I am writing this blog on Sunday afternoon after arriving home from the Congregational Meeting. I'm pretty worn out after facilitating the meeting, and I'm leaving in the morning to visit my mother, so this is going to be pretty short.
For those of you who missed it, today's Congregational Meeting was an awesome event. It showed what an amazing community Westside is. As you all are probably aware, we went into the meeting with no willing candidate for the position of President-elect. The Nominating Committee had been working very hard since January, coming up with the names of people who would make good leaders and then trying to convince them to make the commitment to serve. By the time of the meeting, nominees were in place for all the positions except one: the bigee: President-elect.
The Nominating Committee and the Board had come up with a plan with two options. First, we would try to identify a candidate at the meeting. Since we didn't have much hope that this would happen, our fall-back position would be to ask the congregation to let us take until the May meeting to either find a candidate or propose some other way of moving forward into the new church year. We had no clear idea of what that way might be, so the members of the committee and the board were really sweating this meeting.
Then a Westside miracle occurred. Chris Edkins volunteered to stand for President-elect and asked that others take over his important duties on the Membership and Worship Committees. Sue Draper immediately volunteered. Before Chris had a chance to change his mind, he had been nominated and elected. Everyone agrees that Chris will be an excellent President-elect and then President. I'm sure the reason he had not been asked by the Nominating Committee was because of the important role he was already playing in worship and membership.
So, great thanks to Chris Edkins!
And great thanks to all the other people who agreed to serve our church and who were elected today: Suzanne Molnar, Charlie Dudney, Geoff Mazeroff, Linda Hayes, Elizabeth Corbett, Alice Thornton, Linda Scharf, Mary Isaac, and Richard Licht!
And great thanks to this year's outstanding Nominating Committee: Gillie Hunt, Ellen Greenwood, Carol Coffey, Elizabeth Corbett, and Kelley Youmans!
And great thanks to all the Westsiders who showed up for the Congregational Meeting (or gave their proxy to an attendee) in order to play an important role in making our church work!
We are truly an awesome community!!