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When someone leaves your church or ministry organization, the impact goes far beyond filling an empty position. How do you navigate the emotions, protect morale, and help your team move forward?
On this episode of The Lead On Podcast, Jeff Iorg, president of the SBC Executive Committee, explores how leaders can manage personnel departures with wisdom, compassion, and confidence. Whether someone leaves through resignation, retirement, or termination, Iorg explains how these transitions affect relationships, create uncertainty, and present opportunities for organizational growth.
Drawing from his leadership experience, Iorg shares practical guidance for managing emotional responses, helping employees process change, and preparing an organization for its next chapter.
Discover how even difficult endings can become opportunities for stronger leadership and renewed ministry effectiveness.
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What is Lead On Podcast?
Ready to hone your leadership skills and unlock your full potential? Tune in to the Lead On Podcast, where Jeff Iorg dives deep into Biblical leadership.
Hosted by SBC Executive Committee President Jeff Iorg, this dynamic podcast provides insight for seasoned executives, aspiring leaders, or those in ministry who are simply passionate about personal growth. The Lead On Podcast offers actionable, practical tips to help you navigate the complexities of ministry leadership in today's ever-changing world.
From effective communication and team building to strategic decision-making and fostering innovation, each episode is packed with valuable lessons and inspiring stories to empower you on your leadership journey.
Put these principles into practice and Lead On!
Welcome to the Lead On Podcast. This is Jeff Iorg, the president of the executive committee of the Southern Baptist Convention, talking with you once again about practical issues related to ministry leadership. That's the purpose of this podcast. We talk about the daily work of ministry leadership in churches and ministry organizations, schools, places where we're trying to accomplish things that we pray are part of advancing the kingdom of God. Well, last week we talked about how to make a good beginning in ministry organization.
Jeff Iorg:You've come in as a director or a president or a pastor, a professor, you've come into a new role and you wanna make a great start. We talked about that last week. Now let's talk about the other end of that spectrum. And that is what happens when people leave a ministry organization? How do you manage endings?
Jeff Iorg:And frankly, sometimes these can be difficult as we know. And so we'll talk about some of those issues on the podcast today as well. So last week, how to make
Jeff Iorg:a good beginning, how to get off to a great start. Today, how to manage endings, how to bring the best endings possible when people leave a church or a ministry organization or a staff or a school. What do you do? How do you respond when people leave?
Jeff Iorg:Well, let's talk about why people leave. First of all, some leave for what I'll call a positive resignation reason, And these can be any number of reasons. The most common is I'm leaving this organization because I'm taking a job in a different organization. Sometimes, though, people leave positively by saying I'm leaving this organization, and I'm changing life direction, or I'm changing careers entirely. I'm stopping work and staying home to homeschool my children.
Jeff Iorg:All kinds of reasons why people can leave positively. I've recently had an experience where a person left the employment here at the executive committee in a totally positive experience. God has been stirring his heart and preparing him for a different kind of assignment. The opportunity was presented to him really in some ways out of the blue, and he and his family discerned that this was the time to make a new directional change in life. So positive resignations or positive separations do occur.
Jeff Iorg:Another way people leave, though, is what I'll call a forced resignation. That's where a person is told, you're not going to be able to continue to work here. Sometimes they're given a good bit of notice on this that, you know, at the end of this year, we're going to eliminate your position. Or at the end of this year, we're going to go a different direction in terms of how we organize your department or how we organize our work to be done. Or sometimes it's more personal than that.
Jeff Iorg:We've concluded that your skill set or your gifts just don't match up with what we need to have done. We are going to go a different direction, and you are going to need to find another job by a certain point. And this forced resignation can turn into a termination if need be. In other words, you're not just simply forcing a person to resign and move on to something else and to do that in their own time as quickly as possible before the deadline runs out. But when the deadline runs out, forced resignation can turn into, of course, termination.
Jeff Iorg:The last one of these is the one that is really out there on the horizon for all of us, and that's retirement. You know, it... It's it's... The clock doesn't stop ticking. The calendar doesn't stop turning.
Jeff Iorg:And for every one of us, we reach a point where we realize that we just simply need to stop our normal occupation and to move into what we call retirement. So there's lots of reasons why people leave organizations. I'm not talking today only about the ugly firing of a person who gets caught in a a moral failure or a financial irregularity or something like that. Sure. There are those abrupt terminations, but there are a lot more people, frankly, a lot more people who leave with positive resignations, forced resignations, terminations that are that are not in the crisis context, and, of course, then retirement.
