Meet Rev. Diane Teichert | Diane's Philosophy
Open Letter | Candidating Week
What's Happening | Meet the Committee | Search Timeline | Packet Excerpt
The Finish Line
April, 2009 - We are standing at the finish line in our search for a final candidate for minister. We have completed all our pre-candidating weekends where the potential candidates came for two days of intense interviews, luscious meals, and "neutral pulpit" sermonizing.
During this process, we had a very interesting time visiting other churches and experiencing Unitarian Universalism through the eyes of a newcomer. One church had parking spaces reserved for visitors. Another church specifically told visitors not to feel obligated to contribute when the offering was taken. We also saw lots of interesting displays of reading material, some geared to learning more about UUism, some geared more for young families.
But when it comes to the whole worship experience, we must admit we are still very partial to Paint Branch. Nowhere else did we feel the continuity, the flow, the interaction of the various parts of the service that we get from attending our own sweet church. Those of you who know me can testify to the objectivity with which I view this matter.
But let’s get back to the ministerial search process. We’ve got all the information about all the pre-candidates. Our next step is to choose our final candidate for presentation to the congregation. So who is our candidate?
We hope to soon reveal that information to the congregation in a mailing that will also include the dates for Candidating Week. During this week that runs from Saturday one weekend through Sunday the following weekend, you will have a chance to meet and interact with our candidate. You will also experience services presented by our candidate on the first and second Sunday of the "week."
Please plan to spend some time during Candidating Week discovering why we are so impressed with this candidate. Then, after the service on the second Sunday, there will be a congregational meeting in which we will vote on whether to call this candidate as our next settled minister. Whatever the outcome of the vote is, it is very important that we have a significant turnout at this meeting to determine the will of the congregation. Please plan to be there for the vote or arrange for a member to carry your proxy.
Our agenda has always been to find the ministry that is the best fit for our congregation. The members of the Ministerial Search Committee are: Bettie Young (co-chair), Michael Léger (co-chair), John Bartoli, Beth Lyons, Rene McDonald, Muriel Morisey, and Marge Owens. Please don’t hesitate to stop one of us and ask for more information about Candidating Week. Look for the big tags with the MSC logo.
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Are We There Yet?
March, 2009 - Slowly but surely we move towards our final choice for candidate for ministry to present to the congregation. We are in the middle of pre-candidating weekends right now. After looking at the potential candidate’s Ministerial Record, exchanging packets of more detailed information, interviewing each other by phone, and calling all their references, we finally have a list of those we are really interested in seeing up close and personal.
The Pre-Candidating Weekend starts with a casual dinner with the Search Committee and the candidate (and their spouse if they have come too). No formal interviews, no formal questions, just some time to get to know one another.
On Saturday, the interviews get more intense with the Search Committee bombarding the potential candidate with a series of questions gathered from your own remarks and discussions during the cottage meetings and your responses to the congregational survey. After a light lunch spent with the committee, the candidate is taken on a short tour of our facilities and our community. Later, one of our co-chairs sits down with the potential candidate to discuss the technical and financial details of any possible ministerial agreement between the candidate and the congregation.
Saturday night is free for both the candidate and the Search Committee. They come together one more time Sunday morning to listen to a worship service delivered by the candidate at a “neutral pulpit”. The Committee then meets one last time with the candidate over lunch. There everyone gets to ask some final questions. After lunch, the candidate leaves for home, the Search Committee talks a little about their impressions but does not, repeat, does not yet take a vote.
No vote is taken until all pre-candidating weekends are complete. This is the culmination of months and months of work. If we agree strongly that one candidate is really the right match for our congregation (and that is a good possibility), then we will invite that candidate to come down for Candidating Week.
Candidating Week is an intense and exciting time for both the candidate and the congregation. The week runs from Saturday one weekend through Sunday of the next weekend. The Candidate will be meeting formally and informally with people representing the major areas of the church: the RE Director and staff, the Music Director, members of the choir, the Church Administrator and staff, the RE teachers, the Worship Associates, the Pastoral Care Associates, the We Care Committee, the Social Action Committee and so on. The candidate also preaches a service at Paint Branch on both the first and last Sunday of that week.
