With the closing of the current church year, and the beginning of our new fiscal year, I, and others in the church, are setting goals and making plans for the coming year.

            The biggest work for the congregation belongs to your newly elected Search Committee.  Their work involves a year-long process beginning with preparing our “Congregational Record” this summer and fall.  Once that is written and posted then they will review an initial list of ministers interested in our church in January; conduct phone/video interviews leading to a short-list of “pre-candidates” with in-person interviews in February and March; and then presenting a final “candidate” minister to the congregation for your vote in April, 2020.

I am not involved in the search, although I am available for consultation with our committee or a phone call if a potential minister wants to get my perspective. I won’t be offering opinions or making a recommendation.  That’s your job.

My job for the final year of my interim is to continue to work to put the church in the healthiest position possible to support you and your next minister.  This first year I’m proud of progress we’ve made in the areas of balancing the budget, creating a strong and skillful staff team, developing leadership through the Harvest the Power program, and addressing the stress in the system lingering from the past.

For the coming year I’ve identified several areas that I think still need attention.  

I’d like to convene a Bylaws Review Committee.  Along with a general “clean-up” of language, there are a few larger changes several of us have been considering.  Reducing the size of the Board would allow us to deploy our lay leadership in other important areas; reducing the length of the Board terms would make serving as a Trustee more possible for more people; the Bylaw section defining the Personnel Committee should be revised to model current best practice in UU churches.

I’d like to improve our Communications practices around issues like the monthly newsletter and announcements in the email blast and during worship.  A small task force is already preparing a survey and focus group tools to gather congregational input around communication needs, uses, challenges, and preferences.  We will produce a report to the Board in the fall with some recommendations.

And I’d like the congregation to dive deeper into two of the five Developmental Tasks for the Interim Period, the two that got the least attention this last year:  Identity and Mission.  These are the spiritual questions of “Who are we?” and “What should we do?”  I’ll let those questions guide my preaching throughout the year.  We might also launch an Affirmative Inquiry process in winter 2020.

The Board and I will have a discussion about goals for the coming year at our retreat on June 1.  We will want to design a year’s work that is important, helpful, and also possible, given all the normal demands of church life.

My foremost goal, in the year I have remaining with you, is not to bring every goal to conclusion, but to take the next step, to make a good ending of my time with you, and to create the conditions for a good beginning of where you will go next.