Diocesan Office

October 16, 2007- One of the decisions we made last night in the Search Committee meeting was that Tim Westbrook and I are in charge of communicating the week-by-week goings on.

One of the decisions we made last night in the Search Committee
meeting was that Tim Westbrook and I are in charge of communicating
the week-by-week goings on. Tim is also, as you will have noticed,
keeping a kind of state-of-the-parish blog. He's uniquely placed to
do this for several reasons: he's on Finance, the Search Committee,
and is our current Parish Administrator. Beyond that, he's a good
writer and a thoughtful person. We'll likely be switching off the job
of the Monday Message (which will sometimes be written on Tuesday
morning, I suspect), so you'll get both Tim's voice and mine reporting
to you specifically on the progresses made by the Search Committee,
which we hope will give you a nicely varied view.
Several things got decided last night in a very vocal meeting. The
good news is that the search committee is full of strongly committed
folks with lots to say about the process and many concerns to
express. The bad news--well there really isn't any bad news, it's
just that we're all learning each others' working styles and that
makes for a little frustration when we're all at the table and trying
to move the group in several directions at once. The other good news
is that we did come to a number of important decisions last night.
The thing you need to know about our decision-making process is that
we are committed to decisions by consensus, so when we announce a
decision, even a small one, the Parish can be secure that we have all
come to agree with it and understand that it's the best way to move
forward.

So here's the news:

1. The Search Committee has one new member. She's the last member
we'll be taking on, but we're extremely happy to have Debbie Supplee
join us. For those of you who don't know her, Deb is Linda and Roby
Roberson's daughter and the mother of Abby and Camille, so she
represents a younger demographic than we had earlier. She's a
teacher, too, and brings all the lovely organizational skills that go
with that to the committee.

2. We voted to put in place a Communication Plan that includes these
Monday Messages (sent out to the webgroup, the email bulletin board,
and published in the bulletin), Monthly Messages from the Chair and
Vice-chair (published in the Carpenter and delivered in person at the
services, also available in hard copies after church), a Search
Committee Booth to be set up and staffed after 8:00 and 10:30 services
(for those of you who are Peanuts fans, think Lucy's booth), and a
Search Process Concerns INPUT BOX so that you have a comfortable way
to talk back to us even above and beyond the questionnaire and focus
groups that will be coming your way soon.

3. We began the discussion of the questionnaire. This will be a
thorough document designed very carefully to make sure the information
we receive is as precise as possible. The more precise the
information we glean from the the questionnaire, the clearer we can be
in our search. Average response-return on this sort of thing tends to
run at about 30-40%, but we know of churches where the response has
been as high as 85%. We'd like to see if we can beat that. Since
getting the questionnaire out is our First Big Step, we're planning to
move forward with it as quickly as is humanly (committee-ishly)
possible. This should actually be pretty fast, since we already have a
draft questionnaire.

4. We assigned a number of responsibilities, so we have specific folks
working on specific things. This is actually a bigger piece of
progress than it sounds like as I write it.

So, that's it. This is a remarkably complex process, and I think we
have all come out of the last couple of meetings with a much greater
understanding of why and how it can take some parishes as much as 24
months to complete this process. Anyone who knows either our Chair or
our Vice-chair will know that we are not planning to take that long--
they're both folks who like to get things done expeditiously. We will
be careful and thoughtful, but we are very conscious of not wanting to
waste the Parish's time, our own time, or God's time. Still, it's an
"interesting" balance to be trying to keep, so please continue to pray
for us that we be wise, patient, consistent, and open to the working
of the Holy Spirit among us.