There is more to say about Candidating Week and the final vote to call or not to call the minister, but I will save it for the next article. The MSC has reserved two weeks on the Church Calendar at the end of April: Saturday, April 18 thru Sunday, April 26, and Saturday, April 25 thru Sunday, May 3. If everything goes as planned, one of these weeks will be the actual Candidating Week.
Our only agenda is to find the ministry that is the best fit for our congregation. We're looking for a minister who leaves everyone with a strong conviction that the match is right for both parties. We will not settle for anything less.
The eight members of the MSC (Ministerial Search Committee) are: Bettie Young (co-chair), Michael Léger (co-chair), Tricia Most, Marge Owens, Beth Lyons, Rene McDonald, Muriel Morisey, and John Bartoli. Please don’t hesitate to stop one of us and ask about the search. Look for the big ID tags with the MSC logo.
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At the Far Turn and Headed for the Stretch…
February, 2009 - The Ministerial Search Committee (MSC) has been very busy for the last month considering the many candidates who have expressed interest in settlement at Paint Branch. By the time you read this article, we will have phone-interviewed everyone on our list and finalized our nominees for pre-candidating weekends.
Our congregation apparently is considered to be an excellent settlement opportunity and, as a result, we have had quite a wide variety of applicants from all parts of the country. I personally enjoyed speaking with them and asking them what they thought of our congregation and what they could bring to it.
We now move to the next step: the pre-candidating weekend. For this process, we invite each of our nominees to visit Paint Branch for a separate intensive weekend of face-to-face meetings and interviews. We start the weekend Friday night with a relaxed dinner together with the candidate so everyone can get to know each other.
On Saturday, we spend a number of hours intensely interviewing the candidate with a more detailed series of questions based on the areas we explored in our phone interviews. The candidate will likewise have a chance to question us about anything he/she wants to know about Paint Branch. We break for an informal lunch with the candidate before bringing him/her on a tour of our church facilities and a tour of the community. Saturday night, though, is reserved for the candidate to take some down time and put the finishing touches on his/her sermon.
On Sunday we all travel to a neutral pulpit (another church) to see and hear the candidate present a worship service including the sermon. After the service we again share lunch with the candidate, giving all parties a chance to discuss any final questions or comments.
Once we send the candidate on his/her way home, we will re-convene the Committee to exchange first reactions. No final votes will be taken on any candidate until the last pre-candidating weekend is finished. Even then, we will take a day or two to decompress and think about our choices.
These weekends are the main opportunities for Search Committee members to consider what the candidate's proposed ministry would be like. The candidate also has a chance to find out what it might be like to minister to our congregation. Together, we hope to find out if the pre-candidate and the Committee have the same strong conviction that we are the best fit for each other. We will settle for nothing less.
The eight members of the MSC (Ministerial Search Committee) are: Bettie Young (co-chair), Michael Léger (co-chair), Tricia Most, Marge Owens, Beth Lyons, Rene McDonald, Muriel Morisey, and John Bartoli. Please don’t hesitate to stop one of us and ask about the search. Look for the big ID tags with the MSC logo.
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Hello, This is Paint Branch Calling
January, 2009 - All the work that the Ministerial Search Committee (MSC) has put into finding a ministerial match for Paint Branch is finally starting to pay off. We have received serious inquiries and applications from a number of ministers in search and have been busy evaluating each of them.
We looked at the on-line ministerial records of quite a few interested candidates and requested packets from those that interested us. Some packets were in physical binders that we passed around to read. Other packets were available online with password-protected access. We were very careful to make sure that everyone on the committee had read a candidate’s packet before we discussed that person in a committee meeting. We did not want to unduly influence each other before we had a chance to read the candidate’s information.
