Whew!  Your Search Committee has just completed three rounds of face to face meetings with the ten nominees who are still active in this process of mutual discernment.  It has been both humbling and uplifting as we have met and engaged in great conversation with these gifted priests. 

The meetings were held in beautiful Savannah, the see city of our diocese.  St. John’s was a very supportive and gracious host as we gathered for day long sessions with each nominee in Cranmer Hall.  We met with four nominees April 28-29; another four May 12-13, and the final two on May 19. 

We decided that your budget dollars would best be used by bringing the nominees to Savannah to meet with the whole committee, rather than sending two or three representatives to meet with them in their own settings.  We calculated that this would allow us to meet with a greater number of nominees thus keeping more people in the process. 

The pattern for the meetings meant that the committee and two nominees would gather in Savannah the evening before the day long sessions were to begin.  Half of the committee would take one nominee to dinner at one of Savannah’s great restaurants while the other half would entertain the other nominee for dinner.  We advised our nominees to bring a change of clothes a size up to return home!  In all seriousness though, we have wanted to extend our most gracious hospitality to our guests on behalf of our diocese. 

We began the next day by gathering together for prayer and announcements.  Eventually, we even developed enough nerve to sing a hymn a capella.  Following opening prayers, those committee members who had dined with the nominee the previous evening resumed their conversation together that morning. 

At noon, the committee members exchanged nominees and went to lunch.  The afternoon session was spent in conversation with the lunch guest.  We usually adjourned by 5:00 pm, our nominees beginning their journeys home as we would begin the process again, meeting two new nominees for dinner that evening. 

This phase of the search for the Tenth Bishop of Georgia is about to be concluded.  Presently, we are prayerfully considering and checking references of the nominees.  We expect by mid June to announce a slate of candidates, one of whom will be elected Bishop on September 12  in Dublin.  Prior to our presentation of the slate, we will publish our final communication about this process and our experience in it.  A day or two after that, the names will be made public. 

You may recall that this election process includes an opportunity to be given for other names to be placed in nomination for election.  This is typically referred to as the Petitioning Process.  The explanation of this process and its guidelines will be posted on this site by the first week of June. 

We have thoroughly enjoyed our time together as a committee and we have met some very fine brothers and sisters in Christ along the way.  We beg your continued prayers as very, very shortly, the work of discerning the one mind for one mission is passed to the whole diocese.

In April we conducted telephone interviews with seventeen nominees to be the Tenth Bishop of Georgia. We divided into teams for this purpose with the option that committee members could listen in on other interviews that their team was not conducting. We hoped this would mean that more committee members than the interview team itself would have more knowledge of the nominee when it came time for the next moment in the discernment process.

Committee members invested nearly 128 hours in conference calls not including the time given by those members who listened in to additional interviews, which probably added 50 hours or more to that total. Your search committee has been very diligent in this work.

We enjoyed talking with our nominees who all turned out to be pretty good conversationalists! As our interviews progressed we began to appreciate them more fully for the unique and capable priests they are. In addition to specific questions about background, we asked each nominee about the funding formulas used in their dioceses, about their experience with youth and college ministries, and about their comfort level with the kinds of diversity expressed in our diocese.

On April 15th, we met in Dublin to enjoy the coffee, doughnuts, and sandwiches graciously set out for us by the people of Christ Church. We began by sharing our personal experiences of Jesus’ resurrection as we prayed to prepare for the work of that day.

On the basis of our interviews and after a good deal of thoughtful discussion, we selected ten nominees to go forward with us as we continue the process of discernment. Those not selected to go forward in the process were telephoned the next day by a member of the committee as were those invited to come to Savannah for a face to face conversation with the Search Committee. We are pleased that all ten have accepted our invitation.

These interviews will begin the last week in April and conclude by the end of May. We plan to spend the better part of a whole day with each nominee. We have designed the days to facilitate productive and engaging conversation about a number of significant issues before our church and diocese, and to allow for the important questions we expect the nominees to ask us. With as much hospitality as we can muster, we look forward to welcoming our nominees to Savannah and to the Diocese of Georgia.

Please keep our committee and this work in your prayers.

We met on November 10, 2008. Ted Clarkson began our time and work together with prayer. Present were: Pat Burau, Rick Callaway, Ted Clarkson, Charlie Hough, Walter Hobgood, Rick Buechner, Lonnie Lacy, Geri Nelson, Fred Richter, and Robert Fain.

