By Emily Enders Odom
Since 1997, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)’s Church Leadership Connection (CLC) has served as the denomination’s online matching and referral system, bringing together call seekers and calling organizations with complementary skills and interests to serve the leadership needs of Christ’s church.
A lot has changed in the past 16 years.
“The needs of today’s church are more complex than when the system was first launched,” said the Reverend SanDawna Gaulman Ashley, coordinator for Leadership Development and Church Leadership Connection in Vocational Ministries, part of the newly formed Mid Council Ministries team in the Office of the General Assembly. “We are attempting to make the call process more efficient as we aim to address the needs of a changing denomination.”
Recognizing the need to bring the system up-to-date, the 219th General Assembly (2010) initiated a comprehensive revision project calling for “a process to evaluate the current call system of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and bring recommendations back to the 220th General Assembly (2012) for changes that will shorten the length of time during which a church seeking a pastor is ordinarily without an installed pastor” (Minutes, 2010, Part I, p. 248 of printed Journal, p. 477 of electronic Journal).
The new system—which will not only help to expedite the call process, but will also ensure more compatible matches—will launch on August 1, 2013.
Read more at http://www.pcusa.org/news/2013/7/30/changes-coming-pcusas-church-leadership-connection/
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Having served on a search committee I can testify that the “matches” were generally not even close to useful. We spent two years looking for an Associate Pastor fromPIFs that were useless (many that specifically did not want our area of the country).