Newsletter: Jan. 28, 2014: We Have Our Three Pre-Candidates!

 

Newsletter: January 28, 2014

We Have Our Three Pre-Candidates!

Your Ministerial Search Committee (MSC) is excited to announce that we have selected three “Pre-candidates” (semi-finalists) for the position of Minister of our church. We have scheduled a weekend-long interview between the MSC and each of our three Pre-candidates. These three “Pre-candidating Weekends” will unfold during February and early March.

We had a strong pool of applicants, both in quantity and quality. As you know from earlier Newsletters, we used the results of our Listening Sessions and the Congregational Survey (see link in last week’s Newsletter) to prepare a seventeen-page job-posting, the Congregational Record (see link below). Twenty-one ministers responded to our Congregational Record by sending us their equivalent ministerial document, the Ministerial Record. Eleven applicants were then invited to exchange further documentation, which they and we posted on limited-access websites. We were thus able to access not only written material but also recordings and videos of services and sermons. Next came 75-minute Skype interviews with six of the ministers. From those six, we have now selected our three “Pre-candidates,” one of whom we hope will be our next settled minister.

In the weekends ahead, each of our Pre-candidates will come to Worcester, tour the area, engage in intense and wide-ranging discussions with the MSC, and lead a service in a “neutral pulpit”—a church where neither we nor they are known. Because the ministers may not yet have notified their home congregations that they are in search, this stage of the process must be confidential. Therefore, members of our congregation other than the MSC cannot be involved.

All our applicants bring unique strengths along with human realities. They offer varying kinds of expertise, professional experience, life skills, and spiritual gifts. As a committee, we are called upon to reflect together on those qualities and to evaluate them according to the criteria you laid down at the Listening Sessions and in the Survey. We feel privileged to have been called by you to do that. We are gratified to have identified a particularly gifted group of Pre-candidates. We will continue to take seriously the responsibility you have placed in us.

Next week, we’ll describe in more detail what happens during a minister’s Pre-candidating Weekend!

To see our Congregational Record, click https://sites.google.com/a/lay.firstunitarian.com/search/1stUCR.pdf