An answer of never is not reassuring, because it usually means they have not thought about it or will not say.
What do you want to ask us, and who else would you like to talk to before deciding?
Why ask it
Their questions reveal what they have been hurt by before, and the people they ask to meet are just as telling. Asking to speak with the treasurer, the youth, or someone who left the congregation is the mark of a candidate doing serious discernment.
Running a pastoral search well
Practical guidance for the conversation itself
Shape of the process
- Meet more than once, and let the second conversation be less formal. Most of what you need to know surfaces in the third hour, not the first.
- Hear them preach in an ordinary service somewhere, not at a showcase event. Ask a member of that congregation what an average Sunday sounds like.
- Put different ages and different factions in the room. A candidate who connects only with the people who chose them inherits a divided congregation.
- Give them time alone with the people they would work with daily: the administrator, the musician, the youth leader.
- Agree beforehand what would rule a candidate out, and write it down. Committees under vacancy fatigue talk themselves past concerns they had recorded in week one.
Checks that need doing properly
- Verify current background checks yourself rather than accepting an assurance, and follow whatever process your denomination or jurisdiction requires.
- Contact the denominational or regional office directly about any disciplinary history, and ask the question in writing.
- Ask the candidate outright whether any complaint has ever been made about their conduct, and how it was resolved.
- Speak to at least one person beyond the reference list, ideally a lay leader from a previous congregation rather than a colleague.
- Ask referees the question that gets an answer: not whether they would recommend the candidate, but what the candidate found difficult and who found the candidate difficult.
How to listen to the answers
Strong candidates answer with people and dates in them: a family they sat with, a board meeting that went wrong, a program they closed. Weak answers describe values without instances, and the fix is a single follow-up: "when was that?" Ask it twice and the picture usually clarifies. Pay attention to how they talk about the congregation they are leaving, since that is roughly how they will talk about yours. Pay attention too when they say they do not know, which from an experienced minister is often a sign of accuracy rather than a gap.
Where searches go wrong
- Choosing on preaching alone. Preaching is one morning; the other six days are visiting, administration, and conflict.
- Mistaking warmth in an interview for the ability to hold a difficult meeting.
- Leaving expectations about hours, days off, and availability unstated because they feel awkward to raise.
- Failing to write down what was agreed, so that the first year becomes an argument about memory.
- Softening the congregation's real problems during the interview. Candidates who arrive to a situation they were not told about tend to leave early.
- Rushing at the end of a long vacancy and skipping the checks.
Before you make an offer
- Put the terms in writing: pay, housing, pension, day off, holiday, study leave, moving costs, and who pays for what.
- Name who the pastor answers to, how often they meet, and what that review looks like.
- Set a date, around a year in, for both sides to talk honestly about how it is going.
- Say plainly what the congregation is struggling with, in the letter as well as the conversation.
- Agree how a disagreement between the pastor and the leadership will be handled, while everyone is still on good terms.