Greetings from your Discernment Committee Chair!

If you’ve been in church the last couple of Sundays, you may have noticed that our “Rose Window” display (which symbolizes where we are in the discernment process) is slowly being completed, and stage three was recently filled in. On April 14, 2012, the Discernment Committee met with the Rev. Canon Joanna Satorius and she presented us with the list of candidates who would like to move into the next step of the process with us to be considered for our next rector. We have fourteen candidates, from all over the United States. Our candidates are an impressive bunch, with varied experiences
and backgrounds.

The week after we received the list, each candidate was mailed a packet with additional information about our parish and about the community, along with a list of questions the Discernment Committee had compiled. The candidates have been asked to provide the answers to those questions and some other materials. Once the candidate materials have been received, which we anticipate to be around June 1, each member of the Discernment Committee will be provided with a notebook with all of the information about each candidate. On July 7, the Committee will meet to discuss which of the fourteen candidates should move to the next step to be interviewed by the Committee, either in person or by Skype videoconferencing.

After these interviews, some candidates may also be visited at their home parishes by members of the Discernment Committee, so that there is a chance to see the candidates in their own current parishes. Ultimately, after this process and lots of prayer, the Discernment Committee will pass three names on to the Messiah vestry. The vestry will then decide who will be the next parish rector.

You may wonder why we don’t share the names of the candidates, or other information about them, with the parish. The Discernment Committee has promised confidentiality to the candidates, and we have also committed to one another to keep that promise. Many of the candidates are currently priests in other parishes, the members of which may not know that their priest is considering a call to Messiah. It would not be helpful to a candidate’s current relationship with his or her parish to disclose that in an untimely manner. The Episcopal Church is a very small world, and it is possible that members of our parish may know members of a parish where one of our candidates is currently serving. Therefore, the only persons who know all the names of the list are the members of the Committee, and we have agreed to not share details about the candidates. Even the vestry does not know the names, and ultimately they will only know the three final names which are passed on by the Discernment Committee. Please help us keep our commitment of confidentiality by understanding that we can only share certain information with the parish at large—mostly about the process, rather than details about the candidates. Feel free to ask questions about that process, but please know that we are not going to divulge specific information regarding the candidates.

Now, more than ever, we need your prayers. Continue to pray for our parish, for the Discernment Committee and for the potential candidates. With your prayers, we know that the next rector of Messiah parish will lead us in the direction God has chosen.

Nancy Whitehead