We developed a standardized list of evaluation guidelines based on the information we gathered from the congregational survey, the cottage meetings, individual interviews, and our responses to the questions on our Congregational Record. We have been applying these standards in an equal and fair process to all interested candidates.
As I write this article, the MSC is currently conducting phone interviews with those candidates who seem to be the best fit. For this portion of the search we also developed a standardized list of about 12 questions that we ask each candidate. We add more individualized questions to this list as needed to clear up any questions we might have as a result of reading the candidate’s Ministerial Record.
During this process, the MSC has met two and three times a week choosing which candidates to call, actually calling the candidates, and spending time evaluating their responses to our questions. Once we have spoken to all the candidates on our phone interview list, we will decide on the 3 or 4 candidates that we would really like to see and hear in person.
Our only agenda is to find the ministry that is the best fit for our congregation. We're looking for a minister who leaves everyone with a strong conviction that the match is right for both parties. We will not settle for anything less.
The eight members of the MSC (Ministerial Search Committee) are: Bettie Young (co-chair), Michael Léger (co-chair), Tricia Most, Marge Owens, Beth Lyons, Rene McDonald, Muriel Morisey, and John Bartoli. Please don’t hesitate to stop one of us and ask about the search. Look for the big ID tags with the MSC logo.
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Help Wanted: Calling All Candidates
December, 2008 - The Ministerial Search Committee (MSC) has reached another major milestone in our search for new ministry. We have finished our on-line "Congregational Record" and posted it to a special password-protected UUA Transitions website that only prospective UU ministerial candidates (and the Search Committee, of course) can see. Both our Ministerial Search Representative, Nancy Dean, and the UUA Transitions Director, John Weston, have reviewed and approved the Record along with the compensation agreement developed with the Board of Trustees, and the congregational survey summary.
As you may recall from my description last month, the Congregational Record is an exhaustive historical, financial, demographic, and philosophical description of our congregation in search of new ministry. It's a kind of prospectus of our church. If ministers in search take a look at our site and find our church's unique aspects appealing, then they will allow us access to their own on-line resume that will include a record of his/her education, previous ministerial settlements, salary requirements, general theological leanings, references, strong points and not so strong points.
The MSC will pick the candidates we want to know more about, check to see if they are still interested, and, if so, exchange "packets" with them. A packet is a more detailed description usually presented in a loose-leaf page format that is exchanged between the parties. PBUUC's packet includes various local community and county information, along with photos of the day-to-day life of Paint Branch. Once we receive the candidate's packet, we will check references provided, check with the District Executive of his/her UU district, and try to develop secondary references from these conversations.
If both parties are still interested in each other, then we will schedule a conference call between the search candidate and the entire Ministerial Search Committee. We may want to call some candidates again to clarify their responses. By the time we are finished the MSC should have a much fuller picture of the candidate.
We hope to make both our Congregational Record and our packet available in the lobby of the Meeting House for members to take a look at in the near future. Because of strict rules of confidentiality, we can never share with anyone outside the MSC the names and/or home churches of potential candidates. We can, however, let you know how many interested parties there are and how many we've been interviewing.
Again, our only agenda is to find the ministry that is the best fit for our congregation. We're looking for a minister with a "calling," and one who leaves us with a strong conviction that the match is right for both parties. We will settle for nothing less.
The eight members of the MSC (Ministerial Search Committee) are: Bettie Young (co-chair), Michael Léger (co-chair), Tricia Most, Marge Owens, Beth Lyons, Rene McDonald, Muriel Morisey, and John Bartoli. Please don’t hesitate to stop one of us and ask about the search. Look for the big ID tags with the MSC logo.
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The Congregational Record
November, 2008 - The "Congregational Record" is what the Unitarian Universalist Association calls the exhaustive historical, financial, demographic, and philosophical description of a congregation in search of new ministry.
Our own Congregational Record, when complete, will be placed on a special password-protected UUA Transitions website. Our Ministerial Service Representative, Nancy Dean, and the UUA Transitions Director, John Weston, will review our work. Once our Congregational Record has been approved, it will be made available to all UU ministers who are currently in search. Each minister will have his or her own resume on this website which our Search Committee will then be able to see. This will allow all parties, potential candidates and our search committee, to get a sense of what the other is about and whether or not we want to find out more about each other.
