Silverton Church of the Nazarene pastor celebrates 20 years

In a small church in Silverton, Pastor Dominic Carlow is part of a greater trend among pastors throughout the United States.

He’s stayed.

Carlow, 54, has stayed at one church longer than his Nazarene predecessors, longer than most other pastors in Silverton, and much longer than even he expected.

This year, he celebrated 20 years of service at Silverton Church of the Nazarene. Others like him, who’ve served one congregation long-term, include pastors Rob Barnes at Silver Creek Fellowship, Steve Knox at First Christian Church and Breck Wilson, of Oak Street Church, who just retired after 30 years of service.

However, new research shows that Carlow is among a growing group of church leaders serving longer in a single location. The California-based polling company Barna Group reported last year that pastors are staying an average of 11 years at a church before moving on. That’s more than double the average four-year stay last reported by Christian pollsters in 1992.

In fact, pastors aren’t just staying in one place longer; they’re staying in ministry longer too. The average total tenure of a pastor jumped from 14 to 24 years during that same time, according to Barna Group.

“Over the course of the last two decades, things have changed,” said pollster and creator of National Clergy Appreciation Month, Jerry Frear. “Two decades ago, I talked to guys who had never had a vacation. They had been in their churches five, six, seven years, and had never seen a vacation day … now the leadership I’m around has a much more balanced life and are encouraged to be a good parent and spouse along with being good pastoral leaders.

In Silverton, Carlow simply felt God wanted him to stay, to put down roots, to be committed to his 80-person congregation and the larger community, as he observed a cultural shift – toward quitting, giving up and leaving – among 21st-century Americans.

“Our culture now, it’s not for staying,” he said. “At church, staying is important to me. A handful of people demonstrate that kind of constancy, to be able to look back and say they rode out the highs and lows.”

A church should be like a family, he said, committed to loving each other, for their star qualities and despite their flaws. He and his wife, Heather, said they strive to live that kind of loyalty in their marriage as well. In a congregation as small as theirs, friendships can go deep.

“Pastor Dominic focuses on heart and spirituality,” said church member Summer Fairbairn. “Instead of focusing on growing and preaching to a church of 300, he’s like a dad ... his long-term commitment makes people feel safe and comfortable.”

Fairbairn was a member of Silverton Church of the Nazarene in 1998 when the Carlows arrived, coming straight from Bible school in Colorado in their two-door Chevy Cavalier with a baby and a toddler. Their new church on Water Street had been led by six different pastors in 25 years since its founding in 1973.

Coming west to lead an unknown church in a new town felt like one more divine calling in a string of events that were “meant to be,” they said.

The couple had met eight years earlier in Quincy, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston, where Heather was attending Eastern Nazarene College and Dominic was working as a banker. Her childhood home in Connecticut had been filled with Christian teaching and traditions; his tumultuous upbringing in Boston culminated in disorientation and a divorce in his early 20s.

“I had come to an awareness of my own failures, my own sin … I was just a mess,” he said. “I believed there was no hope.”

He started talking to God; he didn’t even call it “praying” back then. Soon he met Heather, and her invitation to her college’s chapel service introduced him to the idea that “there’s always hope in Jesus.”

The couple married and moved to live with Heather’s parents in Nova Scotia, where they helped run a family bakery. For Dominic, those three years were a time of “mentoring by Heather’s parents, long walks in the woods,” and eventually, a calling to be a pastor.

“I thought, ‘I don’t want to be a pastor,’” he recalled. “Why would any human being want to be a pastor?”

His childhood and young adulthood had been difficult, his Bible teaching was new, and his personality is more introverted than extroverted – but he couldn’t deny the soul-deep pull to share with other people the supernatural hope he’d discovered.

Five years after enrolling at Nazarene Bible College, he was trained and ready. Any thoughts the Carlows had of taking a breather and operating their successful office-cleaning business before taking a church disappeared when they lost their largest client a mere 20 minutes before their college dean asked them to consider pastoring in Silverton.

“Some people call that coincidence,” Heather said. “We don’t call that coincidence.”

Thus, the Carlows came to town, and Pastor Dominic has been doing his best to “tell the old, old story … but not in the old, old way,” ever since.

The couple’s predecessors are entrepreneurs, so – no surprise – they’ve been full of new ideas over the years. Some of them, like the community garden across the street, and the Potter’s House youth building next door, have taken many years to bloom.

Others, such as concerts and youth alternatives to haunted houses at Halloween and egg hunts at Easter happened quickly and are cherished memories among church members. The church’s Most Amazing Race scavenger hunts in 2010 and 2011 brought together 250 community members.

Over 20 years, church members have gone on five mission/service trips to the Philippines, Suriname and South America, and Pastor Dominic has “never preached a sermon twice,” Heather said. Recently he did a Sunday series relating Christian evangelism to the Discovery show “Deadliest Catch.”

“He’s such a deep thinker. There are a lot of ‘aha’ moments when he’s preaching,” Fairbairn said. “In everything, he has the goal that people would learn something about Jesus.”

The value of staying power got real for her two years ago, when she had to leave Silverton to move to Prineville for work. She missed her old church – its music, its decorations, its people – but, instead of quitting, she joined her new church’s board, taking to heart what she’d heard from her pastor so many times: “It’s not about you. It’s about a commitment to family.”