Process for Calling a Minister
CHURCH CHATS: a time for finding out more, asking questions: January 15, after service and a second time to be announced.
CANDIDATING WEEK: a time when the Church and the candidate get to know each other. It will be from February 19 to 26, which includes two Sundays and the week in between. Rev. Gibbons will meet as many individuals and groups as possible during Candidating Week. The Evaluation Team is now preparing a schedule for her. Click here: Candidating Week Schedule to find the events that you may attend during this week.
CONGREGATIONAL MEETING: At the end of Candidating Week, there will be a Congregational Meeting to decide whether the Rev. Dr. Kendyl Gibbons should be called to be the next Settled Minister of All Souls Unitarian Universalist Church of Kansas City . The Congregational Meeting is now scheduled for the afternoon of February 26th.
Ministerial Candidate
Rev. Dr. Kendyl Gibbons
Rev. Dr. Kendyl Gibbons Speaking February 19 and 26
The Ministerial Candidate Evaluation Team is pleased to announce our recommendation of the Rev. Dr. Kendyl Gibbons as candidate for settled minister of All Souls Unitarian Universalist Church.
Rev. Kendyl has been the senior minister at First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, since 1998. Before that she spent 15 years as minister to the DuPage Unitarian Universalist Church in Naperville, Illinois. Thus, we will be the lucky recipients of 30 years experience in successful parish ministry.
We on the committee have found Kendyl to be entirely genuine, personally warm, and to possess both deep integrity and an awesome intellect. Kendyl is one of the most highly regarded ministers in the UUA; several references hailed her as one of the top five of her generation. Her skills are remarkable. She is a “big picture thinker” who asks the right questions, is sensitive to people, and has a collaborative leadership style that owes much to systems theory (think Steinke). She is grounded by her own personal and spiritual maturity.
Her personal theology is Humanist and was described by a former president and dean of Meadville/Lombard Theological Seminary as a “spiritual Humanist,” “not dogmatic but open to the spiritual dimension of our lives.” Kendyl says, “my personal mission is to learn and teach how the Humanist stance can offer an authentic path to the spiritual maturity which I understand to be the goal of all religious seeking, in whatever tradition.” She appreciates and uses metaphor and is comfortable with Christian and theistic vocabularies finding them to express “the same human condition that I recognize in my own experience.” She wrote “our gospel of freedom, reason, and human dignity is credible only to the extent that we make these claims live in the odd little voluntary associations where we gather for encouragement and accountability in our spiritual growth. In my experience, this effort is endlessly fascinating, risky, and rewarding.”
Early in the search/evaluation process, the Committee described the kind of minister it thought All Souls was looking for. That statement ended with these words: We are looking for a wise leader: someone we can love and respect, who will love and respect us back, who can help us mature and grow so that, together, we might live out our best calling as a beloved community.
We are confident we have found that person in the Rev. Dr. Kendyl Gibbons.
More information will be provided via church chats (January 15 and another date to be announced), as well as in the communications center, electronic media, and from the pulpit. Rev. Kendyl will be here for candidating week, February 19 to 26, and the congregational vote on whether to extend a call will be held after the service on the 26th.
Feel free to talk to members of the Ministerial Candidate Evaluation Team: Jean Patterson, Chair. Members: Barbara Bemis, Nelson Maurice, Ted Otteson, Zarrin Reynolds, Darnelle Roby and Cheryl Westra.
