Dear Immanuel family,
It has been so good to be back together again for in-person services. If you haven't joined us yet, I hope you will soon. We continue to do all we can to make sure that our campus is safe for you and your family. As I'm sure most of you have realized even more after 2020, church is a lot more than hearing a message and listening to a few songs on Sunday morning from our couch. We need to be together to be the church as Jesus envisioned it to be, where the community, worship, and serving each other are just as important as the message.

Managing through the challenges of Covid-19, providing safe and meaningful experiences for you during Thanksgiving and Christmas, and figuring out the next steps on All In would have kept us busy enough with a senior pastor on staff. Of course, we've had to do all that while we keep working towards finding the right leader or leaders for Immanuel going forward.

The last update I gave you on the Senior Pastor transition was in early December, and I know some of you probably wish you were getting more regular updates. I understand that. Not having a senior pastor on staff can raise a lot of questions and perhaps cause some anxiety about the future of our church.

The Elders and I are committed to keeping you informed of our progress. The challenge is that the important work we are doing now may not sound like we are making progress, but it is foundational to making sure we find the right leader(s) to join our team.

In my previous email to the congregation, I said that the search could take up to 24 months for the transition to be complete. Though that is the longest amount of time we can imagine this process taking, that is not our goal. You may not know this, but it took two years to find Josh Petersen's predecessor, Joe Boerman, who was not a member of the Immanuel family at the time. When we transitioned from Joe to Josh, it took just as long, and Josh was an internal candidate! So two years is a fair expectation to set, but we have a more aggressive goal in our project plan.

Let me explain why the process can take so long and hopefully clear up some assumptions about how the process works. We all generally understand that the process of hiring for a vacant position in an organization includes 1) posting a job opening, 2) taking applications, 3) conducting interviews, and 4) making a hire. Those steps would be core to the hiring process for any position in any organization.

Hiring a leader for a church has its own unique challenges. It is not only a normal process that HR can conduct as laid out above, but it also is a very spiritual process in that we need to assess a candidate's call and fit for our mission to help people know Jesus and grow to be like Him, as well as our vision to reach All our Neighbors, All our Region, All for Jesus. That requires following solid organizational processes, clarity on who we are, on where we are going as a church, and discernment to make sure we are taking the right steps as we conduct the search. All of this must move in a deliberate manner and be covered in prayer.

As you know from my last update on this project, the process started with our seeking Godly and wise advice from people who help churches transition senior leaders. The elders and I spent six weeks meeting with these transition advisors (former elders, pastors, denominational leaders, and consultants). After we had heard from them primarily in the area of process, we had a retreat to pray, deliberate, and start building a project plan. All of this took several weeks.

All of these important aspects of the transition work and more are captured in our comprehensive project plan. One of the first things we are doing as part of that plan is to add to the elder team to increase their capacity to accomplish the work required for the rest of the transition project. We have needed to expand this team for a while, so this is growth for the future health of our church, and not just increasing our resources for the transition project.

We also have to make sure that we are clear on the mission, vision, culture, values, and philosophy of ministry of Immanuel Church. These are things all of us talk about in one way or another at Immanuel, but it is harder than you might think to be clear on what they all mean to the collective leadership of our church, and then to make sure they are clearly documented. All that work is in our project plan as well. Only when we have clarity on these elements can we feel confident starting to look for a leader, because then we will know what we are asking them to lead. We know that any new senior leader we add to our staff will want and need to bring their own ideas on ministry and their unique style of leadership to the job, but we also have to make sure that the things we believe make Immanuel the church we are supposed to be are properly protected.

The project plan also includes a complete review of our governance documents which include our church constitution, by-laws, guiding principles, position papers, and policy documents. We not only need to know who we want to be as a church, we must make sure these governance documents help us realize our vision and give us a strong foundation on which to build our church.

Throughout all this work, we'll also be assessing what factors contributed to Josh's short tenure and determine what organizational changes may be necessary to help assure a longer tenure for our next senior leader(s). This could include a change in our leadership model that spreads responsibilities out over a couple of different leaders. If you heard that correctly, you should be thinking that it's possible we won't just replace Josh with someone in exactly the same role. We might, but we might not.

Only after all the work above has been done, we will engage a search firm to help us find the right leader(s) to take us into the future.

It's a lot of work to be sure, and we are tackling it deliberately and aggressively.

You may wonder, with all the work that must be done, how do we as leaders know we have thought of everything we should do, or that we have considered everything that's important to you, the congregation of Immanuel Church?

It's a good question, and of course, it's impossible for us to know what we don't know. So here is our question to you: As the Elders and I seek to identify the best structure and right leaders for the future of Immanuel, What do you think is important for us to consider? To remember? To change? To not change? By clicking this link HERE, you can provide your input by completing the form and submitting it to us. We hope to hear from the majority of you in the next seven days.

I am committed to giving you regular updates on our progress. Of course, whenever you have questions or concerns, you should feel free to reach out to me or the elders at [email protected].

I mentioned that all this work in a church really needs to be covered in prayer. I want to finish by saying thanks for all the prayers you have offered to God for this project already, and ask that you continue to ask for God's hand of blessing and guidance on this work as we seek to hear him lead us to the right leader(s) for Immanuel Church.

Thank you.