Episcopal Church Foundation Vestry Papers - for leading congregations

Responding to a call or lack thereof

No matter how closely you have followed the advice on this blog, the reality is only one final candidate will receive a call from the vestry and search committee. Most will receive what feels like a rejection. The candidate receiving the call should be ready to accept the call, pending resolution of any compensation issues. Rejecting a call at this late date can be devastating to search committees and is frowned upon by bishops and transition ministry officers. Occasionally, candidates may be weighing a second possible call at the same time. While you can ask a search committee for a bit of time to weigh another call, it is unfair to ask them to wait too long.

The successful candidate and vestry must negotiate a letter of agreement to conclude the calling process. Most dioceses have standardized letters of agreement and annually revised compensation guidelines that can be obtained from their website or transition ministry office. Use these in your final negotiations. A call is not complete until the letter of agreement has been signed by the vestry, candidate, and bishop. If the call is to another diocese, the candidate must undergo a background check. The successful candidate can notify their wardens and current bishop before the background check has been completed and the letter of agreement signed, but a broad announcement should wait until all the necessary paperwork has been completed.

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Shakespeare was right: Parting is such sweet sorrow.

We are in the midst of these dueling emotions. Christmas Day will be the last service at our current churches. Three weeks later, we begin a new call with a new congregation.

And we’re excited. The new church has lots of children and some amazing programs. The people are energized about mission and passionate about community. The location is two hours nearer to my side of the family. And after six years of telecommuting with a weekly (or more) 2 ½-hour drive, I’ll be three miles from the diocesan office.

God is good.

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Engaging in face–to-face interviews

There are two forms of face-to-face interviews: a visit to your current parish by a subgroup of the search committee, and a final tour and interview at the prospective parish with the whole search committee and/or vestry. Clergy not currently engaged in parish ministry are usually asked to “borrow” a pulpit in a local parish, so the visitors can hear them preach. Some search committees may omit the step of visiting home parishes for financial reasons.

The pre-visit preparation arrangements give clergy an opportunity to demonstrate their administrative skills. Clergy should help the visiting team make their arrangements. If a hotel is needed, help find a good, reasonably priced one near the church. Send the visiting team maps showing the location of the church, hotel, restaurants, and parking. You may have some latitude choosing the specific day of the visit. If so, choose a day which can best illuminate your ministries, a day with special programs, or a day with good lectionary passages on which to preach.

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Discern what search committees are looking for and respond to their questions

Some search committees ask for responses to questionnaires with an initial application. Other committees review initial applications and nominations and send information about their parishes, including a profile, to potential candidates, and ask those candidates to send information about their ministries, including responses to a questionnaire, back to the committee. After further screening, the search committee may also ask for a phone interview.

Clergy should begin this step of the process by discerning whether the vacancy represents a positive and fulfilling step on their vocational journey. Gather as much information as possible about the parish from their profile, website (including newsletters often posted online), and a Google search of the parish and its community. You may contact people who know the parish, including their interim, but do not contact members of the parish, as they may be involved in the search process.

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Basic Paperwork for Entering a Search Process: OTM Portfolios, Résumé, and Cover Letters 

Three documents are required to make initial contact with a search committee: a résumé, an OTM Portfolio, and a cover letter. Each of these documents should be concise and polished, as search committees often begin with fifty or more potential candidates. The initial screening of that many inquiries is likely to be cursory. The important information about a successful applicant’s ministry needs to jump off the page of each of these documents.

The résumé should be no more than two pages long, with all of the important information on the first page. The first review of a résumé tends to be cursory. After all, a search committee member may have a stack of forty applications to read. The résumé should communicate the message, “explore this candidate more thoroughly” within thirty seconds of reading.

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Identify appropriate open positions

When searching for open positions, clergy should develop a fairly broad screen to help discern which available positions might be appropriate matches. Elements in an initial screen might be: geography, kind of job (i.e. rector, associate, bishop, etc.), parish size, and compensation. These elements can be easily discerned in a search of all potential openings. Once these broader criteria are met, clergy can begin to research a more limited number of openings and discern about matching skills, values, and purpose. Information to answer those deeper questions is often not evident at the beginning of a search process.

Open positions for Episcopal clergy are posted on a variety of websites. This blog has attempted to aggregate all of those sites to provide a simple portal to all job listings. On the left hand column of the following page, you will find a long list under “Episcopal Clergy Openings”. The list begins the Office of Transition Ministry (OTM) Portfolio, which contains the most comprehensive listing of job openings. That is followed by the Transition Ministry Network Newsletter, which contains listings from dioceses in New England, the Mid-Atlantic, Upper South and the Midwest. A list of individual diocesan websites that post some deployment information follows. If you know of other online listings, please forward that information to the Discernment Doctor.

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Step 1. Define your skills, values, and purpose

Who are you, what are your blessings, and where might you like to exercise those blessings? If you don’t know who you are, you will not be able to discern what positions might be good for you, and therefore you will not be able to effectively sell your strengths to a search committee. Just as a parish begins a search process by creating a profile describing their assets, challenges and aspirations, so too clergy should begin their search by identifying their experience, skills, values, dreams and purpose. This portfolio of information serves two purposes. It will provide information for your resume, and OTM Ministry Portfolio, and responses to search committee questions. It will also provide clergy with a yardstick to help discern whether given parish opening is a good fit.

