Senior Minister Search Committee Update | January, 2022

January, 2022:

Dear Riverside Family,

The Senior Minister Search Committee is pleased to announce the creation of the church profile. The profile was presented to lay leaders, commission members, and the Church Council on December 12. Many thanks to everyone who supported this effort. You are truly appreciated.

In a recent meeting this fall, we spent some time going around the room reflecting one-by-one on our hopes for this very moment in our search process. At the end of our reflections, we discovered that we were offering what was in effect a prayer. We want to share with you the reflections of each member of the search committee woven together now as a communal prayer that conveys our goals and our process, our petitions and our thanksgiving:

     We have undertaken this task with humility and prayer. Only by doing this work in a posture of faith can we accomplish the enormous task before us.

     We recognize that kindness and generosity are the cornerstones of community. We serve with the goal to be Christ centered in our efforts to create a true and clear portrait of who we are as the body of Christ and who we are called by God to become.

     You, the people of God, chose us, the Senior Minister Search Committee, to conduct a search that is worthy of Riverside, a process of discernment for the one who will become the future Senior Minister of The Riverside Church in the City of New York.

     We prayed often. We listened intently to your responses to the questions we posed. We worked with common purpose to gather together the church’s ideas and hopes into a church profile. The profile is designed to include input from all participants without hierarchy or order of importance or privilege of voice, but welcoming of all.

     We listened to you, and we are moved and humbled by the love you have shown for our church. We bear witness to the diverse congregation that we are, the diverse voices we heard on the listening tour. We live into that diversity and in that spirit, we share who we are. We are making space for difference. We are no longer who we used to be.

     Our church profile is not only a reflection of the past and present, but also points to who we are called to be in the future. God has called our faith community to be more than the limitations of our past. We are called now to live into God’s promise for the future, invited to be the body of Christ. May we live into that promise.

May the New Year bring you peace, joy, and happiness.

Alexa, Andrea, Annie, Beth, David, Emily, Hylda, Karissa, Lee, Lisa, and Mark