St. Andrew’s Search Committee Update – Colin McDaniel

We are entering an exciting phase of the search process! Our open position for rector of St. Andrew’s closed on April 17th, and we have learned that we have multiple candidates.

While the position for rector was being posted, your search committee prepared to receive candidates’ applications. We reviewed Diocesan procedures and resources for the search process and held meetings with Diocesan staff to orient us to best practices, ethics, and issues of confidentiality. Your committee wrote interview questions and created rubrics—ways to assess which candidates have the knowledge, skills, and traits that are most needed at St. Andrew’s—and prepared for the interview process itself. And we prayed, and are constantly in prayer, for the Holy Spirit to guide us in our preparations.

All of this work has been defined by your voices, as received in the CAT and compiled in the Parish Profile. We constantly ask if our questions and rubrics align with that Profile to ensure that it is your priest for whom we are searching, not what individual members of the committee think we should seek. And in all of this work is our faith that the Holy Spirit is indeed guiding us.

The Diocesan Office of Transitional Ministry is presently conducting background checks on all candidates before sending their applications to us. We anticipate that we will receive the complete package of applications by the time the Tartan is published. We will review all applications and select candidates for the first round of interviews. Following the initial interview, the field of candidates will be culled for a second round. After the interviews, we will conduct site visits to observe selected candidates in their parishes. This work will likely take us the month of May, and perhaps into June.

Now that we are receiving applications and working with candidates whose lives are directly affected by our conduct, the Search Committee must do its work in the strictest confidentiality. This protects the candidates and ensures the integrity of our process. We will stay in touch to keep you generally informed of our progress, however, and you may make your questions or concerns known to the church office, or to the Senior Warden, who will relay them to the committee.

We ask that you pray for us and for the priest God is calling to be our next rector.