Conference Ministers aid Congregational Ministry

Four years ago Pleasant View Mennonite Church began using an Annual Evaluation Tool as a way of yearly  “taking the temperature” of the congregation. This short questionnaire asked congregants to evaluate pastors, elders, and even participation.  Being so close to specific situations, however, congregational leaders had struggled to compile and summarize the results without getting stuck on specific comments.

This led leaders to seek an outside resource person who, while having some prior knowledge of the church, wasn’t so close to the situation that they would get triggered and derailed from seeing the big picture.  This quickly led them to ask their SCC Regional Conference Minister (RCM), James Wenger, to assist the congregation in compiling the evaluations.

Pastor Jeff Selzer said, “We were really pleased with the way James summarized the evaluations in a succinct way that gave us a big picture of where the congregation is at this point in time.  So pleased that, though we had initially thought we would need to shorten his report, we ended up distributing it to the congregation in full! We will certainly look to use our conference RCM to help us with this again.”