Jeff Iorg:Now when people leave, no matter why they left, when people
Jeff Iorg:leave, there are certain kinds of results that are always present. Number one, when people leave an organization, it disrupts relationships. It disrupts
Jeff Iorg:relationships. And sometimes the depth and meaning of relationships is not fully known until those relationships are disrupted. For example, I once had a person that was a supervisor in our organization, and he left. And he had done a good job for us. There was no doubt about that.
Jeff Iorg:But, I was unprepared for the response of one of his employees.
Jeff Iorg:She asked to see me and came, with a good bit of emotion to talk to me. I assumed when I knew that she wanted
Jeff Iorg:to talk to me about this person leaving her organization that she wanted that appointment to be fairly soon, and that when I first saw her as she walked in my office, I could see the emotion and the tension. I frankly assumed something
Jeff Iorg:bad was about to happen. I said, how can I help you? And she said, well, I just wanna tell you that the person leaving was the best supervisor I've ever had,
Jeff Iorg:and working for him changed my life. And then there was a pretty, pretty deep emotional, expression that continued on from
Jeff Iorg:that, some tears and some pretty deep feelings expressed saying, I feel disruption.
Jeff Iorg:I feel separation. I I feel I feel abandonment. I I I feel a deep sadness, and I need help to know how to how to get past this and to and to go forward. Well, that was a bit surprising to me because while I knew this person had done a good job, I had never really perceived that there was that kind of emotional attachment to him or to
Jeff Iorg:the work that he had been doing, but there certainly was.
Jeff Iorg:And this disruption in this relationship was for all positive reasons. And so I think it's important to remember that when you have a youth pastor who's done a fantastic job and decides to leave and go to seminary, that while it's a positive celebration in so many ways, it is still disrupting meaningful relationships, and that disruption can create a sense of loss, abandonment, of emptiness, of just loss. And so don't only think that a termination or the separation has to be negative for there to be disruption. Now to be sure, if there's a person who's terminated for a moral failure or if there's a person who's, let go for financial irregularities or if there's a person who, just through laziness or poor performance or a mismatch of job responsibilities with gifts, for whatever reason, if there's a if there's a termination, then of course you expect there's gonna be disrupted relationships. Of course.
Jeff Iorg:But I'm just trying to alert you that when a person leaves for any reason, there can be these disrupted relationships. I... I've seen this also with people retiring. A sense of loss that comes from the appreciation that was held, for a person and the steam in which they were held, this produces the same kind of disruption. So the first thing to be alert to when people leave is that it disrupts relationships.
Jeff Iorg:The second thing I would say is it it upsets emotional equilibrium. It it simply sends a shock wave, if you will, through the system that causes people to be emotionally unsettled. So for example, in another situation I was dealing with, we had a... An employee that was again in a supervisory role that left our organization. And very soon after that, several employees that were in that department talked with me, and they had all kinds of concerns, some of which I I found surprising, like, well, are we gonna replace this person?
Jeff Iorg:Well, yeah. Of course, we are. Why would you think not? Well, we're just not sure because we we know there's always budget challenges, there's always, you know, opportunities for change and there's always reorganizations. And I said, oh, okay.
Jeff Iorg:I I understand all those concerns now. I I hear where your question is coming from,
Jeff Iorg:and I understand it better. But what I was sensing as I was talking
Jeff Iorg:to these employees was just a lot of emotional disruption of their emotional equilibrium. Things were just upset, if you will, in the organization. Lots of questions, lots of uncertainties, lots of wondering what's going to happen. And because of that, people were going up and down emotionally in response to the situation. So when people leave, it disrupts relationships and it upsets the emotional equilibrium of an organization.
Jeff Iorg:A third thing it does is it often impacts morale, and this can be positive or negative. Positive or negative. Now, usually,
Jeff Iorg:I've thought of people leaving as always in the negative. Like, well, this person's gonna leave, and they're gonna leave because they've been terminated or forced out or they've had to change their job or they found a different position or something, and the morale impact is always gonna be negative. People are going to be, disrupted, as I've said. Their emotional equilibrium is gonna be upset, and so morale is gonna dip down because we lost this person and everyone's gonna be sad about it, and that's the response.
