On Sunday, October 18, Andy Stanley told the churches he founded that he will step away from his job in 2027. Not from preaching. Not from the church. From the job. The elders of North Point Ministries have nominated Joel Thomas, the network's executive director, to succeed him, and members are voting on that nomination now. Stanley put it in one line: "I'm retiring from my job, but I'm not retiring from ministry."[^2]
Most pastors reading this do not lead eight campuses. That is exactly why the announcement is worth studying. Strip away the size and what remains is a plain, repeatable pattern of pastor succession planning that a church of 120 can use as easily as a church of 30,000. It also connects to something we have argued before: a church’s ceiling is usually set by its leadership structure, and nothing tests that structure like the day the founder steps aside.
What North Point actually announced
The details matter, so here they are as the church published them.1
- The nominee. The Board of Elders voted unanimously to nominate Joel Thomas as senior pastor of North Point Ministries.
- The vote. Eligible members received a ballot on October 18. Voting closes October 30, and results will be announced in services on November 1.
- The timeline. If approved, Thomas becomes senior pastor of North Point Ministries on January 1, 2027, then lead pastor of North Point Community Church on June 1, 2027.
- The founder’s next role. Stanley will stay in the preaching rotation and continue serving on the Board of Elders.
Stanley is 68 and founded North Point in 1995.2 He said he and his wife, Sandra, began talking about this decision about four and a half years ago.3
Four and a half years. Hold onto that number.
Pastor succession planning starts long before the announcement
The public moment was a Sunday. The real work was everything that came before it.
Look at the successor’s résumé. According to North Point, Thomas started as the ministry’s first intern in 1998, served in college, singles and married adult ministries, and became lead pastor of North Point Community Church in 2011. He then spent nearly seven years as senior pastor of Mission Community Church in Arizona before returning in 2021 to lead Buckhead Church, and he has served as executive director of the whole network since 2023.1
That is not a successor found in a search. That is a successor formed over almost three decades, including years away leading his own church. The pattern is older than any megachurch. Moses laid hands on Joshua in front of the whole community, and Scripture notes that Israel then listened to Joshua (Numbers 27:18-23; Deuteronomy 34:9). Paul told Timothy to entrust what he had learned to faithful people who could teach others (2 Timothy 2:2). Succession in the Bible is a relationship with a long runway, not a hiring event.
A succession plan is not a document you write when you are tired. It is a leader you start developing while you still have energy to spare.
None of this means your successor must come from inside. Many healthy transitions bring in an outside pastor. But a church that has never developed a leader who could carry real weight has only one option when the time comes, and it is usually the riskiest one.
Split the job so you can hand it over in stages
One of the smartest features of the North Point plan is easy to miss. It separates two roles. North Point explains that the senior pastor functions like the CEO of the whole ministry and answers to the elders, while a lead pastor provides point leadership for a single campus.1 Thomas takes the first role in January and the second in June.
Your church probably has one title, but it still contains several jobs: primary preacher, staff leader, chief vision caster, pastoral presence at hospital beds and funerals, and the person the board holds accountable. A staged transition asks which of those can move first.
Picture a church of 180 with a senior pastor nearing retirement and an associate who has preached once a month for three years. The board could hand staff leadership to the associate on January 1, move the preaching load to 50/50 by Easter, and set the formal installation for the fall. The congregation watches the new leader carry real responsibility before the title changes. The outgoing pastor gets to coach rather than vanish. Problems surface while there is still time to fix them.
That kind of staging only works when the board meets about the right things. If your board time is consumed by reports, it is worth revisiting how the elder meeting agenda is built so transition planning gets real minutes, not leftovers.
Let the church own the decision
North Point did not simply announce a successor. It invited members to vote, because its constitution requires a membership vote to appoint a new senior pastor.1
The church also defined who counts as an eligible voter, and the criteria are telling. A voter must be 18 or older and, within set time windows, have been active in a small group, served on a ministry team, had a child checked into children’s ministry regularly, or given at least four times in the past year.1 In other words, the vote belongs to people who are actually participating in the life of the church.
Your polity may look nothing like this. A denominational appointment, a session, a pulpit committee, or a congregational meeting governed by century-old bylaws will each run differently. The principle still holds: the process should be clear, written down, and followed in the open. When a founder’s choice becomes the church’s choice through a legitimate process, the new pastor starts with a mandate instead of a question mark.
