Article by the Bishop Search and Transition Committee
The committee met on Saturday, November 5, for a half-day onboarding retreat at St. Gregory of Nyssa. All our members were able to attend, along with our consultant Judy Stark, who attended on zoom – as did two committee members.
Having a consultant for a bishop search is an incredible help; there are so many things that we must pay attention to, and our consultant brings a wealth of experience to us. Judy has consulted on over twenty bishop searches in the Episcopal Church from the Diocese of Venezuela to the Diocese of El Camino Real. In addition, she has served the Episcopal Church as the chair of the Board of Transition Ministry, and as a deputy to General Convention, along with other ministries.
The retreat was very productive. Committee members spent time getting to know each other, sharing their excitement and nervousness about the process, as well as each one’s additional ministries. We also divided the larger committee into our five working groups; each team spent some time organizing their work and making plans for the next 18 months of the search and transition. We will meet in working groups regularly and have monthly check-ins with the whole committee on Zoom.
What is most immediate of our work is to hold the Listening Sessions in the Diocese, because in them people can offer their ideas about the search for the new bishop. We have published the dates of the Listening Sessions both on the search website and on Diobytes. In the Listening Sessions, English will be spoken, with translation available into Spanish on Zoom.
We also organized another session, in Spanish, especially for the Spanish-speaking people of the Diocese. This meeting is on Saturday, December 10, from 10:00-Noon, in the Tucson Room at the Church Divinity School of the Pacific, 2450 Le Conte Ave, Berkeley.
The Spanish version of the search and transition committee website is now online, and we are working this week on perfecting the translation. Here is the link for the Spanish version: https://diocalbishopsearch.org/es/