There are many interesting facts that compiling the Congregational Record has brought to light. Did you know that we have 229 official adult members and that our average Sunday attendance is 114? Or that our children and youth enrollment in the Religious Exploration program is 58? Our operating pledge income this year is over $261,000 a year from 125 pledge units. If you do the math, that means we average just over $2,000 per pledging unit, a very high average (we are told) when compared with other UU churches. Did you know that we "employ" 12 people? Three of them are full time (40 hours a week), two are part time (20 hours a week), five of them are quarter time (10 hours a week or less) and the rest are paid for less than 5 hours a week of work.
Some sections of the Congregational Record require much more thoughtful answers: "Provide a profile of the minister you seek." "Provide a profile of the congregation." "What are the congregation's strengths, what are its challenges?" You can see why we spent so much time talking with members of the congregation trying to get a sense of what you want.
Though we may not be as visible as we have been in previous months, we are still working hard, meeting every week to complete our tasks. Our only agenda is to find the ministry that is the best fit for our congregation. We will settle for nothing less.
The eight members of the MSC (Ministerial Search Committee) are: Bettie Young (co-chair), Michael Léger (co-chair), Tricia Most, Marge Owens, Beth Lyons, Rene McDonald, Muriel Morisey, and John Bartoli. Please don’t hesitate to stop one of us and ask about the search. Look for the big ID tags with the MSC logo.
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Search Committee Gathers More Information From The Congregation
October, 2008 - The Search Committee has just finished a very busy month. We had something going every Sunday from Aug. 24 thru Sept. 21. We started out on Aug 24, sponsoring a very successful Beyond Categorical Thinking workshop facilitated by the UUA's Rev. Keith Kron and attended by some 90 people. The next Sunday (Aug. 31) we discussed and distributed our summary of the congregational survey results to a good-sized crowd. Then on Sunday, Sept. 7, we participated in the Involvements Fair. Finally, on Sept. 14 and 21, we held small group Cottage Meeting discussions with about 40 more Paint Branchers on four key questions derived from the survey results.
Whew! All of these activities are part of our congregation-wide plan to gather as much information as possible from everyone associated with Paint Branch about what they want for the future settled ministry. The next month will find us not quite so visible but we will still be working hard, meeting every week, assimilating all the information we have gathered, and putting together the packet of information that will present us to prospective candidates.
Our next big task is putting together what is known as the Congregational Record. This is a full examination of our church, our finances, our buildings, our numbers, our demographics, our Sunday attendance, our RE attendance, our budget--pretty much everything that goes into making Paint Branch Paint Branch. We are intent on completing this process and having our congregational record on the UUA Transitions Website approved for prospective candidates to view by October 31. Once this record is online, any ministers in search (and registered and vetted by UUA) can view our information.
The eight members of the MSC (Ministerial Search Committee) are: Bettie Young (co-chair), Michael Léger (co-chair), Tricia Most, Marge Owens, Beth Lyons, Rene McDonald, Muriel Morisey, and John Bartoli. Please don’t hesitate to stop one of us and ask about the search. Look for the big ID tags with the MSC logo. We’ll be working every week for you.
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Meetings R Us…
September, 2008 - By the time you read this, a lot of you will have taken part in the “Beyond Categorical Thinking” service and workshop led by Rev. Keith Kron, of UUA’s Identity-Based Ministries this past Aug. 24. This workshop was designed to “promote inclusive thinking and help prevent unfair discrimination in the ministerial search process.” Hopefully, we all learned more about our institutional culture and examined ways we can be more inclusive in our consideration of ministerial candidates. The Search Committee spent the last part of July and most of August preparing for this workshop. From the response so far (as of Aug. 17) to all our marketing efforts, announcements, postcards, and phone trees, I’m guessing it was pretty successful.
