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 Superindentent Larry Liebe, District Secretary/Treasurer Rich Lemberg, and our interim pastor Paul Hanson will be assisting the committee in an advisory capacity.
On January 8 by unaminous vote Pastor Craig Ellefsen was elected as our senior pastor. We waited until this week to officially announce the news to give him time to inform his current church, One Life Assembly in Baraboo, Wis. Pastor Craig will start ministering February 5, and Pastor Roy McKain will be serving as our interim pastor for the rest of the month. Please pray for Pastor Craig, his family, and One Life Assembly as they make this transition.
Pastor Craig Ellefsen will be ministering Sunday, January 8, 2012 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 Ellefsen for the position of Senior Pastor of Celebration Assembly. We ask all members to be present for this important vote.
Meet Pastor Ellefsen and his family on Saturday, January 7. See our News and Events page for more information.
We have begun the process of narrowing down our list of top candidates, so we will no longer be accepting new résumés.
We had our search committee kickoff meeting with Pastor Paul Hanson and Rev. Lemberg. 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 each received copies of résumés that were sent by applicants directly to the church.
Thus far we have received over 60 résumés from the district office or directly from applicants. We will be reviewing and discussing them periodically in smaller batches in the coming weeks.
We discussed our first group of résumés and picked six candidates to be researched further by Rev. Larry Liebe, who attended this meeting. Rev. Lemberg and District Discipleship Director Mark Kilcoyne also attended.
We received the results of Rev. Liebe's inquries into our first six candidates and removed three of them from consideration. We also discussed our second group of résumés and chose five candidates to be researched further.
We received the results of Rev. Liebe's inquiries into our next five candidates and removed some of them from consideration. We then listened to audio recordings of sermons from five of our top candidates and discussed them.
We discussed our third group of résumés and chose two candidates to be researched further. We also talked about the sermons we had listened to during our last meeting and started narrowing down our list of candidates. We will be contacting our top candidates to set up phone or Skype interviews.
We received the results of Rev. Liebe's inquiries into our two candidates from our previous meeting and removed one of them from consideration. We listened to a sermon from our newest top candidate and discussed it. We finalized our list of top candidates and will have phone or Skype interviews with some of them in the next two weeks.
We held an interview over Skype with one of our top candidates and took notes for future reference.
We held an interview over Skype with another one of our top candidates and took notes for future reference. In the meantime a third top candidate had accepted a pastorate and was removed from consideration.
We discussed two of our top candidates and ranked them in several categories based on our interviews. Rev. Liebe attended this meeting to provide guidance on the end of our pastoral search process. The higher-scoring candidate will be contacted by our church board to discuss salary, benefits, and other such things and to schedule a try-out weekend.
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.
The two top candidates we had contacted withdrew their names from consideration, so we met again to determine our next steps. Pastor Paul and Rev. Liebe attended this meeting. We will have phone or Skype interviews with more of our top candidates after Thanksgiving.
We held an interview over Skype with another one of our top candidates and took notes for future reference. The church board will be contacting this candidate to discuss salary, benefits, and other such things and to schedule a try-out weekend.
At this point the work of our search committee is essentially complete (again), 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.
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