Jeff Iorg:But I've learned I've learned that sometimes when a person leaves a ministry organization, it actually has a positive impact on morale. Now this is hard to talk about, but sometimes, those of us
Jeff Iorg:in leadership don't realize the negative impact some people are having on our organization. I'm thinking of a clear example of this that I dealt with years ago. I was blissfully working along thinking that things were going well because the person that was the problem in this case was always very responsive and respectful to me. But as I started learning, that responsiveness and respect only flowed up the organizational chart. It did not flow down.
Jeff Iorg:And the persons that they supervised felt that they were being abused, neglected, mistreated, taken advantage of. And it eventually reached a point where there were HR complaints and there were conversations and meetings and there were, you know, plans to, rehabilitate the situation and recover the difficulty. There were performance plans that
Jeff Iorg:were put into place. And anyway, after a while, we had to make the hard call. This person had to be terminated. And after it happened, another employee very quietly came to me and said, I would like
Jeff Iorg:to thank you for having the courage to do what you did. And I think you're going to see a lot of positive response to this. No one's gonna say anything. I'm talking to you because I feel like I need to express my appreciation and thanks for your courage. But this situation was a lot worse than we had ever really let on until we finally had to get to a breaking point.
Jeff Iorg:It's been going on for a long time,
Jeff Iorg:and thank you. Well, I was shocked. I I had no idea that this problem was as pervasive as it
Jeff Iorg:had been, gone on as long as it had, and had caused the morale to go down as far as it had. These were Christian people who didn't wanna talk out and didn't wanna speak out and and were trying to do the right thing. And and finally, they even reached a breaking point. And when we had to intervene and I thought, well, this is gonna be a real morale killer to have to let someone go, it was actually the opposite. Morale actually went up because now people felt valued and validated and protected, and they were really ready to work hard and to prove that they could get the job done in a better work environment.
Jeff Iorg:So when someone leaves, it disrupts relationships and upsets emotional equilibrium, and it impacts morale, but don't think that impact will always be negative. A lot of times it will be, but you might be surprised. Sometimes when you make one of these hard decisions, it actually causes morale to go up. Now when people leave, a fourth thing that that it does for you and for the organization is it creates a learning opportunity. It creates a learning opportunity.
Jeff Iorg:It creates an opportunity to take a step back and say,
Jeff Iorg:what do we need to learn from this situation? If it
Jeff Iorg:was a difficult situation, can we learn from it how to supervise more effectively, how to document more carefully, how to pay attention to problems and solve them when they're more embryonic and less full blown like we had to on this one. What can we learn from this situation? Are there procedures that we need to put into place that would be better than the ones we're currently using? Do we have to shift protocols and write new policies? What can we learn from this situation?
Jeff Iorg:Now let's not overreact and write a bylaw or a policy to fix every single problem that ever comes along, but to ask the big question about what can we learn and how can we adjust based on what we've just experienced. Now this goes beyond those things to the actual job itself. For example, as we're seeing a person leave and we're thinking about this position and this role going forward, what does that role need to be? How has the job changed since the person who just left took it five years ago or whatever? What do we envision the future being like and being different than what we're dealing with right now?
Jeff Iorg:What do we need to learn about the situation, our organization, the possibilities about the future? What do we need to learn out of this person's leaving us? This can even have some specific intentionality about it in terms of an an exit interview. I'm not, of course, talking about here a a forced or abrupt termination, but if you know someone's leaving through resignation or retirement or even a forced resignation over time when jobs are changing and and situations are changing, an exit interview is a really good opportunity for person to come in and answer some questions like, you know, what has been the best thing about working here? What's been the thing about working here that's frustrated you the most?
Jeff Iorg:Is there anything about your job performance you'd like to tell us before you leave? Is there anything about the job going forward that you think needs to be changed before a new person can
Jeff Iorg:do it effectively? These are
Jeff Iorg:the kinds of questions that you ask in an exit interview, and this can be a great learning moment for you and for your organization as you diagnose what needs to happen going forward, which leads us into that fifth thing that happens when people leave, and that is it creates an opportunity for change. Now I learned this, many years ago, and I've been putting it into practice for, gosh, man, more than a couple of decades.
Jeff Iorg:Every time someone leaves an organization is a moment of consideration of what needs to change in the organization going forward. I think I'm able to say this conclusively. I have never ever replaced an employee by not rewriting the job description for that position.
Jeff Iorg:Someone comes to a position, they have a job description, that job description and that position lasts for several years, they leave.
