Dear FCC Family,
As you know, we’ve been hoping for several years to hire a “pastoral resident” – a new graduate from divinity school who would serve with us for two years as a sort of intern. As the committee running this search was engaging with finalists, Amber Scovell let us know that she would like to transition from a full- to a part-time position. It felt like providential timing. We paused and pivoted.
To be clear: Amber isn’t going anywhere! She loves us as much as we love her. You’ll see her in church every Sunday, same as always. But her life has changed a lot over the last few years, and, when given the opportunity to work in a non-ministerial position that would afford her more flexibility, she needed to take it. We bless her in this choice.
Amber will continue to lead our children’s ministries – Kidventure, summer camps, etc. Nothing changes with regard to this half of her portfolio. She will be handing off only our youth ministries – Confirmation, Access, and Teleios.
I’ll be leading Confirmation moving forward, and I couldn’t be more excited for the opportunity to build one-on-one relationships with every student in the church.
As for the pivot: In talking with the Board of Christian Education and the Church Council, the church leadership decided this is the moment live into a dream that many of us have always had:
Instead of hiring a “Youth Minister,” we want to hire a traditional, settled, called Associate Minister who will lead the whole congregation in connecting more meaningfully with the teenagers of our church family. On the back of our bulletin, it says, “Every member is a minister.” This means that every member is also a youth minister.
We want to be a church where families with preschoolers show up at high-schoolers’ hockey games and swim meets. (There’s nothing little kids love more than big kids!) We want seniors in the congregation – whose own grandchildren may not live in the area – to go see our students’ school plays. Our confirmands already visit some of our homebound members, and for many, it is the highlight of the program. We don’t want our church to be one more place where teenagers go to their own room and shut the door.
Church Council voted to appoint a new search committee with generation-spanning representation. We have no intention of calling a too-cool-for-school type who works well with kids but can’t connect with older folks. The whole idea is to find someone who can connect with everyone. Dave Miller, Eliot Jacobs, Caroline Burke, KC Simon, Cassie Yusi, Nancy Brewer, Bradley Robinson, Tate Sedlock, and Kimball Atha have been meeting and begun interviewing candidates. They are an extraordinary group of church members, and it’s been a gift to work with them. Our youth members, Tate and Kimball, have contributed with a level of thoughtfulness that should make us all proud.
We will schedule a candidating sermon, meet-and-greet, Q-and-A session, and congregational vote as soon as there’s “white smoke” from the search committee.
To round out the team – because we will still need a point person for our youth ministries – we will be welcoming Justine Gelner to our staff. Justine was actually a student in the youth group I led 15 years ago! She has run youth groups and summer camps as a volunteer in the intervening years, and is starting at Yale Divinity School this fall. We hope we will be her home-away-from-home church for the three years she is at Yale preparing for ordination.
Additionally, we will be welcoming Maddie Legro, a second-year student at Yale Divinity School, as an intern. Maddie will serve with us for one year at no cost to us. It is an honor that the administration at Yale believes our church is so strong and vibrant that they would entrust the formation of future clergy to us.
All the changes in staffing we are pursuing, taken together, will have a net-positive impact on our budget.
A group of crows is called a “murder of crows.” A group of ministers and ministers-to-be – which we will be blessed with soon enough – is called…..? Any ideas?
It is such a gift to be your minister. I know Justine and Maddie and whomever our search committee recommends to us will think so, too.
Anthony