Community Transition

Our transition at Jacob's Well

Since September 2009, our community has been in transition. Our founding pastor, Tim Keel and his family moved to New Zealand to begin a different chapter in their lives. Since then, we've taken the opportunity to listen, both to God and each other about what next steps would be for us. As we listened, we also started to form a picture about the next phase of our life together. Some things consistently remain. The DNA of Jacob's Well remains the same, our grounding in Christ remains the same, our passion to join God's mission in the world remains the same, our commitment to discover together as a community remains the same. We also recognize that there are new opportunities and new expressions of what it means to be God's people. For that we're excited and thankful.

How can you participate?

 As we endeavor to listen to God, we are also praying for God's guidance and wisdom. We ask you to pray with us. Specifically, we ask you to pray that:

As the elders and staff at Jacob's Well discern God's leading during the transition, we ask that people in our community pray for us by name.  We fully recognize the need for wisdom and discernment during this process as we seek to be good stewards of the Jacob's Well community.  If you feel called to pray for any of the elders or staff in this capacity and want to let that person know, feel free to do so.  We thank you for bringing us to God in prayer and also want to remind you to pray for one another.  Here is the listing of our staff and elders.

How else can you get involved?

We want to engage in missional formation more intentionally, more communally and more relationally. One expression of this is through corpus (it means body in Latin), which is a way for you to experience authentic life with others in an ongoing way within the context of a smaller number of people. If you are interested in being a part of a corpus, email Shana. You might also want to check out the news and calendar section of our website for additional opportunities to get involved. If you have further questions feel free to talk to one of our missional formation team members: Philip Lesniewski, Shana Puckett, Gerard Brown, Jessi Marcus and Tim Bridgham.

Who will be preaching during the transition?

During January through July we will be anchored by a primary and secondary preaching team. Tom Ryan will be our primary interim speaker and Erik Leafblad will be our secondary interim speaker. We're excited to have them as a part of our interim speaking team. In addition to their teaching role, they will work with the Kairos team to plan the preaching calendar for the year. During the January through July timeframe, there will continue to be opportunities for us to hear from other speakers, both from within and outside the community. 

During the month of August, Isaac Anderson will be our preacher. Isaac is a friend of Jacob's Well, was a teacher at the Gathering and is now a graduate student at Ohio State University.

What is the timelime for pastoral leadership?

Click here to see the timeline that we are using in our pastoral leadership search. This timeline is guiding our process as we move forward. We are now in phase three of the timeline.

As a reminder, during this phase of the transition we must honor the confidential nature of the pastoral search. Therefore, we will be providing updates about where we are in the process but we will not be sharing names of candidates until we have an announcement about who we are calling to the position. The candidates will also not be preaching at Jacob's Well as part of their interview. To be clear, the interviews will be extensive and we will hear several sermons by each candidate who is interviewed but it will not happen publicly for the entire community.

We have completed the first round of interviews and have narrowed our candidates to 3 people. Our assessments were based on several criteria which included each candidate's interview, feedback from his/her references, listening to a bevy of sermons and the candidate's potential match for our job description. We are in the process of conducting second round interviews that will be facilitated over a multiple day site visit to Kansas City. In that site visit, candidates will spend time with elders and staff in both formal and social situations. Once those site visits are complete, the elders will have a prioritized list of candidates to fill the teaching pastor position and will make our call based on that list.

Our next elders meeting is August 25. If you have questions or comments, feel free to talk to one of the elders.