Our pastoral search committee is tasked with choosing pastoral candidates from a large pool of applicants. This process can take several months, so your prayers — and your patience — are very much needed throughout this time.
The search committee is a representative cross-section of our congregation with members from many different backgrounds and life experiences. Wisconsin-Northern Michigan District Superintendent John Davis, District Secretary/Treasurer Sharon York, and our interim senior pastor Tim Hawthorne will be assisting the committee in an advisory capacity.
Pastor Mark Chandler will be ministering Sunday, January 11, 2026 during the 10:30 a.m. morning service. A special meeting of the congregation will be held immediately following the service for the purpose of voting on Pastor Chandler for the position of Senior Pastor of Celebration Assembly. We ask all members to be present for this important vote.
Everyone is invited to meet Pastor Chandler and his family on Saturday, January 10. See our News and Events page for more information.
We have begun the process of inviting our top candidate for a try-out weekend, so we will no longer be accepting new résumés.
The board of deacons received a pastoral transition manual from the district office which contains a recommended process for churches that are seeking a new senior pastor.
The board of deacons compiled a list of potential search committee members to pray about and later narrow down to four people.
Our District Superintendent John Davis and District Secretary/Treasurer Sharon York met with the board of deacons to discuss the pastoral search process and the pastoral transition manual. The board of deacons met separately after this meeting to narrow down the list of potential search committee members to a final list of four people we will ask to participate. Over the following days those people prayed about it and agreed to be on the search committee:
The search committee members from the congregation were given a copy of the pastoral transition manual to read before our kickoff meeting.
The full search committee met for the first time for a kickoff meeting. Our Interim Senior Pastor Tim Hawthorne prayed over us, and then we discussed the overall process including the need for confidentiality. We discussed our vision for the church and found that we committee members were all essentially on the same page. We then made a list of attributes we’d like our next senior pastor to have, which grew into a list of attributes that could actually describe Jesus Christ. It will be impossible for anyone besides Jesus himself to possess every trait, but it means we’re on the right track. We were given copies of all of the résumés we had received so far.
We met to review the résumés together and sort them into broad categories of “Yes,” “Maybe,” and “No.” We will pray about the résumés in the “Yes” category.
We met to rank the résumés in our “Yes” category and discuss additional résumés we had received in the meantime. Before ranking them we reviewed our vision for the church and the attributes we are looking for in a new senior pastor. Some committee members mentioned feeling God had been leading them to rank a particular candidate as their first choice. We finalized our list of top five candidates and decided to interview the top two.
We conducted initial introductory video interviews with our top two candidates and discussed the candidates after each call.
We conducted an in-depth interview with our top candidate and discussed the candidate after the call.
Our #2 candidate withdrew his name from consideration due to his feeling that God was directing him to not continue the candidacy process with us.
The search committee voted to recommend our top candidate to the board of deacons to be our next senior pastor.
At this point the work of our search committee is essentially complete, unless the candidate declines our invitation, or if the candidate is not elected by our church membership as per the requirements in our church constitution and bylaws.
During their monthly board meeting, the board of deacons discussed the salary range and benefits package our church can afford to offer to our top candidate. The church board will contact this candidate to discuss the salary, benefits, and other such things and to schedule a try-out weekend.
Our top candidate informed us he felt God was leading him to our church and agreed to come for a try-out weekend.
Our board secretary was going to announce to the church that our pastoral candidate was coming for a try-out weekend, but this Sunday morning service was cancelled due to weather.
Our board secretary announced that our pastoral candidate was coming for a try-out weekend on January 9–12, 2026.
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