John Dotson’s report:

About two weeks ago, the Personnel Committee met, along with Chris and Susan.  Out of that meeting came the statement sent out by the Personnel Committee to the church.  I am not going to re-read that, but printed copies are available if you need one. The deacons have voted to put together an ad hoc committee to continue working on the issue of ministry alignment.  As stated in the document sent to the church, I will work as deacon chairman with the Personnel Committee to appoint and enlist this group.  They will begin their work this year, but a more thorough study of all this will require a good deal of time.  We feel it will be at least April before we can expect to hear back from this group.

Here are some of the tasks this group will need to take on:

• Summarizing and discussing the feedback, positive and negative, received in response to the original proposal.
• Pulling together job descriptions for all our current ministers, and working on the creation of a current job description for Chris Caldwell.  Chris has never had a job description while at Broadway. The purpose of this job description would be to try to describe what Chris does now, before proceeding to discuss what Chris’s job description might look like in a new model.
• Studying other staffing models in peer CBF churches to see what seems to be working best in other places.
• Formulating a new staffing model that attempts to address our primary and secondary issue.
  • The Primary Issue: How do we best align our ministerial staff with our God-given mission as a church, while at the same time doing all we can to assure that our ministerial staff also meets the needs within the congregation as effectively as possible? 
  • The Secondary Issue: Is there a way to meet our primary staffing objective, while at the same time trying to do what we can to make the jobs Chris and Susan hold manageable and rewarding for them or for those who might hold those positions in the future?  
    • A note here: Although we value Chris and Susan and hope they will be at Broadway for years to come, and while retaining them specifically is a worthwhile goal that should not be neglected, we also feel that any staffing model must be able to function effectively apart from the presence of Chris and Susan at Broadway.  Broadway normally modifies job descriptions anytime a staff member leaves, and we don’t think it would be any different should Chris or Susan leave, but the point is, we do not think a staffing model can simply be a custom fit for Chris and Susan, without regard for how it would work should one or both of them leave.
  • A third issue for the ad hoc committee: How do these changes affect the rest of the staff and their responsibilities?
  • A fourth issue: How does the proposed model square with the ability of our budget to pay for it?

We feel there is some measure of weariness with the conversation we have been having as a church right now.  For that reason, we think it would be healthy for the ad hoc team to spend some time doing their work before reopening the congregational conversation about our mission and how best to align our ministers with it.  We do not, however, think that just kicking the can down the road for a long period of time is wise.  We need to return to this congregational conversation after the first of the year.