The following thoughts were presented as a homily at the church service on December 7, 2014.

Gratitude despite the disappointment

You all know the result of last year’s search. Most of you were right here, sitting in these pews, when our committee broke the news that we would not be presenting a candidate minister to the congregation.

It wasn't because we were unable to find candidates who we connected with deeply.

It wasn't because we weren't able to find just the right match according to all the input from our cottage meetings and the survey.

It wasn't that we hadn't fallen in love with ministers who we felt would challenge us, inspire us, and empower us to become the congregation we have the potential to be.

No, we discovered not just one, but two candidates that met all those criteria and more. The painful reason we stood here last April and broke that disappointing news was because neither of those two candidates selected us. It still hurts a little to acknowledge that.

This morning, on behalf of the Search Committee, Carol Houde and I will share with you some of the insights that we gained from last year’s search and the lessons we continue to learn about who we are, why we gather together, what we aspire to accomplish within our wider community, and where we hope to go on our shared journey together.

But before I launch into that, I'd like to make two quick points about last year’s result:

The first is that neither of our top two candidates chose to go somewhere else because they saw any kind of issue, shortcoming, or dysfunction within this congregation — quite the contrary. Both Ministers fell in love with us, too; not just through their interactions with the Search Committee, but because of what they came to understand about this congregation, what we've accomplished, the priorities we've set, our strong lay leadership, and our deep caring for each other and for those in our community. I know both Ministers saw a lot of great things going on here, and they both felt their own sense of remorse in letting go of this Church. 

The second point has to do with how all of you responded to the news. I would have understood frustration and disappointment with the Search Committee, but instead you showed us nothing but caring and support. Your immediate impulse was to make sure we were all right. At first, this caught us a bit off guard. But, in hindsight, it shouldn't have surprised us at all. This is the kind of caring, supportive community we are. Following that spontaneous, “pastoral care” response, what we heard from many of you was your gratitude, gratitude that we had set such a high standard for our next minister and that we had not compromised on those standards. The committee has reflected often about how you responded to us back in April, about how much it meant to us and about how proud it made us to be a part of this community.

Like tiling a bathroom

Being on the Search Committee is kind of like tiling a bathroom floor for the first time. It's not until you've finished the job that you really feel like you know how to do it. So, as we embarked on our "bonus year" of search, we were able to take advantage of the lessons we learned from our initial round. For the purposes of this morning’s talk, these lessons are broken into two general categories: those associated with a better understanding of the mechanics of the process and those that translate into a deeper understanding of the congregation.

Much of that first category, the “mechanics,” has a lot to do with having a better grasp on the work products we need to develop and how to better prepare ourselves for those times that demand intense work during short spans of time. These represent a fairly dry source of material as far as sermons topics go. Those of you who look for a sermon to tug on your heartstrings can put your tissues away for a few minutes.

On second thought, I'm going to be talking about money, so maybe you should keep those tissues close by. 

Last year we learned the hard way how competitive the search process is. As fabulous as we all know our congregation is, we discovered that there are other UU churches out there that are also pretty remarkable. Some have deliberately embraced a number of new programs and initiatives that are circulating around the denomination: the Green Sanctuary program, theme-based ministry, and restorative circles, to name just a few.

We also found that among all the highly capable UU ministers in search, there are a select few that have those special, hard-to-define qualities that separate them from the pack. These are the ministers who can challenge our preconceptions, nourish our sense of mystery and wonder, empower lay leaders, inspire meaningful social action, and guide a congregation to transcend where they are and help them to get to the next level.

There’s a subcommittee involved in the Search process that I suspect most of you aren’t aware of. It’s called the Negotiating Team. It consists of a Search Committee member (me), a member of the Board of Trustees (Kate O'Shea), and a trusted church elder (Jon Lasselle). Together, the three of us put together what you might think of as a draft employment agreement for our next minister. It documents our expectations for the job, the minister’s roles and responsibilities, and the compensation package — salary and benefits — that come with the position. Before this draft document is made available to candidates, our Board of Trustees reviews it, amends it as required, and approves it by vote.

Fair and competitive compensation

The Transition Office of the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) provides a fairly extensive set of guidelines for compensation for both ministers and other staff positions. It calls out things like insurance and retirement benefits, vacation and professional development allowances, and salary. Last year’s draft ministerial agreement, like the one we've updated for this year, is fully compliant with the UUA guidelines.

The guidelines for salary, however, are expressed as fairly wide ranges that are a function of church size and geographically-dependent cost-of-living indices. All of this is best explained with the help of some graphics.