This is where many churches get caught. Ask your board chair today who is eligible to vote on a new pastor and how a nomination reaches the floor. If nobody can answer in two minutes, that is your first piece of succession work.
Define the founder’s next role in writing
The hardest part of any pastoral transition is not choosing the next leader. It is deciding what the last one does now.
North Point answered it publicly: Stanley remains in the preaching rotation and on the Board of Elders.1 There is real wisdom in keeping a trusted voice close, and there is real risk too. A founder who stays on the board and in the pulpit can steady a church through change. He can also, without meaning to, become the person staff and members go to when they do not like a decision the new pastor made.
Stanley has seen succession up close before. His father, Charles Stanley, stepped down at First Baptist Atlanta in 2020, and associate pastor Anthony George became senior pastor according to a succession plan the church adopted in 2017.4 The plan existed three years before it was needed.
Whatever arrangement your church chooses, write it down. Spell out what the departing pastor will and will not do, who he reports to, how long the arrangement lasts, and when it will be reviewed. A role nobody defined becomes a role everybody interprets.
The numbers say most churches are not ready
North Point is the exception, not the rule.
More recent data points the same direction. In Barna’s 2022 Resilient Pastor research, one in four pastors said they hoped to retire within seven years, and 38% of 584 pastors surveyed had made it a top priority to identify and develop leaders who could take their role.5 Faith Communities Today found the average age of congregational leaders climbed from 50 in 2000 to 57 in 2020.5
Put those numbers side by side and the picture is uncomfortable. A large share of pastors expect to leave within a decade, and most have not made preparing a successor a priority. Those transitions will happen either way. The only choice is whether they are planned or forced by health, burnout, or crisis.
The handoff is the last thing a pastor leads
Every pastor will be succeeded. That is not a threat. It is a fact of the calling, and it was true of Moses, Elijah and Paul.
What Andy Stanley’s announcement shows is that a transition can be led instead of endured. Start years early. Develop leaders who can carry real weight. Break the job into parts and hand them over in stages. Let the church own the decision through a clear process. Write down what the departing pastor does next. None of those steps requires a large budget or a famous name. They require a pastor willing to treat the end of his tenure as part of his work, and a board willing to put it on the agenda before anyone has to.
If your congregation could not explain who leads after you, start there. A vision people can repeat back to you will outlast you only if someone is ready to carry it.
Footnotes
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North Point Ministries, “Updates About Leadership Changes at North Point Ministries,” October 18, 2026. https://northpointministries.org/update ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6
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The Christian Post, “Andy Stanley to step down as head of North Point Community Church next year,” October 2026. https://www.christianpost.com/news/andy-stanley-to-step-down-as-senior-pastor-next-year.html ↩
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WSB-TV, “North Point Ministries pastor Andy Stanley announces plans to step down,” October 2026. https://www.wsbtv.com/news/local/north-point-ministries-pastor-andy-stanley-announces-plans-step-down/GPQGA5XO5NEL3DJMYK2OH2HTEY/ ↩
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Religion News Service, “Influential pastor Charles Stanley steps down at First Baptist Church Atlanta after 50 years,” September 14, 2020. https://religionnews.com/2020/09/14/influential-pastor-charles-stanley-steps-down-at-first-baptist-church-atlanta-after-50-years/ ↩
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Faith & Leadership, “More pastors age and retire; churches appear to be facing a succession crisis, study says.” https://faithandleadership.com/more-pastors-age-and-retire-churches-appear-be-facing-succession-crisis-study-says ↩ ↩2
Three moves you can make this week
- Write one paragraph answering this: if you could no longer lead in 90 days, who would preach, who would lead staff, and who would decide? Give it to your board chair.
- Put pastor succession planning on the next elder or board agenda as a standing item, reviewed once a year whether or not a transition is in sight.
- Pull your bylaws and find the exact process for calling a new senior pastor: who nominates, who votes, and who counts as a voting member.
Key takeaways
- North Point's transition started roughly four and a half years before the public announcement.
- Splitting one job into its parts lets a church hand them over in stages instead of all at once.
- A clear congregational process turns a founder's preference into the church's decision.
- The departing pastor's next role should be defined in writing before the handoff, not negotiated after it.
- Most churches are less prepared than North Point: only 38% of pastors in one Barna study made identifying a successor a top priority.