the phone interview

Tonight was the night. I talked with the call committee of St. Da Kine for about an hour. They asked about my experience in worship leadership, and planning and style of preaching. They were concerned about how I would deal with two different styles of worship so I talked a bit about how my internship site had two different services and i spent a year navigating that. They asked about my free time activities and how that might work for me, which was a nice thing to hear them be concerned about.

Obviously we talked a lot about the Praise service. When they asked me about my experience in worship planning, I did say that I would expect to be involved in worship planning for every service at the church I served - in choosing the music and the liturgical rhythms...no one commented, so it may be a good thing or a bad thing in their minds. They also were interested in my experience and philosophy around children's sermons and my previous work with youth and young adults.

I talked a lot about working with them to decide what to try for their various ministry needs and talking and listening to people. I was clear that I'm not going to show up with a bag of 'tricks' that have worked in other places and plan to implement them at St. Da Kine. I did point out, that even if I had a bag of tricks they likely wouldn't translate from Lawrence, KS to the OC and that a lot had changed in the lives of teens in the last 7 years anyway.

They will let me know in a week if they want to continue to pursue this and work out a time for me to travel down there to meet them and preach - the usual interviewing gig.

Overall, I feel better about it than I thought that I would. No huge red flags came up for me. I have some reservations still, but I'm open to pursuing this further if they decide to do that. On the other hand, if they decide not to have me come for a face to face, I wouldn't be devastated...annoyed that I'm still unemployed, but not devastated.