CANDIDATE INFORMATION PACKET - Ryan Fields

HOW THE SEARCH COMMITTEE ARRIVED AT ITS CONCLUSIONS

Dear Members of Faith Evangelical Free Church, We are thrilled and humbled by God’s leading to present Ryan Fields as our choice to succeed Pastor Brad Johnson as senior pastor at FEFC. Over the last nine months, our search committee found no other candidate that matched Ryan’s skills as a preacher and pastor. We believe he will bring an energy and excitement for the gospel to Faith for many years to come. On Feb. 5, 2020, Mike Young opened our first search committee meeting with a brief teaching from Ruth 2:3 and Proverbs 3:4 ‐ 5. Trust in the Lord, Mike encouraged, so we may “find favor and good success in the sight of God and man,” just as Ruth, following the advice of Naomi, went to glean in the fields and “ happened to come to the part of the field belonging to Boaz.” Our search committee carefully, with prayer, followed a process used by previous search committees and we came upon Ryan. His name first appeared in early April  ‐ before we were even ready to consider candidates  ‐ as someone who was eager to submit his résumé and was evidently highly regarded by Sam Huggard, the New England District Superintendent of Evangelical Free Churches of America. We put Ryan’s name aside and followed our process. We compiled a church and community information packet that would later go to a leading candidate; we created a congregational survey and then analyzed the results from 152 respondents. We answered a questionnaire for pastor searches, wrote a job description and advertised in about a half ‐ dozen seminaries as well as the Gospel Coalition, and then wrote our own more in ‐ depth questionnaire for leading candidates. By late spring, our weekly, multiple ‐ hour long meetings were solely online due to the pandemic. In June, we received our first batch of résumés, including Ryan’s. As became our routine for every candidate, we each read his submissions and listened to his sermons online and then independently gave him a number grade with our comments. No one ever received a higher grade in this round. His answers to an initial questionnaire were detailed and highly thought out, and we were won by his preaching. “I don’t think we could find a more prepared or skilled man for assuming the mantle for proclaiming the word of God,” one of us wrote at the time. So we sent Ryan our second, more detailed questionnaire. The attached packet shows Ryan’s responses, which we received in early July. This time our grades were even higher. Simultaneously, we were reviewing dozens of other candidates. We rejected the only other candidate who reached the second round of inquiry. A dozen others who had made it through our prescreening process had been rejected and the half ‐ dozen who we invited to answer a further questionnaire were either rejected or lost interest in us. Ryan consistently was our sole top candidate. By August we were crafting our Zoom interview questions for Ryan. We were impressed by Ryan’s preaching and his beeline trajectory to becoming a highly learned pastor. And we were impressed with how his learning played into his thinking both in articles he published and in sermons. His interests are broad  ‐ everything from Flannery O’Connor to a Christian take on the

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