August was my last month of being “in search and call” (or, what more realistic cynics would call it, “being unemployed”). Starting with my move on Monday, I will begin the gradual transition into my new job as Senior Pastor of Longview First Christian Church in Longview, Washington, and today, I believe I will be withdrawn from the search and call process by the general church.
The search-and-call process for finding a minister, at least in the Congregationalist polity of the Disciples of Christ, is very different from the world of secular hiring, but it is also very different from the traditional itinerancy model that denominations like the United Methodists use, in which you go wherever your bishop has assigned you to go. So for the Disciples, a lot of this process has to do with building connections and relationships with a parish’s search committee (in anticipation of the entire parish). Russ, my mentor and supervisor at FCC Concord, always said the search and call process was more akin to dating than hiring, that you had to go on a few dates with a church before exclusivity—I would amend this one step further in saying that it is akin to online dating, since the whole process begins with you and parish viewing one another’s online profiles (provided by eChurcharmony, er, I mean, the Office of Search and Call).
With graduation from seminary around the corner, and at the strong suggestion of Ben, my regional minister here in California, I put my profile (a pastoral hybrid of resume/biographical information) into circulation at the end of April 2011. This was actually earlier than I had intended—I had planned on returning to school for one more year to write an academic master’s thesis in Biblical Studies. But a combination of factors—especially emotional factors—led me to think that I was finished with school and needed to move on to the next step in my life.
What Winston Churchill said about democracy (“It’s the worst system, except for all the others”) is sort of how I feel about our search and call process, but it does have its definite advantages—for one, while there is a level of involvement from our regional ministers (our rough equivalent of bishops) in that they send profiles to churches and candidates, they do not outright assign us, so we still have a say in where we go. Similarly and secondly, you can be very specific about asking particular regions for preference in hiring. In my case, I asked the regions in Southern California, Northern California, Oregon, Washington, and Kansas City for preference—the West Coast being that I had lived here for the last seven years of my life and would love to continue to do so, and Kansas City so that I could return to my boyhood hometown and live in (relatively) close proximity to my parents and sister. I never heard from any parishes in Oregon or Southern California, and a couple of leads in Northern California and Kansas City ended up falling through, which left Washington.
On May 12, around two weeks after my profile had gone into circulation, I received an email from the Rev. Sandy Messick, the regional minister for Washington, Northern Idaho, and Alaska (and who is absolutely wonderful, despite being a ginger), asking me if I would be interested in a church in Longview, Washington, a town about an hour’s drive north of Portland, Oregon. After chatting with her and taking a night to sleep on it, I said yes—aside from starting my vocational career as a solo pastor (which is what I felt most passionate about), it would return me to my beloved Pacific Northwest, less than a two-hour drive from many of my college friends as well as from my aging grandfather, who lives on the Oregon coast.
I was exuberantly excited (to the extent that I get exuberant), but I wasn’t contacted by the parish until June to schedule a Skype interview, which we did in early July. The parish quickly followed up with me to request that I come visit them in person, which I did in early August for a series of face-to-face meetings as well as to preach a “call” (aka “audition”) sermon on August 6. On the following Sunday, August 14, the church voted to call me as their next senior pastor. Subsequently, they presented a "letter of call" (aka a contract) offer to me. The offer itself was very fair and generous, and so there wasn’t much negotiating to do—a few days later, we agreed to terms, and I have since gone about the many details of relocating from Berkeley to Longview.
As with most pastoral searches, this was a lengthy one compared to the process of a secular company filling an open job-—I was first contacted by Sandy on May 12, and my first Sunday on the job is September 25, which, for those of you keeping score at home, is roughly 4.5 months from first contact to first Sunday of work (and FCC Longview themselves had an interim pastor for several months before even contacting me). That’s a lot of time to be under consideration for one particular job opening, but it is still very short compared to the lengths of search and call that I’ve seen many of my friends and colleagues undergo. In any event, I’m glad I did it, and I’m glad it’s over with so that I can get on with the actual work of ministry, because I am quite psyched to begin my work with the folks up in Longview.
Finally, I am always interested to hear the stories of clergy colleagues and my seminary classmates about your own navigation of the search and call process, as well as from laypeople who have, say, sat on a search team for their parish. Search and call is a delicate issue for many pastors and many parishes, but talking about it (even in more general terms to protect confidentiality) can be a great help—in my experience, I often felt like I was a little on guard, unsure of how much information to give away at any one time, and that can take its toll on a person, which is unfortunate when you are just one step away from beginning the next great stage of your work as a servant of God.
Yours in Christ,
Eric
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