The Thing No Interview Question Can Fix
Clarity, honesty, and self-awareness in ministry job searches
Job searching in church ministry can be particularly… complicated.
In a very real sense, there’s more at stake than in other job searches. It doesn’t just affect your job. The church you commit to also becomes your church home — your source of community and spiritual nourishment. You’re not just there for a paycheck, but for spiritual companionship and shepherding.
And it’s really hard to discern fit in all of those things in the course of an interview process.
In the past few years, I’ve walked alongside several ministry leaders who were navigating some sort of transition, and I’ve also been gathering thoughts for a resource on this topic. One thing that keeps coming to the surface is this: clarity and honesty are crucial if you want to make wise decisions.
I think back on interview processes I’ve been through, and I can recall times when I asked honest questions and got honest responses. Those conversations allowed me to assess fit with much greater clarity. I was told about weaknesses and decided for myself whether I could live with them long-term.
There were also times when I was turned down from a job, and the interviewer gave me honest feedback about why I wasn’t a good fit. That feedback was clarifying, helpful, and genuinely loving.
And then there were times when honesty wasn’t there — when I or the church had concerns about each other, and neither of us named them. We didn’t ask. And in the end, that didn’t turn out well for either of us.
As Brené Brown says, “Clarity is kindness.”
A wise colleague recently said that gaining clarity is one of the most important things you can do as a candidate. Two churches can talk about outreach, discipleship, and partnering with parents, and mean very different things by them. If you aren’t clear on what a church genuinely expects of you, you might find yourself in a role that’s a poor fit without fully understanding how you got there.
But here’s what I’ve come to appreciate: doing this well requires something beyond asking the right questions. It requires self-awareness of both you and the church.
The more you and the church have a deepening self-awareness, the more honest you’ll actually be with each other. No matter how good your questions are, a church that lacks self-awareness won’t give you honest answers. And no matter how honest the information you receive, if you lack self-awareness, you wont be able to accurately assess whether it’s the right fit for you.
Case in point: there were churches that were honest with me about their weaknesses, and I made the call that I could live with those weaknesses. But the longer I was actually in those roles, the more I realized I couldn't. They were a bigger deal for me than I'd understood going in — not because the church had hidden anything, but because I hadn't yet developed the self-awareness to recognize what those things would actually cost me.
Self awareness is hard won like that. God often teaches us self-awareness through these difficult situations, which help us to see that something matters to us more than we knew. But it’s worth naming that the self-awareness you bring into a job search, as well as the self-awareness a church brings, directly shapes how honest and clear you can actually be with one another. That’s not a small thing.