Section 2Section 2
The Senior Pastor’s Role
Senior Pastor is a big job
Pastor Henry Schorr has been our senior pastor for over 45 years. In this role, he has provided three major areas of leadership:
1) Spiritual oversight – pastoral care and maintaining Biblical faithfulness in all ministries.
2) Executive leadership – leading our church’s staff and providing vision, planning and strategy.
3) Preaching – teaching us God’s word each week from the pulpit.
As the church has grown into five campuses, the job has become bigger and bigger, and Pastor Henry has grown and adapted to take on the challenge. However, as Pastor Henry himself has said, taking on a role like this is very challenging, takes a heavy toll on a person’s energy and carries a spiritual weight.
With that in mind, we now envision a new model in which the senior pastor continues to participate in the preaching ministry, but is not expected to preach every weekend.
We are pleased that, as part of the transition, Pastor Henry has agreed to serve as a lead preaching pastor while we conduct a search for a lead preaching pastor for CSC. This arrangement will create additional capacity for the senior pastor to focus on spiritual oversight and executive leadership across CSC’s many ministry areas—such as casting vision, setting strategy, and ensuring that ministry is carried out in a Spirit-led and biblically faithful manner—as we continue to grow in reaching people for Christ and making disciples. It is important to note that the senior pastor will continue to be responsible for ensuring that all preaching and teaching remain biblically grounded and theologically sound.
This model helps to ensure that some of the work is shared and it allows other people to exercise their gifts as preachers/teachers.
A role for Pastor Henry
The fact that Pastor Henry will continue as lead preaching pastor means that we will continue to hear from him about as often as we have in the past as he unfolds and explains God’s word to us. Pastor Henry will also have the title of pastor emeritus, and he’ll be an ambassador for our church, finding ways to advance our mission and build our church.