Look at the Ministerial Search Team Timeline
March 29, 2026
My name is Cheryl Dixon, I use she/her pronouns. I have been a member of our congregation since 1995, and am so honored to be a member of your Settled Minister Search Team.
Our committee started working in April of last year. It takes time, caring, and forgivenesses along the way, to make a team as interconnected as this one has become. We’ve shared many meals, stories, hopes, and dreams during this past year. We’ve supported each other, brought our skills to the many tasks we faced, sharing the work load, offering an extra hand to one another when we could, stretching our own growing edges beyond imagination. We’ve challenged ourselves and each other in ways we hadn’t experienced previously. We model right relations in our meetings, covenanting together, listening with our hearts and minds. And always bringing you, our congregation and staff into every conversation amongst ourselves and with the ministers we’ve met. Our hearts have been opened by the work of Search. It’s been an enriching experience for me.
Meanwhile, our team prepared snacks for Coffee Hour, and we look forward to talking with you.
March 22, 2026
Good morning.
I am Emily Sherwood. I am a member of the Settled Minister search team here to share where we are in the process. It’s time to (holds up whistle)…… not yet.
The Search team has been BUSY. We spent separate weekends with each of our 3 really strong final candidates. We’ve had rides to and from the New York airports, breakfasts, lunches, dinners (thank you Chris), brunches, “tourist” drives around the local towns, vespers services, sermons and 3 hour marathon interviews. All of this to see in person who will be the next minister to fill this beautiful space and our hearts.
The team has been so impressed with all of the enthusiasm and ideas of each of our candidates. So, here is where everyone starts to get involved…
What can we, the congregation, do? We can mirror that enthusiasm back toward whomever it may be and start to practice RADICAL WELCOMING and KINDNESS today!
- Practice Radical Welcoming– ensuring all people—regardless of race, gender, ability, or age—are seen, valued, and fully included.
o In my 4th grade class, that means making sure everyone gets a Good morning from a friend EVERYDAY. Did you know Engaging in brief conversations of HELLO with others triggers the release of oxytocin (the “love hormone”), leading to increased happiness and satisfaction.
o Actually remember to bring your nametag in from the car (that might just be me) so everyone knows who you are. - Practice Radical Kindness- Treat every interaction as a spiritual act of love, reflecting the UU principles of justice, equity, and compassion.
- Let’s show our possible next settled minister how welcoming and kind we are!So YEAH! (Whistle) Today the Settled Minister
Search Team goes into the Meeting House- not to emerge until we have ranked our top three candidates! We look forward to Radically WELCOMING our next minister with all of you very soon.
March 15, 2026
We’ve spent this year gathering the threads of this congregation: the distinct, sometimes clashing colors of our cottage meetings, the frayed ends of our growing edges, and the bright, sturdy yarns of our shared values. We’ve taken your stories, the wisdom of the elders, the curiosities of the children, the dedication of our staff, and looked for the ways our new settled minister’s own stories, identities, and perspectives can interlock with them. We have searched for a partner who knows how to sit at the loom with us and turn these raw materials into something we can actually use.
We are down to the final strands. The pattern is finally visible, and the search is shifting from a concept into something we can almost reach out and touch. We’re moving from the theory of a new minister to the reality of a person who will soon be walking these halls and joining the work. A visceral, breathing, complex, loving person, just like each one of us.
This congregation is a living tapestry, one that refuses to stop at the edges of a frame. As the search nears its end, and the new ministry approaches its dawn, the tapestry will continue. We are handing the shuttle to a new partner to keep the weave going. This is a fabric meant to be lived in. Flexible enough to stretch as we grow. Rugged enough to handle mud tracks and coffee spills at happy hour. Worn soft by the weight of our shared lives.
The pattern is nearly complete. We are exactly six weeks away from April 26th, the day our candidate comes to the pulpit for us to decide together to call them as our minister. The day we finally step away from the loom to wear this work out into the world. As new light comes through the windows and the season turns, we are weaving in the last threads. The dreams you shared in your surveys, the hopes from your cottage meetings, the intentions you planted months ago. They are all here, in the cloth. Until then, keep bringing your color and your heart. Journey with us.