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Understanding the process from the clergy’s perspective

Clergy beginning to search for a new position can anticipate spending a year or two looking at several prospective positions before finding a good match and receiving a call. This process takes time for at three reasons: 

It takes a while to find a good match. Not all good matches result in a call. The process from initial nomination through final interview and decision often takes six to eight months.

Clergy in a search process have two tasks: 

To discern whether a given parish will be a blessing for you and your family. To present yourself to the search committee as a blessing to the parish. 

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One of the my core values is clarity. Hence, entering into search processes early in my career drove me nuts, as the process seemed opaque. I never knew what happened when or why. Nor could I understand why there were long lapses in communication from the search committee. Through personal experience and through coaching colleagues, a five step understanding of the search process emerged.

This five step model of a search process will be outlined in a series of blogs over the coming weeks. Before looking at the search process from the clergy’s point of view, let’s peek behind the curtain and see the process search committees usually follow. They also use a five step process, roughly parallel to what we need to do as clergy.

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Yikes! The Rector is retiring/leaving and there are so many dynamics going on! 
Where can we get some perspective? 
Where is there help?
A new resource from Fresh Start (2013 Update: the program is no longer running, but resources have been uploaded to ECF Vital Practices) builds upon 10 years of experience helping congregations move through the transition from one rector to the next. While most of its focus has been working with dioceses and their Transition Ministers, Fresh Start is now making their material available to lay leaders looking for resources to help a congregations in transition beginning with the announcement of a Rector’s departure and continuing through the search process.  

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My daughter was only four months old the first time I truly understood the challenge of raising PKs – priest kids.

I held her in my arms as we waited by the door for my husband to lock up the church. Her little face peaked out from a caterpillar costume. Across my back stretched butterfly wings. A Martha-Stewart idea brought to reality by my sewing whiz of a mother-in-law, the costume won first place at the church contest.

Like every mom, I was happy that she won – though she had no idea and was perfectly content with her pacifier. The ribbon will go in her baby book, I decided.

Another family walked out. The mom looked at us and under her breath, she muttered, “Figures she won first place. She’s the preacher’s kid.”

It was a sucker punch.

I’m not prone to casual weeping, but the tears welled up right away. I cried, not over a silly costume contest but rather for a new understanding of the thin space in which we would raise our children.

If they won a contest at church, it would be because they were priest’s kids. If they knew a Bible story, it was because they were priest kids, and if they didn’t, then something must be wrong. If they misbehaved, they would be judged more harshly. If they sat like angels, it would be taken for granted.

When I was five years old, my parents moved to a new church, and I lost a bet with a fellow Sunday School classmate. He told me that Wesley’s dad was the preacher. I didn’t believe it. In my small view of the world, preachers didn’t have families. They weren’t real people with obligations and relationships.

Preachers were on a pedestal.

I don’t want my children to be there too.

As promised, ECF Vital Practices continues to add to its January/February Vestry Papers themed content with two new articles:

Covenants in Congregational Life
In his role as the Episcopal Church’s Missioner for Church Planting, Ministry Redevelopment, and Fresh Expressions, Thomas Brackett has witnessed the power of covenants as a tool for building a healthy congregation. Learn how covenants might help your congregation achieve its goals.

Healthy Transitions: The Role of Leaders Part 2
In part one, Sandra Clark Kolb of Fresh Start shared ways congregational leaders can make the transition from a departing to a new rector a healthy one, by managing both the change (the event itself) and the transition (people’s internal responses). In part two, she focuses on steps congregational leaders can take to lay a welcoming foundation for a new rector.

I invite you to share your ‘Healthy Practices’ with other ECF Vital Practices readers by commenting on an article, blog, or tool or by sharing your own healthy practices in the Your Turn section.

VP Talk: Two New Transcripts

In January, ECF Vital Practices sponsored two VP Talks: Tom Ehrich’s “The End to ‘Business as Usual’” and Mary MacGregor’s “No More Parking Lot Conversations.” Transcripts of both are available on the site.

Building Community: Do You Have a Lenten Resource to Share?

Is your congregation ready for Lent? Have you developed or discovered Lenten resources that you would recommend to others? ECF Vital Practices invites congregations and faith groups to use the Your Turn section of the site to share their Lenten resources and practices with others. Registered users can log in and upload documents or audio, video, or image files directly. Not a registered user? Please visit the ECF Vital Practices homepage and click on “Register.’

March/April Preview

“Caring for God’s Creation” is the theme for the March/April issue of Vestry Papers. Posted online March 1, this issue will offer a variety of hands on resources for congregations interested in reducing their carbon footprint or going green.

Thank You

I want to thank our readers and contributors for helping all of us at ECF Vital Practices build a resource for congregational leaders. The number of unique visitors to our site continues to increase, due in large part to the work many of you are doing to help us spread the word. Please continue to do so.

As always, I welcome hearing from you either through the website or by email,editor@episcopalfoundation.org.

Faithfully,

Nancy Davidge
Editor, ECF Vital Practices

Click here for a Spanish translation of this blog post.

In 14 years as a clergy spouse, I’ve witnessed the gamut of how a congregation cares for its priest.

Don’t get me wrong – I know that the congregation pays its priest – and this is both a job and vocation, but I’ve come to believe that one way to measure the health of a church is how it interacts and cares for its priest.

I don’t see the congregation’s wealth – or lack thereof – or Sunday attendance -- high or low -- as factors in the care and feeding of priests. We’ve served a variety of churches, from tiny country congregations to large suburban, a new start and county seat churches.

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