Dear friends,
Remember that tomorrow is the first Sunday of our summer schedule. That means one service at 10 a.m., followed by coffee hour. No Sunday School until September.
Also when you see that the opening procession is much shorter than usual, remember that the choir has the summer off. And please welcome our interim organist, Julie Bunn, who will begin with us tomorrow.
We also now have a search committee for our next organist/choir director. The members are Matthew McCawley, Steve Hauser, John Morgan, Susie Throop, Elizabeth Wong Mark, and, of course, me. We will have our first meeting Tuesday evening. I can’t give you an exact timeline yet, but I can tell you the process. We’ll begin by writing a job description, and then posting it in various places (like the diocesan website) with a deadline for applying. Then we hope we’ll have a significant number of applications to go through. The committee will help me decide who we want to interview. Initial interviews will be with the committee and with me.
The next step after that is to invite the final candidates to come and do a choir rehearsal. I want to stress this part because it means that every member of the choir will have a chance to meet the finalists, see them in action, ask questions of them, and give feedback to the committee and to me. So for choir members not being on the search committee will not mean they have no input into the process.
Finally, the search committee and I will meet. Their role now is to give me a recommendation. Ultimately the final decision is mine. But I cannot imagine that I would reject the committee’s recommendation. Although the final responsibility for a choice is mine, I definitely see this as a collegial process.
All of this is happening in the summer, which means people are in and out of town, including me. But I will be in town for most of the time I am off, so I’ll be back when I need to be for this process.
My hope is to have the new person in place as we begin the new program year in the fall, and to have the choir back, relaxed, rested, and ready to start this new chapter in our musical life together.
I’ll also send the job description to the congregation. If you know someone who might fit what we’re looking for do not hesitate to pass it along. And please keep this work in your prayers. Somewhere out there is the right person for this job. Please pray that we find each other.
With love,
Tricia