~ Phil Thomas
March 8, 2026
Good morning! I’m Chris Aquino, and really glad to be here representing our Settled Minister Search Team, here to share this week’s Search Moment. It’s been a busy and rewarding run.
In the past few weeks, we’ve heard from Tom about all that’s involved in the early part of a settled minister search process, and from Bob about some of the differences between a settled and interim ministry. He also spoke about the process of candidate selection, from the first several we met online to the three the UUA allows a congregation to meet with in person.
Jamie gave a great overview of how far we’ve come and the ways the Board, and all of you in our Congregation, have helped us get as far as we have with your support and input.
Elena described what a candidate’s weekend looks like and how we spend our time together, visiting the area and talking more in depth to learn about each other.
At times the conversations are as you might imagine, covering all sorts of topics, as one would when getting to know someone they might like in their life. Other conversations are very specifically geared toward the needs and desires of our Congregation. For these we lean heavily on what we learned from the surveys and cottage meetings and coffee hour chats with you all.
Here are some of the topics of those conversations:
- Worship services; preaching style and themes, multi- generation involvement
- Spiritual traditions that have influenced them; their knowledge of other faiths and practices
- Unitarian Universalism, what they love about it, how they have been involved on national level
- Faith formation for families, youth and adults
- Ways of practicing pastoral care
- Experience in and support of social justice (everyone we spoke with noted our strength here)
- Managerial styles, staff support; experience with and ways of growing through conflict
- The role of money in a congregation and ways to understand it, as it supports our values
- Discernment process for decision making
- The value of diversity in all its forms and ways to further develop
- Each candidate’s major strengths and contributions to congregations they have led, and where they see their growing edges, and how these areas match with our needs and values
- And finally, we talked about joy! Joy! And how to keep it alive in all we do
Thank you all so much for your patience and support through these past several months, and for putting your faith in the Search team. We’re working hard and looking forward to what’s ahead for us all. You can find and review these moments in SOUNDINGS.
March 1, 2026
If you have been here the last few Sundays, you’ve heard a bit about the process from Tom, Bob and Jamie.
At the risk of repeating some of the timeline, I’ll just mention that we are in the period when we “go dark,” and can’t share information about any individuals just yet. This is to preserve confidentiality for the people who have applied for our position.
We can talk a bit about the process, though.
After interviewing close to a dozen candidates who were interested in becoming our new Settled Minister, the team extended invitations to three people to come to Westport for what are called “pre-candidating” weekends. I thought you might be interested in what those look like:
They have arrived – or will arrive – on a Friday afternoon and joined the committee for dinner that night. We’ve already met them on ZOOM, but this is our chance to get to know them a little better. And for them to learn about us, too! Our committee, and our community.
Saturdays are pretty full days, with a tour of the building, a tour of the area, a three-hour interview, and dinner with the full search team again. After dinner, we have asked them to provide a small “vespers-type” service so we can get a sense of their worship style.
And then we finish up with lunch on Sunday, before they leave. These weekends are marathons for potential ministers and for us.
Some of this is in the guidelines we received from the UUA – particularly the interview length and the suggestion of a vespers service. It used to be that a pre-candidate would be invited to preach at a “neutral pulpit,” and those of you who have served on search teams in the past may remember this. The good news is that we have watched our pre-candidates preach online, so we already have a sense of their style; the bad news is that those streaming services make it difficult to preserve the confidentiality of the process. So, we don’t watch them deliver a sermon in another congregation. But that’s okay, we find spending quality time with the candidates allows us to get to know them even better than watching them.
So, that’s where we are now. We’ve met with two potential candidates, with one more to go before we start our final discernment discussions. And in the meantime, we’ll keep updating you on what’s happening, as much as we can.
February 22, 2026
Good morning I’m Jamie Forbes and I am a member of your Settled Minister Search Team. And I am here with your weekly Search Moment!
You have already heard from Tom and Bob and now know that we have 3 candidates that we will be meeting with as we head towards the mid April deadline. We are now in what we call the period of discernment which requires strict confidentiality but I wanted to make you aware of input and decisions outside of our team that have been and will be crucial to the hiring of our new settled minister.
