Now that my new book, The Unintentional Interim: Ministry in Times of Transition, is officially out in the world, here are answers to what I imagine to be some of the most common questions about it.
Where can I find this book? It’s available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Cokesbury, and The Pilgrim Press website.
What’s this book about? There is a particular designation of pastor in some church denominations called the intentional interim, one who is especially trained and suited to serve in churches in between settled pastors. Sometimes, a settled pastor ends up having to deal with issues within a congregation related to ongoing transition that preceded their arrival, making them “unintentional interims.” The big kicker in our post-pandemic reality is that nearly all churches are now dealing with transitional needs due to factors both internal and external. This book is about navigating these new waters.
What sorts of transitional needs and issues do you mean? Again, these can be divided into two broad categories–internal and external–although of course they are also linked. The internal includes ongoing grief over the departure of a beloved pastor, the effects of a recent or present conflict, and anxiety over declining attendance. The external includes demographic shifts in the surrounding community, tension over national politics, cultural shifts in religious practice, and the need to reckon with societal discrimination in all its forms. Both internal and external transitions such as these are having an effect on the congregation’s mindset and practice.
Is this a book on how to fix all of that, then? Haha, no. In fact, the book states early and often that it will not provide any “fixes.” Church systems and dynamics are way too complex for any book to claim such a thing. Instead, this is a book that provides some tools and observations as a way to frame and understand what is happening.
What sorts of tools and observations? The role and effects of losing one’s illusions, and how to deal with negative expectations that may result from it. The relevance of the traditional interim tasks to all ministers’ work. The mental and emotional movement through transition-related grief. The need for self-care. Identifying and relying on a support network.
Explain the “part memoir” description that you use for this book. I do weave a fair amount of my own ministry-related story into this, more than I ever have in any other piece of writing. My particular focus is my experience of my most recent pastorate, which followed the 26-year tenure of a beloved pastor. I describe some of the issues that arose in the earliest years of my time there and how I handled them.
So is this a seedy tell-all? Absolutely not. I’ve read ministry books like that, and some are done well and others are very off-putting. It’s all in how personal experiences are shared, and for what reason. The stories I share are boiled down to their most essential elements to highlight the transitional issues that we worked through together. Anything that didn’t serve that purpose was stripped away. That said, I did try to preserve a sense of the messiness in order to show that this is just how I worked through these things, and to resist any notion that I am prescribing that anyone else do the same thing I did.
Why’d it take so long for you to write a ministry book? It hasn’t been due to a lack of trying. In fact, in a sense I’ve been writing this book for the past 20 years. I’ve pitched several versions of it over the years with no takers. It turns out that I needed that long to find the right need to focus on, as well as the right way to shape the ideas that I present. I’m very pleased that it took that long, because I finally figured all of that out.
Explain the questions and journaling practice at the end of each chapter. I actually did so here already.
Where can I keep up with any book-related news? This very website would be the best place, as well as my monthly author newsletter. And I’m also on Facebook, Instagram, and Bluesky.
Any plans for a release event? I’ll certainly end up doing a podcast episode about it. I’ll also do a book signing at the UCC’s General Synod this summer. Other than that, I’ll let you know.
Don’t you have a bunch of other books, too? Why yes, I do. Find them all here.
Jeffrey A. Nelson 