Community Transition
Blessings to you, Tim and Mimi
As many of you heard, our senior pastor, Tim Keel has decided to follow God's call to Auckland, New Zealand to be a lecturer at Laidlaw College and interim dean in their school of mission and ministry. While we are sad about saying goodbye to Tim, Mimi, Mabry, Annie and Blaise, we are also hopeful to see how God is leading them and us into the next phase of our lives.
Actively waiting on God
Our Elders, who are leading us through this time, are committed to not getting ahead of God in this process. In fact, we want to wait on God as expressed in Psalm 130:
Out of the depths I cry to you, O LORD;
O LORD, hear my voice.
Let your ears be attentive
to my cry for mercy.
If you, O LORD, kept a record of sins,
O LORD, who could stand?
But with you there is forgiveness;
therefore you are feared.
I wait for the LORD, my soul waits,
and in his word I put my hope.
My soul waits for the LORD
more than watchmen wait for the morning,
more than watchmen wait for the morning.
O Israel, put your hope in the LORD,
for with the LORD is unfailing love
and with him is full redemption.
He himself will redeem Israel
from all their sins.
As we wait on God, we understand this is an active rather a passive posture. We are not waiting because we don't know what to do or because we are overwhelmed by what is before us. We are waiting on God in order to intentionally create space so that we can discern how God will lead us through this time.
- we continue to listen (to God and to our community) during this transition
- we create opportunities for people to fully engage with the life of this community
- we make time to be with each other (both the Elders and the broader Jacob's Well community)
- we find opportunities to apply the words of Genesis 1-11 and God's steadfast love to our lives and our relationships with each other
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 I 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. We're pleased to announce the five members of our missional formation team: Philip Lesniewski, Shana Puckett, Gerard Brown, Jessi Marcus and Tim Bridgham.
Who will be preaching beginning in the new year?
Timelime for pastoral leadership?
Click here to see the timeline that we are using in our pastoral leadership search. This timeline will guide our process moving forward.
The Elders have formed working teams in order to handle specific aspects of the transition. The transition team is responsible for ensuring that we address aspects of our process as defined in the timeline. The communication team is responsible for ensuring that we are sharing information in a timely manner and finding opportunities to hear from the community. Here are the teams and the people involved:
- Transition: Ashley Cleveland, Chad Jolly, Cheryl Burbach, Mike King, Jeff Larison
- Communcation: Art Gangel, Laura Lesniewski, Steve Jernigan, Rachel Bonar
Our next elders meeting is March 9th. If you have questions or comments, feel free to talk to one of the elders.