As early as last winter our UUWestport Board of Trustees worked with the UUA to understand the Search process and to review compensation guidelines. They also helped determine which documents would be needed for our UUWestport packet that, after our search team updated and added information, went out to all possible candidates. The board approved the budget for the search team, reviewed nominations for the team, selected the team and finally facilitated the congregational vote to approve the team.
Then you all helped us by attending cottage meetings, the B4 (Break Barriers, Build Beliefs) workshop with a UUA rep, filling out questionnaires and taking us aside during coffee hour with very heartfelt desires for your new minister. Your input has guided us every step of the way as we work through this process.
After gathering all of this data we went ‘dark’ as our UUA search rep calls it so we could start to do the work needed to evaluate which candidates could be a good fit for UUWestport.
Finally once the candidate is announced we team up again with you, the congregation which includes our youth, the board and the staff to host a candidating week of meetings with all interested parties and to schedule the very important vote to call.
So this is a way of saying thank you for your participation, thank you for your trust and thank you in advance for engaging with our future candidate during our candidating week in April!
February 15, 2026
Hi my name is Bob Perry from the Settled Minister Search Team. A settled minister focuses on long term vision and guidance while interim ministers like Carlton and Alan before him, by design, focus on the short term by keeping a steady hand on the rudder while we prepare for our next settled minister.
For example, Carlton sees the importance of Happy Hour fellowship. Oooops! I mean Coffee Hour! I don’t know if many of you know this but more than once Carlton himself has made the coffee and organized the goodies that we may at times take for granted. It’s work!. Try it! A settled minister on the other hand will help us to develop leadership in this and other areas hopefully moving people who think “This is the congregation that I attend” to the internalized feeling that “This is MY Home”
So, enough of that… Our team has received 13 applications from ministers all around the country. After many weeks of ZOOM interviews with many interesting people and much discernment and lots of reference phone calls we are finally down to 3 candidates which is the maximum allowed at this time! While there is no perfect minister (no offense to Carlton) and no perfect congregation (no offense to you all out there!) we feel very confident that any of these 3 would be a very good fit for us. So over the next month, per the strict UUA confidential process the Search team will meet in person with each of these 3 candidates for more extensive interviews, worship and fellowship. Then we will rank the 3 candidates 1-2-3 and the ministers will also rank their 3 congregational visits 1-2-3. Then the UUA will play the match game and hopefully find very nice matches so that we may announce our final candidate for our next Settled MInister by April 12. Will Any Search team members who are here please stand for a second? Our names and emails are in the latest soundings if you may have any questions or comments for the team.
February 8, 2026
Hello, I’m Tom Hearne with your first Search Moments update
Our work began when the congregation affirmed our team for your Settled Minister Search in late April of last year.
Since last summer we have been meeting at least every week – sometimes daily! We first gathered information from you from the Cottage meetings, the three surveys, the B4 workshop and, of course, chatting at coffee hour. With your input we created our Congregational Record – a 60+ page mirror of our many strengths, growing edges, hopes and dreams – everything we heard from you, our beloved community. We submitted our Record to the UUA in December.
Prospective ministers in search create their own Ministerial Record during this same period and then choose congregations they’d like to serve. The formal ‘dating’ process began in early January with ZOOM interviews — So far so good!
Perhaps you’ve been wondering why we proceed with so much discretion? The short answer is that the UUA has created a detailed process that works for all, based on keeping confidences, remaining in covenant. The process is transparent, the interactions with candidates are transparent, the details are simply not available to you. Fun fact: the UUA Handbook detailing this process is 190 pages!
We live in an age where communication is almost too easy, including widespread streaming of services. As always, it remains imperative that ministers be able to pursue a search without jeopardizing the health of their congregation with premature disclosure. Consequently, confidentiality and fairness require the upmost diligence on our part.
So, thank you all again for your input – and your patience! — we could not do this work without reviewing and revisiting your input every step of the way. We hope to have a candidate to recommend to you by April 12.
Feel free to contact any one of us in person or by email. Our contact info will be printed in the next SOUNDINGS.
Finally, I ask any Search Team members here today to please raise your virtual hand. Thank you for the privilege to serve the congregation in this way!
Settled Minister Search Team:
Chris Aquino
Cheryl Dixon
Jamie Forbes
Tom Hearne
Bob Perry
Elena Rockman
Emily Sherwood
David Smith
Phil Thomas
