pastor search

Decision Tools

Decisions, decisions, everyone loves making decisions! With our ad for a new pastor out in a number of locations, it’s time for the River’s Edge Pastor Nominating Committee to nail down exactly how to evaluate potential candidates. That is, we have to decide how to decide on the candidate to nominate. Oy vey! This was an area where, once again, we found ourselves blessed to be working with such good friends and ministry partners as we brainstormed ideas and methods and scoring thoughts galore. After tossing around a lot of ideas with seven backseat drivers making suggestions at one Excel Spreadsheets operator, a set of ideas did ultimately click and we’re now all set to consider and discuss applicants to our ad! We have two sets of criteria that we can use as tools to evaluate each candidate: 1) One spreadsheet has a list of good questions to consider while

Getting Started

As the Pastoral Search Team, we are thrilled to be open about our process and include you, the rest of our church family, as much as we can while protecting the privacy of future candidates. We’re just getting started, so there’s not much to share just yet. But to begin the habit of transparency, here’s what’s been going on so far: We have a book we’ve been reading and pulling out useful tips; it’s called, Search: The Pastoral Search Committee Handbook, by William Vanderbloemen. Dane found it, and we’ve all had a chance to start reading our copies. Some notes in there will likely not be as useful for River’s Edge, but there've been a number of really good points about things we should start doing early, and make sure that we’re in sync about now as a team. One of the things that the “Search” book recommended was to