The Screening Process

• We proceeded to spend a good bit of our time in conversation with our consultant, Rick Callaway, about the screening process. The Search Committee expects to open the nominating process on December 1st. Nominations postmarked no later than January 15th will be accepted.
• Walter Hobgood presented a proposed timetable of steps to be accomplished by specified dates. Committee members offered helpful recommendations. This schedule will be posted on the website.

The Next Bishop

• Over lunch the committee began to discuss with much more specificity the profile of a new bishop.

The Nomination Process

• The proposed Nomination Form and Policy were discussed and suggestions made about wording. These documents will be posted on the website and made available to the Church in Georgia. We are committed to making participation in this process a rewarding experience for the candidates.

Profile Progress

• Lonnie Lacy led us through the work accomplished to date and made assignments for the work to be completed. We hope to have the Profile posted on-line by December 1st.

We concluded with closing prayer. The next meeting is scheduled for December 8th at 11:30 am in Dublin.

We began our time together on October 13, 2008 with prayers and a review of the guidelines for discernment listening for Christian consensus. Chaplain Nancy Mills offered a well prepared reflection on our work and community as a search committee. Present were: Pat Burau, Lonnie Lacy, Geri Nelson, Skip Jennings, Ted Clarkson, Rick Buechner, Walter Hobgood, Nancy Mills, Robert Fain.

Following our opening prayers, we began to share our thoughts and insights based on our individual reviews of the survey data. Conversation was lively and substantial. There is a lot of truth in the adage that two heads are better than one!

We broke from our conversation long enough to partake of the sandwiches and refreshments provided by Christ Church on SHORT notice! The chairman of the Search Committee, having neglected to notify the parish of our meeting until he was in Wrens!

THE SURVEY

• The committee was pleased with the participation percentage and noted that generally the data was provided by an older, highly committed group of Episcopalians – 61% of whom were not born in our church! By roughly the same percentage, participants identified themselves as liberal, moderate or conservative both in their political and theological disposition - a majority indicating they were conservative in their views.
• The survey will be posted in its entirety on the search website so that all interested persons and prospective candidates may view the results and make their own interpretations of the information provided.
• The Search Committee did note the overwhelmingly clear desire to value and preserve unity in our diocese as well as continued participation in the Anglican Communion. Participants are very supportive of the generous liturgical expression policy allowed in our diocese. Consensus about the future mission priorities for the diocese was clear as well as the attributes desired in a new bishop. There continues to be fairly pronounced reservations concerning the ways gay and lesbian Episcopalians might be fully included in the life of our church.

THE PROFILE

• We next turned our attention to the preparation of the Profile. This document is very important to us and to candidates as a statement of how we see ourselves, our future direction, and the qualities needed in a new bishop for this diocese. The Profile will be developed for additional use in congregations as an introduction to the Diocese of Georgia. It will be posted and available on disk, saving considerable expense. Responsibilities for generating the sections of the profile were assigned. Fred Richter will serve as overall editor, harmonizing the different writing styles of drafters into a single voice.
• We are bit behind on timeline now and will work diligently to have the profile by November 15th.

We concluded our meeting with prayers.

We began our meeting with prayers and an excellent reflection by Chaplain Nancy Mills. Nancy shared some very specific recommendations for discernment listening in building Christian consensus that came from the book Grounded in God…Listening Hearts, Discernment for Group Deliberations.

Following our opening prayers, we partook of sandwiches and chips and caught up with each
other over lunch.

THE SURVEY

• The rest of the meeting was used to review the proposed survey document presented by Walter and Fred. The survey begins with a section of demographic gathering questions. This is followed by a questions asking for participant views on a number of subjects. Participants may answer with one of six responses: Agree Strongly, Agree, Neither Agree or Disagree, Disagree, Disagree Strongly and No Opinion. The final two sections ask respondents to pick the top five from lists with a number of options, for priorities for the diocese, and characteristics most desired in a new bishop.
• Walter was heartily thanked for his leadership in this phase of the process. He has been ably assisted by Fred, Skip, Cynthia and Rick. Lonnie proved an able scribe.
• The prize for the most accurate prediction of the number of participants in Town Meetings goes to … Fred, who estimated 300. The actual number of participants was 276.

Estimates for the number of survey participants are:

• Fred - 6,000
• Cindy - 1,400
• Charlie - 590
• Pat - 1,600
• Ted - 1,000
• Rick - 4,800
• Skip - 3,500
• Walter - 4,200

Geri, Mark and Gail - it’s not too late to enter your estimate and possibly win a prize!