Nancy Dean, our Ministerial Search Representative from JPD, met with us on July 29th. She walked us through all the major steps of the search process and cleared up a lot of confusion we had about when/where certain things had to be done. She noted that the average length of settlement for a new minister is seven years, though average length of settlement for a minister of color is about 3 or 4 years.
We now have three pages on the PBUUC website. On the “What’s Happening” page you will find current information about what activities the committee is engaged in including all the MSC newsletter articles written so far. The “Meet the Committee” page lists bios and pictures of each member of the committee while the “Search Timeline” page shows a tentative outline of the various steps on our way to making a final ministerial recommendation to the congregation. Here’s how to access the new pages: go to the main page http://www.pbuuc.org, click on “Ministerial Transition Page” then click on “Ministerial Search Committee” or go directly to the “What’s Happening” page with http://www.pbuuc.org/news/minister-transition/search-whats-happening.html. You can then easily navigate to the other two pages from there.
And what about those survey results? We are currently planning and organizing interviews with representatives of various committees and affinity groups. In September we will be conducting “cottage meetings” open to all members of the congregation during Enrichment Hour after service. We plan on presenting survey results at these meetings and asking everyone for further input based on those results. We want to make sure we understand what attributes we all want our next settled ministry to have. Check out the announcements for times and dates of these meetings in the weekly bulletin in the order of service, on the website, or from the listserv.
Again, the eight members of the MSC (Ministerial Search Committee) are: Bettie Young (co-chair), Michael Léger (co-chair), Tricia Most, Marge Owens, Beth Lyons, Rene McDonald, Muriel Morisey, and John Bartoli. Please don’t hesitate to stop one of us and ask about the search. Look for the big ID tags with the MSC logo. You’ll see us around.
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We Retreat Together and Advance Towards Our Goal and Beyond…
August, 2008 - The eight members of the Ministerial Search Committee went on an overnight retreat to Bon Secours Spiritual Center in Marriottsville, Maryland, at the beginning of July. The Joseph Priestley District provided us with a facilitator, Judith Bauer, who was well experienced with running retreats and in particular retreats for search committees. Judith led us through a number of playful and thoughtful exercises that helped us learn more about each other, discover what our talents are, and reinvigorate our reasons for being on the search committee.
We created a covenant where we pledged to dedicate ourselves to the ministerial search in a confidential, honest, and communicative process. Above all we dedicated ourselves to find out, to the best of our ability, what the congregation was looking for in its next settled ministry in particular, and the future direction of the church in general.
With this as our core, we were able to consider more of the business of the committee. We discussed some principles for making the many decisions we will have to make along the way to finding a successful candidate(s) for Paint Branch. Judith also led us through the basic techniques of interviewing potential candidates, both on the phone and in person.
All this preparation led up to the parceling out of the individual tasks that comprise a Search Committee’s work. Within a few minutes, all the jobs were filled. Bettie Young and Michael Leger will Co-Chair the committee. Michael and Bettie also agreed to be point persons on checking references of prospective candidates. Bettie Young will also be the MSC member on the compensation committee that determines the financial package we will offer our future minister(s). Muriel Morisey will continue to keep the minutes and monitor internal communication within the committee. Rene McDonald will head the effort to create and edit our “packet,” the information that we send potential interested candidates about our own congregation. Rene will also arrange appropriate hospitality for candidates that make the first cut. Marge Owens will be the committee Treasurer. Tricia Most will arrange the neutral pulpit sites for the “pre-candidating” weeks. Beth Lyons will head the information gathering phase of our work, looking at congregational survey results and organizing cottage meetings. John Bartoli will work as “communications czar” keeping the congregation informed of the committee’s progress through newsletter articles, web presence, and other public relations vehicles.
By the time you read this article, we will have met with our District Search Representative, Nancy Dean. This will be our chance to coordinate with her our planned calendar checklist of tasks to perform to keep us on track for a successful search.
