Team players: What do associate pastors want? is a highly informative article from Christan Century about relationships between senior and associate pastors. Having never been either, I can't speak to its veracity, but it does seem to square with what I hear from the many pastors I interact with.
One paragraph almost put me on the floor laughing:
Mainline thinkers who have broached the subject do so clumsily. In Leading the Team-Based Church, for example, George Cladis suggests the popular theological description of social trinitarianism as a model for staff relations. As the Trinity is a society of mutually indwelling persons, the argument goes, so the staff should be a team of players without one figure dominating the others. It turns out, however, that the managerial visions of mutuality are presumed in this argument before the theological mystery of the Trinity is explored. (And if the Trinity model is taken seriously, then someone must become incarnate and die!)
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