Good friends and why I took this job

[blpurdom]

Not too long ago I got another call from Holly, our church music director and my good friend, who earlier dropped off a care package for me before going to the church to give some voice lessons to students who had to be rescheduled because she threw her back out last week; she's actually still in the church office, working on the bulletin in my

Comments

[acciopotter]

That's so wonderful. I'm trying to figure out how to get the same feeling from my church.

[blpurdom]

We get a lot of folks in the congregation who come and then go again because we're on the Penn campus and very close to the Drexel campus, so there are either students who attend services while they're at school or professors who start attending when they get hired at a local school and then get another job somewhere else in the country and wind up moving. About 95% of the time, folks who move away send letters and postcards and emails afterward saying how it's basically impossible for them to find a congregation even remotely like ours wherever it is they've moved. I was on the last PNC (pastoral nominating committee) when we were looking for a new pastor (and hired Patricia, nine years ago) and I recently learned that it was very unusual that we had about 100 dossiers to wade through! People from all over wanted to work here, even though it's only an 80% time job and we can't pay a heck of a lot for that time. I couldn't imagine living anywhere else at this point in my life, for many reasons, but my church is one of the biggest