Jerry Cox's Celebrate Christ the King Task Force Update, December 12-13.

Early in the year Pastor Gerald Wahl of the Florida-Bahamas Synod spent a half day with us to provide a framework to prepare us to form a call committee for a new senior pastor.  One of the first steps was to form a task force to shepherd the process.  The Council appointed the members of the Task Force and the congregation commissioned the Task Force shortly thereafter.  The Task Force has formulated a detailed plan to implement the process.

A timeline setting forth the steps of the plan was published in the December issue of Connections and may be seen on the Church’s website.  Please note that the Task Force will use several forms of communication; but, we will rely heavily on this website page to provide you with news about what is going on in the process.

There are several things going on.  The early steps involve gathering information from both within and without the congregation.  We are meeting with the many small groups to ask you some questions about the future of CtK.  Those visits will continue into next month.

Late last year, we participated in a survey conducted through the ELCA called the U.S. Congregational Life Survey.  Some 341 of us completed that survey.  The Task Force has the results and is evaluating them.

The Task Force has obtained a demographic study of our ministry area, which we have defined as a five-mile radius around the church.  The study was prepared by an organization named Percept, which has been providing churches with demographic and ethographic information about their communities since 1987.  The study is very detailed and includes the usual demographics as well as lifestyle insights and church preferences.

The last of our information gathering vehicles will be the Reveal Spiritual Life Survey.  The Task Force is particularly excited about the Reveal Survey.  We believe that it will give insights into CtK’s spiritual development that we could not obtain from any other source. 

The Reveal Survey was developed by the Willow Creek Church as part of a recent ministry re-evaluation and has been used by three to four thousand churches, including many Lutheran churches.  Willow Creek has engaged a first class market research team to develop and conduct the survey.  (By the way, that team includes Jan Arnson’s brother Eric).

The Task Force will be providing you with more information about Reveal in the upcoming weeks.  There is also a link to the Reveal website on the Task Force page.    However, let me give you some essentials.  The survey will require 30-35 minutes of your time.  The survey will be conducted online during the two-week period of January 23rd through February 5th.  That time is reserved for us.  Reveal will send us an online link around January 16 and we will provide it to you.

I have been told that 30-35 minutes is really testing your attention span.  I have confidence that is not the case.  Besides, you can do the survey anytime during the two-week period, 24 hours a day.  All you need is a computer and internet access.  For those who do not have the computer capability or may need some help with the survey, we plan on having computer stations at the church.

As I indicated, we will be providing more details about the survey in the weeks ahead.  Two things I will tell you now:  both husband and wife should take the survey and the survey is confidential.  Reveal will provide a report in about 30 days after the completion date.

After the Task Force has received the Reveal report and done some evaluation of the results of all of the surveys and information that we have accumulated, we will be sharing the results with you.

In Pastor Wahl’s presentation, he provided us with an outline.  The first two or three steps in the outline were to pray and pray again.  For this process to be successful and for us to be able to discern God’s plan for Christ the King, we must be in prayer.  The success of this discernment will be in our corporate prayers.  However, please add this to your personal prayers.  The practice of the Task Force member is to pause for prayer each Thursday afternoon at 4:24 p.m.  Why 4:24?  Because we are told in Acts 4:24 “...they raised their voices together in prayer to God.”  Please make it a practice to join us.