There are the long, difficult months between discovering a terminal disease and the end of life. There are the weeks of anticipation from Thanksgiving until Christmas. There's that unattached week between Christmas and New Year's Day, not the next year, but not really feeling like last year. Life is filled with these kinds of days. Sometimes they fill us with anticipation, at other times they fill us with anxiety.
Life is just like that.
We can look at those times with dread, tie a knot, and hang on. The Church is a people much more than a building, a program, or a budget. One expression of these times is that period in the life of a Church when they find themselves without pastoral leadership. This is someone who knows the people and who does pastoral ministry, but who is not a candidate to become pastor. Traditional Interim - refers to a period of 3 to 4 months or more in a Church that, while it may or may not be growing, is not in serious conflict of any sort.