More news from the Search Committee

We have a new member of the Search Committee. Please welcome Renee Long who has agreed to join the "team" and kindly sent us the following background information about herself:

Renee Long has been an active Christian as long as she can remember, and has been an active member at Sylvania UCC since 2006. She has lived in the Toledo area all her life, and attended the University of Toledo and BGSU where she earned a Bachelor’s degree in Elementary Education and a Master’s in Counseling. She has worked exclusively in the field of education for a variety of school districts for the past 22 years. Renee and Steve, her husband of 21 years, have been blessed with 4 children, Jacob (15), Larson (14), Nathaniel (10) and Jacquelyn (8). Renee is very active in her children's lives, volunteering as Cub Scout Den Chief, Brownie Leader, Room Mother, PTA Secretary and Sunday School Teacher, among others. To relax, Renee likes to read, cross-stitch, cook, visit historical and cultural sites, view Toledo Rep and other theatre productions, travel, and take long walks.

-- Jeanne

Our sincere thanks to Renee and all the members of the committee who are volunteering to serve our church in this capacity. Your willingness to give of your time and talents is much appreciated.

News from the Search Committee

The members of the Search Committee have been meeting and Jeanne Brockmyer, chairperson, sent us this update:

The Search Committee met with Reverend Dan Busch on January 23, 2012. We had a great conversation about both broad and nitty-gritty search issues. The Association is definitely there to help us in this critical journey.

Now the Search Committee is hard at work on the Church Profile. It is a difficult task because we need to show potential candidates who we are in both statistical data and in the deepest sense of our convictions. Fortunately, we have the help of the survey from Russell Crabtree and the work of the Vision Team.

We invite your input to any of the Search Committee members. Working together, we will know God's direction for our pastoral leadership.

- Jeanne

Forum Review

Thanks to all who attended the forum last Sunday to hear about the CAT results. 70-75 people learned about several key findings, including the Top Five Drivers of Satisfaction (which place Sylvania UCC on the High Energy/High Satisfaction quadrant of the Energy-Satisfaction Map), Descriptive Indices such as our theological perspective and flexibility style, and numerous Performance Indices relating to hospitality, morale, conflict management, governance, spiritual vitality, readiness for ministry, educational engagement, and worship and music.

We continued with an overview of our top Critical Abilities for the Pastor and Ministry Priorities. For suggestions from the congregation on how we will accomplish our Ministry Priorities we broke into small discussion groups. The Transition Team will compile the various ideas for those in the relevant ministry areas to use in future planning.

Our thanks to Al Palmer who unveiled the draft of the Vision Statement and to Jeanne Brockmyer who gave an update on the activity of the Search Team. Both committees have done great work as evidenced from their reports.

For those who are interested in reading the survey documents please see Amy in the office. You'll find 70+ pages of information about our church, how we see it now and our goals for the future.

The members of the Transition, Vision and Search Teams are listed under the "About the Blog" tab above -- all of us welcome your thoughts, suggestions, questions, comments and concerns!

--Bonnie