Selecting the Transition Team (I)

Little activity here at Coffeespoons lately and I wanted to write a few posts about the constitution of the Transition Team. For the composition of the team, my basic goal is to have representatives from every major group within the congregation. One of my primary jobs during my first two months at Pecan Grove was to find out what the groups in the church were.
I shared with them ahead of time the process for the composition of the Transition Team.

The process would be as follows:

First, I asked the congregation to nominate five people for the Transition Team. I asked them to request permission from the person before they nominated them. I shared with them that this person needed to be someone with whom they would trust the future of the church. The criterion should be “If you were going into the hospital, this person is one whom you would call and ask them for their prayers.”

Second, after these nominations were made, I sat down with the personnel committee and we tabulated the results. We then selected ten members for the Transition Team based on two factors: number of votes received and diversity of representation. We did NOT pick the top ten vote recipients. To do so would’ve left certain groups in the church unrepresented on the committee. The Personnel Committee assisted me in the composition of the committee.


We spent about two weeks on this process.


The following Sunday morning after the vote was taken, I presented the transition team to the church. As I announced their names, I had them come up before the congregation. I then invited the church to come up and pray over these women and men whom they had entrusted with the future of their church.

The service was meaningful and moving. I saw some people pray for members of the team that I knew they disagreed with. It was in this service that I genuinely felt the church was united in their desire to take their first major step through this interim process.


So as I began to move to the back of the church to shake people’s hands as they departed, it came as some surprise to me when an angry church member blocked my path. He could barely contain his rage as he said through whispered clenched teeth:


“How could you put some of THOSE PEOPLE on this committee?!”