We met on August 11th. Mark Jones opened our time together with prayer. We are really enjoying the sandwiches and chips. We have scheduled meetings for each second Monday of the month until we have completed our task. Present were: Skip Jennings, Ted Clarkson, Geri Nelson, Charlie Hough, Mark Jones, Lonnie Lacy, Rick Buechner, Pat Burau, Fred Richter, and Robert Fain.

We spent a good bit of time discussing and planning the format for Town Meetings. We are very excited about listening to the people of our diocese and asking them to listen to each other as we begin this conversation about our future ministry together. Each of us will be attending two or three Town Meetings to support Walter Hobgood who will facilitate ALL of them!

With Ted Clarkson’s help, we began to talk about and reflect on the work of a diocese and the role of a bishop in the church today.

We have begun the process of putting together a survey questionnaire for the diocese, but we want to wait until all the Town Meetings are completed so that we may include any specific questions that address the content of our conversations together. The final questionnaire is to be ready for approval when we meet on September 8th.

Survey Week is September 21-28. Members of the Diocese may complete a questionnaire in one of three ways:

1. Online at www.georgiabishopsearch.org
2. By calling a 1-800 number to complete a telephone survey
3. By requesting from parish clergy a paper survey to complete

Our prayers are that our conversations will be honest and fruitful with all comments shared and heard respectfully. May God bless us as together we begin to discern the one mind for our mission in Christ’s Diocese of Georgia.

We met on July 14th. Present were Geri Nelson, Lonnie Lacy, Mark Jones, Gail Griffin, Rick Buechner, Pat Burau, Charlie Hough, Fred Richter, Skip Jennings, and Robert Fain.

Geri Nelson shared a terrific devotion and led our prayers. We realize we are in a rolling process of building our team and shared our single greatest hope for the Diocese of Georgia in the next decade.

Some of the expressed hopes were for:

• A priority for campus ministries with Chaplains at VSU and GSU as a minimum.
• Getting out of the conventional box and emphasizing growth even to the point of needing a Suffragan Bishop stationed in the Western part of the Diocese.
• Enthusiasm about being and inviting others to be Episcopalians.
• Youth Ministers in more of our congregations.
• Celebrating the Diocese of Georgia as a coherent and consistent expression of the Anglican Way

We contracted with a firm to get our website up and provide support for the next eighteen months.

We turned our attention to the Survey/Profile phase of the process and proposed an ambitious schedule for meetings in each Convocation, with our young people and with our clergy.

We set the week of September 21-28 as Survey Week in the Diocese when everyone would have an opportunity to respond to a questionnaire about our diocese and a new bishop.

We are aiming to post a Profile about our Diocese and open nominations by All Saints Day.

Rick Buechner reported on interviews with Bishop Louttit and Canon Phelps.

We had a blast together. So far, this is fun!

Members of the Search Committee are all about two hours driving distance from Christ Church, Dublin, which makes that parish a logical place to meet. We appreciate the warm hospitality of Fr. Louis Miller and the people of this parish. Attending a Search Committee meeting is essentially a day long event for members with four hours driving time to and from Dublin and two hours or more of actual meeting time.

The first meeting was convened on June 23rd. Present were Cynthia Taylor, Ted Clarkson, Rick Buechner, Charlie Hough, our Chaplain Nancy Mills, our consultant Rick Callaway, Fred Richter, Walter Hobgood, Skip Jennings, Geri Nelson, Gail Griffin, and Robert Fain.

We began with a reflection followed by prayers and lunch. We introduced ourselves to each other by sharing our own hopes and concerns about this signal event in the life of the Diocese of Georgia.

It is a big task, which broken down into parts or phases is very manageable. Our sub-committee structure is:

• Communications: Lonnie Lacy, Geri Nelson, Charlie Hough
• Survey/Profile: Cynthia Taylor, Fred Richter, Rick Buechner, Walter Hobgood and Skip Jennings
• Education: Gail Griffin, Mark Jones, Ted Clarkson, Pat Burau
• Screening: Cynthia Taylor, Walter Hobgood, Rick Buechner, Gail Griffin, Pat Burau
• Visitation: Fred Richter, Skip Jennings, Geri Nelson, Ted Clarkson, Charlie Hough

The purpose of these committees is for the most part obvious. The Education Sub-Committee is tasked with informing the committee and diocese about the role and work of a bishop in today’s church. The Screening Sub-Committee will review the information provided by nominees and the Visitation Sub-Committee is responsible for arranging visits of the Search Committee to those nominees under very serious consideration for nomination.

At this first meeting we were in agreement that we wanted to involve our young people in every way that is reasonable considering their own schedules.

We asked the Communications Sub-Committee to get hopping and get our search website up by August 1st.