Call Committee Corner

Your CGS Call Committee would like to thank everyone who took the
time to fill out the congregational survey.  Your answers have been
helpful to us in filling out the Ministry Site Profile (MSP) used to
match us with potential candidates, and are helping to guide our
discussion of specific things we'll want to cover when we interview
candidates to become our next pastor.

The surveys filled out on paper provided us with some unplanned
benefits.  In the online survey, responses for the question about
preaching style were limited to three choices.  We had done this
thinking that if we didn't impose such a limit, those filling out
the survey might select so many of the options that we'd have no
sense of what the congregation's priorities were.  ("You can't always
get what you want / But if you try sometime you'll find /
You get what you need.")

Some of those who filled out the survey on paper didn't abide by the
instructions to limit themselves to three choices.  To avoid skewing
the overall results, we processed those individuals' responses to that
question separately.  In aggregate, these responses were quite different
from the others.  We found three things:

    (1) Those who made more than three selections chose so many
        of the options that, in aggregate, their only clear priority
        was, seemingly, that sermons should be funny.  This was clearly
        *not* a top priority of the congregation in general.

    (2) Adding these responses to the total pool of responses did
        not change the overall ranking of desired preaching styles.

    (3) Comparison of the two sets of responses confirmed that our
        decision to limit the number of options in order to
        tease out priorities was correct.

In other news, we have identified people willing to serve as references.
The MSP process requires a person from inside the congregation, a person
from outside the congregation, and ELCA rostered leader, and "someone
else."  We believe these four people all know CGS and its ministries
well and will be able to provide an account helpful to those discerning
whether this might be the site of the next stage in their ministry.

Again, the committee would like to thank everyone for their continued
input.  We continue to meet weekly, and hope to soon be able to hand
off the draft ministry site profile to our congregational council for
consideration and approval before we submit it to the ELCA.

Randy