The Business Meeting

As the Pastor Search Committee we prepared for the business meeting on the Wednesday before the vote, we decided to involve the entire committee in our report to the church. I asked each of the committee to share the moment that they became convinced that God was calling Brother Rick to be the next pastor at Lakeview. We also discussed a bit about Brother James. He had announced that he would not serve as moderator of the business meeting because he wanted to address the committee directly during the meeting. We tried to anticipate some of the objections that he might have and discussed how to respond.

On Wednesday evening we met beforehand, prayed, and then began the business meeting. I’m very glad that the entire committee spoke. It took a while (around 40 minutes) for each of us to share for a few minutes, but it really helped the church to see the candidate from our perspective. Plus it confirmed our decision to take a unanimous recommendation to the church. This was the only time that the entire committee had an opportunity to address the church. We made sure that none of us told the same story and several people told me during the following days that they appreciated hearing from the rest of the committee (besides just from me!)
The committee did a great job. The only statement that made me wince was when one of the committee members compared the previous pastor to the new candidate very unfavorably. No malice was intended, but our previous pastor was loved and supported by many in the church. Following our opening statement (motion) the questions began.

As committee chair, I addressed most of the questions. From time to time, my colleagues on the committee would step in and answer or clarify some issue. Some my answers were lousy, quite frankly, and many of them were only satisfactory. But the committee stepped in from time to time and handled things well. Here were the major topics that the church asked about:

The first person to ask a question, really didn’t ask one at all. Mr. Farmer, long time teacher of one of the senior adult Sunday School classes simply offered his thanks to us and said “Ya’ll have done a really good job for this church. We think that he’s gonna work just fine.” Farmer’s support right off the bat was encouraging for us all. We were still concerned about the senior adults, but for one of their primary spokesmen to share that certainly set the tone for the rest of the conversation.

Next Mr. James slowly walked up to the microphone and expressed his primary concern. He said that the candidate had shared in his testimony that he laid our fleeces to help him decide if God was calling him to be our pastor. Such an approach demonstrated (to Mr. James) a clear example of spiritual immaturity. In addition, the candidate didn’t cite any scripture that he used to make his decision. These oversights, according to Brother James’ were glaring. How could we expect that he was spiritually mature enough for this position?

My first response was that he spoke with the committee in great detail about his calling to ministry and how he felt God leading him to Lakeview. I had no response to the fleece comment, but essentially said that while we did have some questions throughout the process for him, a lack of spiritual maturity was never an area of concern. Almost all of our concerns were how the church would receive him, not about any lack of ability on his part.


Brother James then sat down and after a brief pause, the questions continued. We shared with the church many of the theological questions we asked (and provided a complete list for anyone who wanted one). I wanted to provide a list because I didn’t want to go through all of the questions and have people interrupt to ask “How did he answer that one?”

After the questions ended, we then presented the financial and benefits package to the church.
Before we presented it, I spent several minutes explaining how pastor’s salaries differed from those of normal ;) people. I then took questions before passing out the amount. Unexpectedly, several in the church felt that the package wasn’t generous enough and that we should increase it! So I was in the contorted position of saying that it was deemed enough by the three committees, even though as chair of the PSC committee I had pushed for a higher salary. And certainly to Brother James' credit he did add "This is only a motion. We can certainly amend it." We did make a point to say that it was a joint recommendation from three committees and that we could revisit it in next year’s budgeting process. Others wanted to know what the candidate’s current salary was (at his home church) to try to decide if we were offering a competitive amount. Although we had that information, we didn’t feel it was relevant to the discussion. But no one, not a single person, thought the package amount was too high. (Clearly a sign that it was too low!)

The meeting took a draining two and a half hours and was pretty stressful. But overall, the committee felt very encouraged by the church’s response. Now everything was done except for the voting on the following Sunday.

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