We have also arranged for a UUA sponsored congregational service and workshop called Beyond Categorical Thinking (BCT) to promote inclusive thinking and help prevent unfair discrimination in the ministerial search process. On Sunday, August 24, our new interim ministers, Phyllis Hubbell and John Manwell, along with Keith Kron of the UUA, and Worship Associate Tosha O’Neal, will present a search-related worship service at 10a.m. followed by a 3-hour workshop designed to help us consider our hopes, expectations and concerns in regard to our search for new settled ministry. Lunch and child care will be provided. For further information please see the article on the BCT elsewhere in this newsletter or contact Tricia Most at 301-445-2821 or e-mail her at patricia_most [insert 'at' symbol] msn [dot] com. Please attend if you can make it.
We will continue to meet on a weekly basis through the summer and through the entire search process. If you have any questions about the search or about the work of our committee, please do not hesitate to stop and ask any one of us. Call me, John Bartoli, at 301-441-2516 (john.bartoli [insert 'at' symbol] verizon [dot] net) and I will answer your questions or put you in touch with a member of our committee or congregation who will be able to help you. Thanks for your support.
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Ministerial Search Committee (MSC) Convenes!
July, 2008 - We began our first meeting on June 12, by sharing with each other our reasons for volunteering our time and effort in the cause of finding a new minister(s). The members of the Committee represent a diverse group of Paint Branchers. Bettie Young, Marge Owens, and Rene McDonald have been church members for thirty plus years while Beth Lyons, Michael Leger, and Muriel Morisey have been attending Paint Branch for five years or less. Patricia Most and John Bartoli have been around for 15 to 20 years.
Among these eight Committee members are three former Board members, including two Board chairs, two Worship Associates, two members of the Men’s Group, two members of the DARTT team, four members of the Choir, one member of the Social Action Committee, and two former RE Committee chairs. Nobody on the MSC currently has children in the RE program but four of them have had their own children pass through the program and/or taught RE themselves.
Our first order of business was to organize our calendars and establish a regular weekly meeting day and time. Summer is a very busy time with many people taking vacations. Under the guidance of our convener, Bettie, we were able temporarily to establish Thursday nights as our regular meeting night (at least for the summer).
Our next task was to arrange a time and place for a retreat including a facilitator from JPD. That is now scheduled to take place July 1 and 2. Through special group exercises monitored by the facilitator at the retreat, we will get to know each other. We also expect to choose a Chair and start the process of determining who is best suited to lead each of the many different aspects of the work of the Committee. We will also decide on procedures we will be using to determine the will of the Committee as a whole. For example, which decisions must be made by consensus and which decisions may be made by a simple majority?
We have established a no-cost method of teleconferencing for telephone interviews with prospective candidates and for sharing information with members who cannot attend scheduled meetings. We also intend to create a password-protected website for Committee members to share reference material, calendars, and any suggestions for possible candidates. Look for our presence on the Paint Branch website too.
As of this writing (June 15), we are still eagerly awaiting the congregational survey results. After we analyze those results, we will come back to you, the congregation, and ask you whether you agree with our analysis and if not, what’s missing. Our intent is to gather as much information as we can so we can paint an accurate picture of our congregation and the direction in which we want to go for prospective ministerial candidates.
The eight members of the Ministerial Search Committee represent many years experience in various aspects of the church. If you think, however, that your particular group or interests are underrepresented by the MSC, please feel free to contact any one of us to make sure your concerns are being addressed in our search. This is a long, long process and the eight of us have promised to dedicate something like 300 to 400 hours apiece over the next year to search for our new minister(s). So, please, please, please, don’t hesitate to talk with us. We don’t want to waste time, yours or ours, in this very vital search for the future direction of the church. You can always contact me, John Bartoli, by phone at 301-441-2516 or john.bartoli [insert 'at' symbol] verizon [dot] net, and I will make sure the Committee becomes aware of your concerns, ideas, suggestions.
I’ll be reporting again in next month’s newsletter on the continuing progress of the Committee. So long for now. --John Bartoli
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