Good morning. God has continued to bless us with abundant interest in the Lead Pastor position here at Coastal. Since posting the job opening on February 12th, we have received resumes from over 180 interested candidates. While some applicants don’t appear to possess the experience and pastoral attributes you desired in your survey responses, many exceed our expectations while also having much in common with Coastal's values and vision of helping people know and follow Jesus.

All nine members of the Pastor Search Team have committed to reviewing each and every resume. We all have different experiences and opinions, but we all share a love for Coastal and a desire to discern God’s vision for Coastal’s next leader. Team members will each narrow the total candidate pool to those 30-40 candidates God puts on their hearts. Then, next weekend we’ll meet to find consensus among our individual choices, narrowing the field to 30-35 mutually agreed-upon candidates. We’ll then pray over these men for two weeks, returning to again narrow the pool to 5-10 candidates. At this point we’ll really dive in, learning more about each candidate through a series of written questionnaires, phone interviews, and reviews of their on-line sermons.

What else do we want you to know about this process? I guess just know that before, during, and after each process step we are actively seeking God’s direction. People have asked me if I’m concerned about finding our next pastor. I have to say, I’m really not. God is never surprised by anything, and He truly wants what’s best for us. I’m confident that He knows what Coastal needs and that He’ll provide it in His timing.

Again, I encourage you to follow the updates on the website, get involved in the work God is doing here at Coastal, and continue praying for the search team, our staff, and our next lead pastor. Thank you!

Coastal has been blessed with an outpouring of interest in our Lead Pastor position. This response is a testament to God's goodness and our past and current church leadership's efforts to create a positive reputation for Coastal in the church community.

To date we have received over 130 resumes, and they continue to arrive. The Pastor Search Team is evaluating all interested candidates to ensure they meet the desired qualifications and exhibit the heart and spirit you requested. We will continue the evaluations while the job is posted with the goal of narrowing the candidate pool and discerning God's choice for Coastal's next leader.

Little will change while the evaluation process continues, so please expect the next update during the service sometime in mid-to-late March.

We appreciate all who have told us that their community groups are praying for us and the Coastal Staff. Please continue to pray as we seek God's man, in God's time, no exceptions.

Good morning. My name is Scott Jones, and I wouuld like to give you a brief update on the Pastor Search process. I will be on stage about once a month, but between these in-person updates, you are encouraged to monitor progress on Coastal’s web site. We posted an update on January 29th and will post about every two weeks unless we are in a period where there is nothing new to report. Even if that is the case, we will still let you know that. Our goal is to be 100% transparent about the process.

On Coastal’s Pastor Search page, you can find the four phases of the search process. You can see we have now completed and compiled the pastoral survey results. Since the last update, we received almost double the original number of responses with a total of 160. Your feedback is helping direct our search by defining the approximate experience, age, and education you prefer in a Senior Pastor. You also shared many characteristics you feel he should possess and how he should prioritize his time as a pastor, a husband, and--if he has kids--as a father.

The last few weeks, we have been creating the informational profiles describing our church, our community, and our desired lead pastor. These profiles include input from you, from the staff, and from our local church association representative. Again, these profiles will give prospective candidates an idea of who Coastal is as a church, the community and people we serve locally, and the qualities we are seeking in our next lead pastor. The team will meet again today to finalize these profiles and the formal job description. We will post these profiles this week on the web site and at the same time post the job opening within multiple pastoral job-search avenues, for example seminaries and religious association job boards, etc. This will open a 90-day period of receiving resumes for evaluation.

After the resume period closes in May, we will begin narrowing the candidate pool to 10 individuals, then 3-5, and finally 1 to present to you for approval. This process uses a series of questionnaires and interviews--both over the phone and in-person--and will take several months. After this week, we will have completed all of Phase 2 and the first item in Phase 3.

Again, I encourage you to follow the updates on the web site and to continue praying for the search team, our staff, and our next lead pastor. We truly feel and appreciate your prayers! Thank you.

Coastal’s Pastor Search Team has gathered data and information from numerous sources to create the church, community, and pastor profiles necessary to communicate to prospective candidates who we are, the community we serve, and who we are seeking as a pastor. Sources of information included Coastal’s web site, the Galveston Chamber of Commerce, the Union Baptist Association archives, Coastal’s membership data, and congregational input from the recent survey. These profiles will be completed within the next few weeks and posted on Coastal’s web site.

In addition to the profiles, a job description is being created to post simultaneously with the profiles on local, state, and national church and seminary sites. This job posting will open a 90-day period of resume submissions from prospective candidates.

The next update will be provided in-person on February 9th at both services. We appreciate your continued prayers for the staff, the search team, and the next candidate and his family.

Good morning. My name is Scott Jones and I'm honored to serve as the chairman of Coastal's Pastor Search Team. We’ll update you about once a month, or as needed, to be sure you are hearing from us frequently from this stage.

The Search Team is made up of nine Coastal members. You can see our names and pictures on the web site, but here is a summary of who we are. We are 5 men and 4 women. We are in our 20s, our 70s, and all decades in between. We are single, married, have young children still in school, and grown children who've emptied our nest and blessed us with grandchildren. But with all of this diversity, we are unified on a single goal: to identify God's man, in God's time, with no exceptions.

Between these in-person updates, you are encouraged to monitor progress on Coastal's web site. Just click on the "Pastor-Search" tab, where you can see the four phases of the search process with green, yellow, and red icons for each step within each phase. Currently, we have completed Phase I, which was 30 days of prayer and an encouragement to keep praying. I’ll come back to that in a moment. We have also selected a Search Team and begun receiving congregational feedback.

Regarding the congregational feedback, 87 people have responded so far to the survey questions about desirable qualities for the new pastor. We greatly appreciate everyone who responded. You can still respond using the QR code in the seat back or on the program insert until January 19th.

Our next step is to create profiles for our church, our community, and our desired Lead Pastor. These profiles will give prospective candidates an idea of who we are as a church, what we value, our culture, and the community we call home. It will also give them an idea about the qualities we are seeking in our next Lead Pastor. We will then post the profiles and at the same time post the actual job opening. This will begin a 90-day period of receiving resumes for evaluation. Everything I have just described so far takes plus-or-minus 6 months.

During the next phase, we will narrow the candidate field to 10, then 3-5 and eventually one candidate to present to the staff, the Advisory Team, and to you--the congregation--for your approval. This portion of the search can take an additional 6-9 months, or more.

I know this all sounds like a long time, and it is, but it is necessary for us to trust the process and do things properly. This is the "God’s time" part of our task. Throughout the Bible, God asks us to be patient and trust Him with our decisions and our lives.  When we do, our obedience is rewarded. When we don’t trust Him, it usually ends badly.

Your search team will not rush the search process and I encourage you to look to the web site and this stage for your progress updates. I promise that we will be diligent and will apply constant effort to keep moving forward to find God's choice for Coastal's next Lead Pastor.

Lastly, circling back to the 30 days of prayer, please do not stop praying just because the 30 days is over. Please continue praying for the staff, the search team, the man that God has selected as our next Lead Pastor, his entire family, and his current church. At some point, that church could be in our shoes. And pray for Coastal. We are still the same church, stacking the deck for the next generation and helping people know and follow Jesus. That has not changed, and we are making an impact in our community every day.

Your. Prayers. Matter! Thank you.