March 2019 Update

In January 2019, the elders met for a day-long offsite meeting to prayerfully consider and discuss where the Lord is leading The Moody Church and the pastoral search. Following that meeting, the elders decided upon the following items:

1. The elders emphasized the importance of pastors working together with our executive pastor and managing director of operations as a team, but decided that the Lord is leading us to seek a Senior Pastor rather than a Lead Teaching pastor. The new Senior Pastor will maintain the constitutional responsibilities of the Senior Pastor role. As such, he will be a voting Elder and the Chief Administrative Officer for the church.
2. The gift of preaching and teaching was reaffirmed as paramount to our search criteria for a Senior Pastor.
3. Pastoral Search Committee (PSC) members will be given an opportunity to step off the committee if they feel they need to do so. If a vacancy opens up, the committee they represent will be responsible for filling that vacancy. As a reminder, the PSC is made up of four elders, three deaconesses, and two deacons.  Committee members are prayerfully considering whether to continue serving.

The PSC resumed regular meetings on January 16, 2019. The committee reevaluated the list of candidates received throughout last year, roughly 50 names. The PSC decided to reach back out to two candidates to see if they would be interested in re-engaging with Moody. They also evaluated several other referrals. In an effort to better streamline communications with the broader elder board, the PSC has decided to communicate promising candidates to the elders sooner than previously. This has led to positive cross-collaboration and communication with the elders who are not present on the PSC, and we hope will lead to better alignment in the future. Of the six candidates that we have considered since we started meeting in January, we have shared three promising candidates to the elders, two in February, and one more just this week.

The entire elder board listened to several sermons of each of the two potential candidates and reviewed other available information. Following an elder meeting in February the elders initially decided to not continue with either candidate they had received from the PSC. Upon further deliberations and new information received at our subsequent PSC meeting, we requested the elders reconsider one of the two candidates and have sent along that new information to the elders. The PSC also passed along another promising candidate for the elders to consider at their next meeting. They, along with PSC members, will review three to five more sermons of each of the candidates and any other corresponding information and deliberate in April as to whether or not we should continue evaluating either candidate.

We continue to search for, and evaluate Senior Pastor candidates even while this elder deliberation is ongoing. This extra vetting is to better align the elders and PSC at the early stage of evaluating a prospective candidate and is not to be misunderstood as the “second stage” of our search process as outlined here in our Pastoral Search Process documentation.

We ask for your continued prayer for the elders, the PSC, and The Moody Church as a whole, as we seek God’s will in our search for a Senior Pastor. Pray also for the man that God is preparing to be The Moody Church’s next Senior Pastor.