The above slide shows the ministerial salary ranges for Mid-Sized I and Mid-Sized II churches for our GEO Index. We are technically a Mid-Sized I, but we're only three voting members short of being a Mid-Sized II. Because we're right on the cusp of these two categories, I’ve also included an average range, in between the other two. For each range, the high, the low, and the mid-point are designated by the yellow diamonds. Just below these three ranges, I've illustrated the salary range that the Board approved for last year’s search cycle.

Below these are the salary ranges offered by the churches selected by our top two candidates last year. We obviously didn't have that competitive information before we set our compensation range last year, but as you can see, our mid-point offering was lower than the low end of each of our competing churches. It’s important to note that the range at the bottom, representing the church selected by our second choice candidate, was in a GEO index whose salary guidelines are a full 11% lower than ours.

This slide shows our range relative to our own ministerial compensation trends over the past eight years. Again, you can see that our offer last year was low.

Now, I don't mean to imply here that compensation was the reason we did not present you with a minister last year. Employment decisions like these involve complex, personal considerations. I do believe, however, that compensation was probably a factor. It may have been that our compensation range kept us from seeing some candidates who never even applied for consideration here. Keith Kron, the Director of Transitions at the UUA, told us a few months ago that salary is one of the main factors that Ministers consider in selecting a congregation.

This slide shows the same information as the first, but has been updated to reflect this year’s conditions. All the UUA guidelines have been increased by 8%, a correction that compensates for the fact that the UUA hadn’t revised their salary recommendations in six to seven years. At the bottom, the competing churches’ salary ranges have been scaled by the same 8%, and the one that represented the lower GEO index has been adjusted upwards to make it comparable with our own index.

Shown in red in the middle is the compensation range that the Search Committee recommended to the Board earlier this year. We met with them, shared our concern about last year’s low range and provided our rationale for the new recommendation. Last month, to the day, the Board voted unanimously to approved this range.

The vision and courage to stretch

It’s important for you to know all of this because this is a decision that was made on your behalf and one that affects you all. It’s all of us who call a minister. It’s all of us who pay his or her salary. This decision by the Board reflects our principles of fairness and respect. In my view, it also represents the Board’s courage and optimism. Courage, because we have, for the last two years, been running deficit budgets, essentially exhausting our cash reserves. This increased salary requires funding that we can't point to right now. Optimistic, because the Board senses, as I do, that we collectively are poised to do greater things, to achieve greater levels of involvement in social justice and community outreach, to initiate more meaningful programs that attract and empower our youth and young adults, to reinvigorate our RE programs across all age ranges, to learn to relate and engage with each other more compassionately and authentically, and to increase opportunities for new members to get involved, to have a greater impact, and to become leaders in the church.

These things begin to speak to my second category of Search Committee “lessons learned,” those insights and perspectives that we've gained over the past couple of years that have fostered a deeper understanding of our congregation, its purpose, its aspirations, and its potential for making a difference in people’s lives. Getting us there won't be the sole responsibility of our next minister. The right minister can certainly be a catalyst and a guide, but it’s all of us, I believe, who are ready to take this beloved community to the next level.

To me, that doesn't mean that we'll never experience conflict. It means that we'll find ways to recognize and appreciate our differences, we’ll learn to listen to each other with a willingness to be influenced, and we'll develop techniques for communicating with respect, empathy, and authenticity.

It doesn't mean growth for growth’s sake. It means creating an environment where people find transformation through their own free search for truth and meaning and through opportunities for giving of themselves and getting more personally involved in meaningful community service. How could such an environment not attract new members?

It doesn't mean that we have to lose the close and comfortable “second-family” sense of community that we all cherish. It means that by adding new programs, community service activities, and social justice initiatives, we will develop ways to extend that circle more broadly.

It doesn't mean that we have to fear losing our identity as a liberal religious community that values reason, rational exploration, and an absence of dogma. It means that we will learn to use these as our launching point to explore our deepest human experiences, to discover the things that nourish our souls, to create more meaningful relationships, and to give a clearer purpose to our lives.

These are a few examples of what I see when I look reflectively at this congregation, where I see us going as we exit this time of transition. It’s the image I project forward when I envision us moving forward with a new settled minister.

Thank you for selecting me to serve on your Search Committee and thank you for the unwavering support you've shown to all of us throughout our time serving you on this committee.

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Now, I'd like to introduce Carol Houde, who will share her insights from the past year.