Update from Your Search Committee – March 31, 2024

Your Search Committee has been hard at work since we were elected by the congregation on June 10, 2023. Since that time, we have accomplished many tasks. We have written articles for the Newsfeed to keep you informed. We reviewed, studied, and interviewed many potential candidates, and invited three applicants to spend a “pre-candidating weekend” with us on Long Island. During those weekend,s we had the opportunity to spend time with them, show them around the area, conduct in-depth interviews, and hear each applicant preach and lead a Sunday service.

For two of the three potential candidates, we indicated to the UUA that they would be a good match for our congregation.

Unfortunately, those two candidates were matched with other congregations, and so we were unable to find a suitable match by the first offer date of March 28. The work of the Search Committee is to find a good candidate that will minister well here. So far this work is incomplete, but we will continue to a second round of the search. This will require considering some ministers who are still in search as well as some who did not enter search in the first round. Once again we will go through the screening, interviewing and pre-candidating process. That process will not be completed until late May or early June. While we had hoped to bring you news of a candidate before then, it is much more important that we find the right candidate. It is just going to take a bit longer.

We will keep you all informed, to the extent possible, going forward, and we thank you for your continued support and understanding.

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NOTE: If you are curious about any of the details of the search process, you can check out the 119-page Settlement Handbook on the UUA website.

Committee Membership

The Search Committee for a Settled Minister is comprised of the following members, elected by the congregation in June 2023:

• Cassandra Allison
• Mayté Alzugaray
• Claudia Jacobs Dunmire
• Mike Hoffman
• Jaymie Meliker
• Elise Nichols Powell
• Colleen Rudman.

Click here to read brief bios of all the members.