From Our Board President
Dear Fellow Countryside Members and Friends –
Things at Countryside Church are still very busy.
As all of you are aware by now, the Board has authorized a search for a contract minister and has established a contract minister search team. The members of that search team are Board members, Pat Wydell and Elizabeth Van Orden, along with fellow congregants Judy Ball, Michael Lunter and Amy Zukoski. I am a non-voting member of the search team, and I follow their activities closely and work closely with Pat Wydell, who leads the team. To refresh your memory, a contract minister is hired by the Board for a specific term – one or two years, with an option to renew. This is different from a settled minister, who is called by the congregation through a vote at a special congregational meeting, and serves for an unspecified, open-ended term. Of course, a contract minister may be called later by the congregation, but the call decision is not made at the beginning of the contract period.
The search team has received applications from several ministerial candidates and is in the process performing due diligence on two of those candidates whom they feel are well qualified. The search team will then recommend one or more qualified candidates to the Board which will vote to notify the UUA Transitions Team of our top candidate(s). If all goes well, our top candidate will consider us to be their top congregation, and we will have a “match”. If that occurs, we will make a formal offer to our top candidate on March 26 and will make a public announcement shortly after that. As I said, things are moving quickly! I will keep you posted.
Next, thanks to the tireless efforts of our Treasurer, Rick Rayborn, and the ad hoc capital projects team he assembled, it appears that we will be able to install a second array of solar panels on the church roof. Also, thanks to a very generous donation from a friend of CCUU, the solar panels will be paid for in full, as will part of the roofing upgrades needed to support the solar panels. I have signed the contract for the roofing upgrades. We are waiting to sign the solar panel contract pending a review by Commonwealth Edison as to whether our existing electrical equipment will support the new solar panels. We are cautiously optimistic that the review will conclude that our existing equipment is sufficient or that the upgrades necessary will not be prohibitively expensive. We should know that in the next week or two. If all goes well, the roofing enhancements will begin in late March, and the solar panel installation will begin shortly thereafter. I understand that once the new solar panels are installed, we will have doubled our solar generating capacity. That’s impressive.
Finally, we are in the middle of our annual stewardship campaign (pledge drive). The theme for this year’s campaign is “Rooted in Love, Growing Our Future”. More detailed information is available at: https://ccuu.org/rooted-in-love/. If you haven’t already made a pledge, please do so by Sunday March 15th. I trust that you all will pledge generously to sustain this amazing spiritual community.
Thank you,
Gary LaBedz, Board President