July 27th Update 2025: Steve Ewert

Our committee decided it might be a good idea to remind everybody of our timeline, which is not necessarily short, and which might take me a little bit to refresh your memory.   

The very first thing was there was a nominating committee for the Pastor Nominating Committee where we voted on those of us to be on the pastor nominating committee. And then we got to work.   

One of the first things we did was develop a church profile. It is currently on our website. And if you wanted to look at that, you could still do so. The next thing we did was that we decided it would be important to get information from the congregation about what our needs and areas of ministry might look like, what we are currently doing, but also what we might have in mind for the future.   

So, we developed a questionnaire with a number of questions and those were distributed and submitted. Then gratefully, we've have a member of our team who is a wiz with Google Sheets who is able to go through that, categorize, and come up with those things that seemed to be of importance to our congregation.   So, we did a long evaluation of that information. 

Then the next thing we did was that we developed a job description. We looked back at what our lead Pastor has done in the past and those things that we thought might be important in the future. Once all that was in place, then we went to recruitment of candidates and mostly that was done through online job boards.   

As candidates saw that, they submitted their applications, those things that we asked for. And we went through the process of evaluating those submissions. We reviewed each candidate's information. We asked them to provide us with three of their online sermons. It is easy to do that nowadays. Most everybody has some kind of online presence. It is easy to get those submissions from that. 

Then we decide whether we would want to conduct an interview with a candidate.   We have done a number of those. With the candidates we were more interested in, we went and checked with three references for each of these individuals. We have been through different levels of the process with a number of candidates up to this point in time.  

During and after each step, we assembled as a committee to pray and discuss. And each one of us spent time on their own in prayer, looking for and trying to figure out and listening to God to discern as we go along this process. We have even had a couple of times when a member of our committee has asked for a little bit of extra time for prayer to be able to discern how they felt God was leading them.   

Something important to remember too is that in the transition from Bill Welch to Pastor Rick Lindbergh, there was a time of about two years. If you think about this, Pastor Rick has been, has ended his time of tenure with us, only about seven months ago. Just keep that in mind.   

So currently our committee has been meeting with a candidate several times, and as we follow our usual practice, we will be meeting and getting together as a team to seek and discern in the way that God is leading us.   

Remember we've have an email if you have questions, please feel free to communicate with us at: pnc@sierravistachurch.org.    The biggest thing is we would we really covet your prayers so that we are able to discern where God is leading us. Thank you, Steve Ewert