How pastor’s preparing to hand over the baton

How do you prepare your church for when you step aside as pastor? By building a legacy leadership team, says Pastor Tony Peters

When Tony Peters planted The King’s House (also known as London’s Alive Church) in 2000 he made a bargain with God: “I’ll lead this for 20 years then I’ll pass it on to the next generation.”

And so, true to his word, he has spent the past few years building a legacy team to take over the reins as he now gets set to step aside.

The church Tony’s team will take on was birthed from a call of God in 1999. After leading elsewhere for several years, teaching in a secondary school for 13 years, starting a Bible school for his church and serving in financial and eldership positions, Tony sensed God calling him “to step out and father a people”.

“It felt like a pastoral responsibility and I didn’t much like it!” he admits. But a prophetic word from American speaker Cindy Jacobs – “God is calling you to start a new church and pastor it” – confirmed the call, as did two other prophecies. So The King’s House was planted.

Tony and his wife, Shola, led the independent church for the next 15 years, until the time came to make good on the aforementioned bargain with God.

“We heard a talk which said it can take up to five years for leadership to transition, so in 2015, my wife suggested we should start building our legacy team. That way they’d be ready to take over by 2020,” says Tony.

“We knew it was important to hand over to the next generation because we’ve been around churches where the leadership held on forever. Churches die when you don’t have any new blood.”

Several people in the church felt – and even predicted – that Tony and Shola’s son Tosin and his sister Melody were obvious picks, since they had grown up in The King’s House and were enthusiastically involved.

“My son loves the church so much that he chose to live at home while he was at university. He travelled an hour and a half each day to get there just so he could continue playing the keyboard for us on Sundays.”

Although many thought that Tony’s adult children would be the next pastors, he and Shola wanted to see who God had in mind, so they chose ten young people, including Tosin and Melody, to train for leadership. Everything was going to plan until Covid struck, delaying the transition by five years. But now, as the church prepares to celebrate its 25th anniversary in September, plans are back on track.

“We’ve been training eight young adults and all of our services now have one of them leading a part of it,” says Tony. “Each week one of them will be leading worship, prayers, taking the offering or preaching – we’ve been identifying and encouraging the different graces each one carries and praying they will get to a place where they see themselves as called by God to lead.

“We also give them opportunities to do their own thing, so sometimes they’ll have five or six people discussing a topic rather than one person preaching about it.

“The plan is to identify a couple of them as associate pastors and hand things over little by little, while remaining in the background to offer advice and support if they need it.”

Tony may be handing over pastoral leadership of the church, but he is adamant that he won’t be hanging up his ministry hat any time soon. He has some new projects in mind.

“I love writing and research – and producing helpful materials for believers. I want to do more of that,” he says.

He has already written pre-marriage resources for engaged couples. Now he is turning his attention to supporting a younger generation grappling with ideologies around sex, identity and gender.

“They have to cope with a woke agenda in a way we never did, so I’ve been studying these issues to help them find proactive solutions.

“I know I’ve been out of the workplace for 25 years, whereas they are living this every day, but I can help guide them by giving biblical principles to apply to the situations they’re going through.

“This is one of the main reasons I want to step aside.

“I’m not tired. I don’t want to sit down and put my feet up. I just want to change direction and spend time providing resources for the next generation.”

This article first appeared in Direction Magazine. For further details, please click here.