Update from Director of Music Hiring Team

“Many of you may have heard the rumor that Don Krehbiel is retiring this year in May, and in order to prepare for the eventuality that that’s actually true, Daniel has put together a team of folks including Stuart Owen, Margaret Moore, Jenani Tzhone. Rosana Eckert, and myself (David Schulze) to search for a Director of Music that will serve this church after Don’s retirement.

We’ve gone through a really rigorous process. We started by listening to the congregation and to the choirs to find out what your thinking about this position would be. We’ve crafted a job description and a position announcement and for about 90 days we solicited. Applications came in from around the country and around the world. We’ve got some amazingly qualified candidates that have applied, 45 candidates, as a matter of fact, applied for the position. We took the time in January and February to carefully review the applications, the videos, and audio recordings that were submitted by the candidates to demonstrate their skills and abilities to lead music at this church.

And we came up with a list of 10 individuals that we’ve asked to interview with us. We’re in the middle of conducting those interviews now. They’ll continue through the end of March because of schedules and just getting everybody together.

And we don’t want to be rushed as we’re conducting those interviews. This is a really important conversation that we’re having. After the interviews are conducted, we will huddle back together again as a team and consider the information that we’ve heard from the candidates and identify two or three that we think are the best qualified to move forward and actually come to our church for an audition.

The candidates will meet with the hiring team, they’ll meet with the ministers, they’ll give a demonstration, a small performance, if you will, of their keyboard skills so that we can actually see that what they’ve told us about their skills actually exists. And then we’ll also give them the opportunity to work with the Kindred Voices Choir and with the Sanctuary Choir so we can observe them interacting, conducting, and give us a little bit of a deeper dive into their musical skills.

After the auditions, we’ll take a bit of time if we need to ask more questions, resolve other things that are still lingering for us, and our commitment to Daniel is that by the middle of May, we’ll have a candidate to recommend to him to serve as our next Director of Music.

This process has been really joyful for me and for other members of the committee. We really treat it as a spiritual practice. We start all of our deliberations with meditation and time together sharing about where we are in our lives and how this work that we’re doing is impacting us. And I’m pleased to be able to tell you about where we are and to give you hope that if Don actually does decide to go through with his retirement, we have a plan.

Thank you.”

-David Schulze