At the recent Leadership Training session we held there was a lot of focus on the changes we are going through during this Interim Ministerial period. This session was planned by and delivered by Chris Stovall and Rev Gretchen with great assistance and additional training from Tanya Webster. There were about 20 of us in attendance.

Looking forward to our upcoming year, we will be looking for leaders. Leaders for many things, but perhaps the biggest effort will be for the Search Committee that will do the work of finding a new settled minister for our congregation. Rev Gretchen will be telling us about what that process will involve, but I can provide a few hints to hopefully entice a few more people to step up and be part of this effort.

Choosing the Search Committee is very important to the success of finding a new minister. To that end, we will be using a very democratic process that will involve the whole congregation. The board plus a few others will be calling every member with a few questions and will ask for your thoughts on who you would trust to be part of this committee.

From the large list of names generated this way, there will likely be a group who get a higher number of votes. The board will then talk to this group to check if they are willing to take on this task if elected.

For those who indicate their willingness, a slate will be presented to the congregation to vote on at a special meeting that will take place in the spring of next year. This will be the Search Committee that will spend a lot of time working together through a well-defined process to search for and find our next minister.

It is now October and we need to have a special congregation meeting in the March/April timeframe to select the committee. That is really not a long time, so put your thinking caps on about who you would trust to be part of this process.

Getting back to the Leadership Training session, it will probably be repeated between now and the spring, so you will have another opportunity to sit in and learn more about how many committees and affinity groups, etc., we have and get a feel for how we may want to start thinking about how to better manage all these cats. The clearer we can be about who and what we are and what we want to be known for, the more help that will be for the Search Committee and for prospective ministers to understand how they can best fit with us and us with them.

So take a chance and step forward to help this effort. Think about who you would want to be on this committee, or if you would. More details to follow from Rev Gretchen.

Steve Hill,

BoT President