Chenoa Baptist Church 09-12-2007 Update

The Pastoral Search Committee (PSC) has been very busy since we began our work in February. The PSC is creating this newsletter because the Church survey results clearly showed many people wanted written updates in conjunction with verbal updates from the PSC……so we hope you will find this information helpful.

The committee has several steps it must accomplish to complete the search process. These are the steps we must go through during the search process:

Status	Step	Task
Done	1	Survey the Church to find out the type of Pastor desired.
Done	2	Share the results of the Church survey with the Church.
Done	3	Prepare information packets which contain data and pictures about our Church.
Done	4	Use Church survey results to search for prospective candidates.
Done	5	Exchange information with the candidates and arrange for interviews if appropriate (packets from step 3 are used in this step).
Done	6	Conduct interviews.
Done	7	Select the candidate that will be presented to the Church congregation.
	8	Introduce the candidate to our Church family at a potluck dinner. (This will be held the day before the “Candidate Sunday”).
	9	Arrange for a “Candidate Sunday” and Church vote

As you can see, the committee has accomplished a great deal since February, and we are currently very busy since we are now in the process of actually searching for candidates…..so we could really use extra prayers now! How does the PSC go about getting names of potential candidates? There are actually several ways we can get names:

· We are currently getting profiles from the American Baptist Churches national organization which maintains a database of Pastors who are available or may be willing to consider a move even if they are currently ministering at a church.

· We will be attending a “Face to Face” (which is a job fair specifically for Churches and Pastors) in Indiana on October 12th and 13th. The good thing about this event is that we will get the chance to meet potential candidates in person and will be able to conduct a pre-interview.

· We could even potentially use the internet. How? There are websites that are set up for this purpose such as Seminaries, Church Organizations (like the American Baptist Churches), and other organizations such as ChurchJobs.com. By placing information about our opening on these sites, candidates from virtually anywhere could see our information and contact us.

So, this is where things stand at this point in time. We hope you have found this newsletter to be helpful, and we want you to know that the committee intends to send out 2 more newsletters. One will be sent when we get to the interview step so you will know we are in that phase and can be in prayer for us. And the last one will be sent once we have a candidate to present to the Church so that everyone can plan to attend the meet the candidate potluck and the Candidate Sunday events.