i really had a horrible set of experiences in church today. perhaps, many readers of this note would have come away from the worship service just fine. nothing of consequence, perhaps a message that would be appreciated. i had a totally different experience. the minister of five+ years retired a few months ago and now they are in the in between time. today they introduced a potential minister before the church to sort of get to know him and his wife. groan. this is not a healthy way to go about calling a new minister within my denomination. the church generally needs to hire a trained interim for a year of so to help the church process itself. once this is done in a healthy manner, a search committee is formed and the search begins. once the search committee has done its work of first preparing a church profile which describes the church, its members, its faith practices, any issues it may have and so forth ... then this church profile gets distributed to potential candidates. a series of interviews occur with the search committee finally going to a neutral pulpit (a church distant from the searching church) and the committee witnesses/evaluates the candidate ... then the chosen single candidate is presented before the church for a scheduled worship service with the candidating minister. a vote is then taken by the membership. it almost all persons are for the candidate, the person is *called.* this church, however, has its own way of progressing through the search. they hear of a person who would hopefully accept them, bring the person to the church to meet all the people, have a lunch and so forth. to me, this completely invalidates the work of the search committee and divides the church. not only that this happened today, the service began by a worship leader coming before the people at the start of the worship service and stating not once but twice that although he had been trained as a lay worship leader by the retired pastor to perform the leadership role, why last week once person said to hom after worhshiop that he had really chjanged since leading the church and the the change was not good! he said the same thing happened by another person having the same comment, that that person had meant it to hujrt him and that it had. groan. what a way to start off worship. they are in need of hiring an interim minister and working through their issues waaaaaaaaaaaaay before they call a minister ... else that person is in for a rough placement. i am so glad i am out of church politics ... forever. there were many other things that happened as well today at worship that continue to point to the need for more healthy ways of processing who they are as a church.
Posted on: Mon, 26 Aug 2013 07:01:45 +0000
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