Serving on the Pastor Nominating Committee for the past 19 months was time consuming, stressful and an awesome spiritual experience. So many valuable lessons were learned that it seems worthwhile to share some of them with the church at-large.
The most valuable lesson we learned was about becoming indifferent. This comes directly from the book Presbytery encouraged us to read, Pursuing God’s Will Together by Ruth Haley Barton. We need to work diligently to remove our own desires, biases and prejudices while we are waiting for God’s answer to prayer. It is complete submission to God’s will, not our own. It is a challenging process that takes continual work. True discernment can’t happen when we aren’t open to God’s answer. It requires constantly praying “Thy will be done”.
Serving on the PNC honed our prayer life. We prayed continually, individually and as a committee. We were also upheld by all the prayers of the congregation. It was so encouraging to be told “we’re praying for you”. There were many, many days where we needed to sit or walk alone, quietly, with decisions regarding candidates. The time and the prayer were absolutely essential and there was no possibility of short cutting this.
Which leads to another lesson: waiting for God’s timing is hard. We knew that God loves this church even more than we do, but there was always a nagging sense of “getting it done”. When we thought we had found a candidate and it fell through, it was hard. But God clearly needed us to learn more about leaning in and waiting on Him. Our first candidate had a lot of strengths, but he wasn’t as humble or spiritually filled with joy as Pastor Jason.
There were other lessons learned as well, such as an appreciation for the church we are even as we searched for a new pastor. From the very first, God orchestrated success. God was there during the crafting of an enormously helpful Mission Study Report utilizing Appreciative Inquiry and the gifts of that team. Those who agreed to interviews provided the information we needed to describe who we are as a church, as well as the type of pastor we were looking for. God was with the Officer Nominating Committee as they put together a group with a gifted team leader, a Real Estate expert, a “facilities guy”, an expert in Presbyterian procedures, ones with knowledge of church finances, an internet search guru, and a Hospitality Queen – all skills that helped us be more effective at doing this job.
Along with seeing how God used the gifted and talented people in our church in this search from the beginning, it also became clear that we do ourselves a disservice if we look at the new pastor as the one who will “make this church successful”. Of course, there is an implied aspect of his call that he will help grow our church, but we are all members of this church, and introducing others to the joy of being here is part of the job for all of us.
We also learned, after viewing many, many on-line church services and looking at many, many church websites all over the country, that we are enormously blessed to have the church we have. Luke Graham and his team make us look good online. In the same way, we are so very blessed to have our music ministry led by Liz Virkler. Very few churches have a choir like ours! Our gorgeous sanctuary, that allows a pastor to move around and address the entire congregation, turns out to be unusual and an additional blessing. In our in-person interviews the response to our facility was always: WOW! Sometimes we need to be reminded of how blessed we are in our space.
There were more lessons learned by us individually: much more about prayer, about being Presbyterian, about the huge variety of ways pastors are serving their communities, even if those ways didn’t necessarily work with our mission. Please feel free to talk to any member of the PNC about their personal experiences and lessons learned. Thank you for allowing us to serve in this way.
Jeannette Haley with contributions from PNC members Nikki Butera, Tony Cook, Mike Hughes, Elaine Johnson, Warren Johnson, and Linda Souerbry