Jeff Iorg:At that point, it's time to change. Someone leaving creates an opportunity for change
Jeff Iorg:so that you are able to go into the situation, look at the job description, look at the job demands, look at the job necessities, and look at the organization's needs, and tweak, if you will, the job description to make it more like what is needed for the present and going into the future. I've recently been working through a similar process with this here at the executive committee. We had an employee leave, very positive, departure, and we've done... Gone through a lot of the things I've been saying here. But one of
Jeff Iorg:the things I I said was, I'd like for
Jeff Iorg:us to pull the person's current job description. I'd also like for us to see if we have any previous job descriptions on record of what this job has been in the past. And then I'd like for us to ask the team to evaluate the job description and give us input on how it needs to change, and then the executive leadership's gonna evaluate the job description and think how we think it needs to change. Now notice I wanted input from the team. You've worked with this person.
Jeff Iorg:You've seen what they've done. You see what the job entails and what you need from a leader. Tell us feedback on what this job description needs to look like. And we we rewrote it into a new position for the next wave of what we need to have happen in that area of ministry leadership. So when a person leaves, it's an opportunity for change.
Jeff Iorg:We always do this also with retirements. When someone retires, we take a step back and say, all right, that position has served us well and the person has served us well, but how does it need to be shaped or reshaped for the future? So when people leave, it disrupts relationships, it upsets the emotional equilibrium across the organization, it impacts morale, and this can be positive or negative, and it creates a learning opportunity
Jeff Iorg:to learn about your organization,
Jeff Iorg:to learn about the performance that's needed, to learn about things that have gone on in the past, and to learn about how you can do better in the future. And then finally, it creates an opportunity for change, an opportunity to do things differently than you've done them before. Now
Jeff Iorg:with all
Jeff Iorg:of that in mind, let's talk more specifically about your role now in leading in your organization during this process of people leaving? Well, the first thing I would say to you as the leader is that you have to learn to function above your emotional response. You have to learn to function above your emotional response. You may be angry if the person has done something that's been damaging to your organization and you've had to step in with a termination. You may feel a sense of loss if the person was doing a really good job and someone came along and offered them a better job and more money and you couldn't match that in any way and you just lost them.
Jeff Iorg:You feel a sense of loss in that. If the person leaves through retirement or even maybe through death, you may feel a deep sense of regret because this person was very valuable to you, was perhaps a colleague and a friend, long term contribution, a lot of institutional knowledge, and you just feel a sense of regret. So whether you're feeling a sense of regret or a sense of loss or even a sense of joy because someone leaves on good terms and you're you're happy for them, you can't lead your organization out of your emotion. Now, you have to learn to function above your emotional response. And you do that by, first
Jeff Iorg:of all, admitting that you have emotion and that
Jeff Iorg:your emotions can sometimes get the best of you. So admit that you have emotion and emotional struggles and recognize that that's human, and
Jeff Iorg:part of learning to manage those is part of leading. You may need
Jeff Iorg:to debrief your emotional responses with someone. Now, I would discourage you from doing that with someone in your organization because they need to see you leading above your emotions. This is where you need a mentor, a friend, or a consultant. This is someone that you can sit down with and say, hey, man. I'm I'm really feeling a sense of loss with this employer or some anger toward this employer.
Jeff Iorg:I'm really having a sense of confusion about what this means for our organization, and I'm just trying to process all of that. Get someone you can talk to. Look. It's perfectly permissible to go out to lunch with a colleague, or with a peer from another organization and say, man, I got a situation, and just talk about it. And then in the context of this, choose healthy actions that rise above your emotions.
Jeff Iorg:So you don't respond in anger. You don't respond in grief. You don't respond in loss. You don't respond in regret. You are feeling all those things, but you say, what is a healthy action that needs to be taking place during this time?
Jeff Iorg:What can I do that will move us forward in the context of these emotions emotions
Jeff Iorg:that we're feeling? A second thing is, as a person is leaving, make a good faith effort to bring that relationship to the best closure possible.
Jeff Iorg:Don't just end it. As people are leaving, you want that leaving to have the best ending possible. So one way you can do this is initiating pastoral conversations with the person who's leaving and the people who are impacted. Pastoral conversations are are not complicated. It's simply asking, you know, how are you processing the fact that your your friend Sarah is leaving?
Jeff Iorg:You know, Bob's retiring, and we're all gonna miss him. How are you feeling about that? These are pastoral conversations to give people the opportunity to talk about what they're feeling. Now this doesn't violate any HR standards or violate any confidentiality or go into the details of anything about what's happened. It's just a fact.
