Step by Step: The Journey to Our Next Senior Minister
What a busy and momentous spring it has been for our church. We have said goodbye to one of our best interim ministers ever and are welcoming another. Our church is recovering its vibrancy. Examples include our well-attended faith formation classes, the creativity of our worship liturgy, and continuing strong musical leadership. Every week we see new faces in worship, including some young people and children!
Both staff and lay leadership are stepping up. Tripp Caldwell and Valarie Kovolski have brought some of their Cornwell Center “magic” over to the church side. Nancy Hudson and the Deacons are making forward looking decisions. Lay leaders are stepping in and shoring up long-neglected areas of the church.
Especially impactful has been our name change work. Ray Owens’ committee has engaged the Congregation so that this historic decision will be ours and not just church leadership’s. I am confident that whatever name we choose, all of us will do our best to be positive and live into it.
What does all this have to do with our Senior Minister search? Everything! Prospective candidates are watching our services, reading our media and asking us questions. They will see our energy and momentum and will know that we are not looking for someone to rescue an old, dying church but to join one that is already on the move!
Our search went “live” on May 3. We immediately began receiving candidate resumes. You might be interested in the process we use to evaluate our candidates, so here is a high-level summary:
- Each resume is vetted by a 2-person Resume Review Team. We do our research on the candidates, watching worship services, listening to sermons, reading articles they’ve authored, and scanning relevant social media. If qualified, we schedule an introductory Zoom call with the candidate to introduce ourselves, get to know each other, and explain our selection process. Then the real work begins.
- The candidate joins our full committee via Zoom for a 2-hour interview that will focus primarily on their history in ministry so far. The goal is to learn about their interests and talents and their successes and failures. In this, and every interview, we give the candidate time to ask us questions. It’s a two-way discernment process and they have a decision to make that is as important as ours. All Zoom meetings are recorded so we can revisit them if necessary.
- After this interview, we will determine which candidates we want to advance in the process. Then we will conduct a second 2-hour Zoom interview that will focus on the goals and dreams of both the candidate and our church, with the goal of learning where they intersect. Here, we will narrow our candidate pool down to two or three finalists.
- At this point, the process becomes somewhat customized and will involve extensive reference checks and possible in-person visits to candidate churches. We will then invite each of the finalists to Charlotte for in-person interviews after which a selection will be made.
How long will this take? Ideally, we might have our finalist this Fall but there are a couple of wild cards. First is the summer. Both candidate and committee member availability may be limited due to travel, family events, etc. Second is the very specific type of candidate we are looking for, which is someone with the skills needed to help us complete our church revitalization. Ideally, we want someone who has a track record of success. Never in our church history have we had to find someone with such a specific set of skills and experience. They exist but only as a small subset of the total potential candidate pool. We feel our preparation has positioned us for success but the fact that we will not - and cannot - compromise means our search might be extended.
We will continue with our regular updates and, as always, hold the church and our committee in your prayers.