Jeff Iorg:This person is leaving, and it's impacting us. How's it impacting you? And then as a part of this, you do wanna avoid any conversations that veer into reasons for termination or veer into any personal business or any kind of thing like that. That's really not what we're talking about here. We're talking about initiating pastoral conversations to help people process the emotions they're feeling and get their focus back on the actions that need to be taken to move everyone forward.
Jeff Iorg:And then as you're doing this, seek the input of people to talk about the changes that need to be made or the changes that seem inevitable in this situation. For example, like I mentioned earlier, saying, let's pull together the job descriptions for this position and the times it's been filled in the past, and let's rewrite and rethink this. And let's do that by asking people in the department to to to give us input on this issue. And so it's about pastoral conversations. It's about gathering good information.
Jeff Iorg:And then when someone leaves, it's also about managing the unintended consequences. You know, I'll give you a simple one. I once had a conversation with an employee that went like this. She came to me and said, you know, I had a... My supervisor, has left.
Jeff Iorg:And, I said, yeah. And and we've had this going away and we've had pastoral conversations and we're all good. And I'm thinking this to myself, and she said, my supervisor has left. Who signs off on the vacation,
Jeff Iorg:requests in our department now until we get a replacement? I'm like,
Jeff Iorg:that's not a hard question to answer, but
Jeff Iorg:it's one I haven't answered yet. And people were wondering
Jeff Iorg:who who signs off on sick leave, who signs off on vacations, who signs checks and gets check requests ready to go? Who's the official person that we need to turn to right now? So when you have someone leave an organization, you're having pastoral conversations, you're focusing on the change and actions that will participate the change, but then also be prepared to manage what I call the unintended or unexpected consequences of someone leaving, and that is things that they were doing or things they were responsible for that just need to be covered or need to be resolved to get through to the new leadership structure. And there sometimes are simple solutions, but there's still solutions employees need to know how to go on into the future. Well, I wanna wrap it up by saying this.
Jeff Iorg:Overarching principle for all of this is to engage every personnel change as an opportunity for the organization to grow. It's an opportunity for people to grow spiritually. It's an opportunity for some people to grow professionally. It's an opportunity for the organization itself to sharpen its focus. It's an opportunity for the organization to think about who it is and what it wants to be and where it's going.
Jeff Iorg:It can be a tremendous learning moment. And every time you have a personnel change, it needs to be an opportunity for organizational growth. Today, we've talked about one of the harder things that happens in ministry, and that's when people leave. It's inevitable that they're going to, and it can be in those moments pretty discouraging some days, especially if people are leaving for better jobs and you just don't have the better job to offer. They're leaving for more pay and you just don't have the more pay to offer.
Jeff Iorg:Or they're leaving for a better opportunity that they think they can make a bigger impact, which tells you that your organization isn't making that big of an impact? I mean, these are the kinds of negative thoughts that come
Jeff Iorg:to us when people leave. It's also sometimes disheartening because we think, well, if if this person leaves, who will we get to replace them? Well, I've been working on this one a long time,
Jeff Iorg:and I'll just tell you, I've come to believe God can be trusted to bring us the right people we need.
Jeff Iorg:I can't tell you how many times that I thought when someone left, well, man, that's really bad. Until three, six months later, the new person was in place and working well, and change was happening and progress was being made and new ideas were coming.
Jeff Iorg:And I thought, wow, what a good day that was when God brought about this change. You know, we sometimes lose focus on the fact that organizational life is seasonal and cyclical in a sense. People come, they bring new ideas, they bring new energy, they take us in new directions. Sometimes they serve well and that good service lasts years and sometimes decades, but eventually the life cycle comes to an end and by some means, whether it's death or retirement or resignation or forced resignation or even a termination, everyone comes to the end of their employment in a particular organization. And in those moments, we have to have the confidence in God to know that He's going to bring new people who can take us in new directions and do new things that can only happen when a change of personnel takes place.
Jeff Iorg:So last two weeks, we talked about making a good beginning and helping an organization make a good ending when someone leaves. These are sort of the bookends, if you will, on getting new people and losing people that are part of leading in organizations, in ministry organizations, in churches, like the one where you're serving. So today, think about it. How do you make a good beginning and how do you make a good end? How do you help people get started well and how do you help organizations process it when someone leaves?
Jeff Iorg:Work on it today as you lead on.