Pastoral Transition - 2024-2025 Updates

Leading up to our Founding Pastor, David Stark's, retirement in summer of 2025, we had a series of announcements and updates, beginning in September 2024.

As most of you know I'll be retiring from full-time staff in July 2025. Debi and I love our church, and it is our spiritual family that we depend on. I will continue to be an active member of our community, using my pastoral gifts in some new ways. Though my role is changing, as followers of Jesus we never retire from ministering to others.

Over the last 3-4 years, Pastoral Council and other leaders have been seeking God on how the church will be led without me as Lead Pastor. For a year now, we have been learning and putting into practice a new approach to doing church centered around pursuing God's will together.

We feel confident this is from God and have a lot of faith for our church, but we also understand this is a big change. We will be talking a lot more about this and we would very much like each of you to be engaged in this journey. We will have further communication from each one of the members of the Pastoral Council and also plan to have interactive gatherings (big and small) to help us move forward together. But you don't have to wait to ask any questions you have! We absolutely want you to share your questions, concerns, or anything else that surfaces as you hear these updates.

We had also mentioned that last week, Pastoral Council would be meeting in person over two days with David Hughes, who has been helping us in this transition process since March. Thank you so much for your prayers! It was a very rich and helpful time for us.

Again, please don't hesitate to reach out to any of us!

Stories about VCC's pastoral transition. New episodes will go live on Wednesdays! Watch our weekly email for the YouTube links, or link to it below.

Caleb shares how every one of us makes decisions that impact the whole of church and describes the framework for our new process of shared discernment. He reminds us how God has been setting us up for this in a number of ways including our two biggest sermon series over the past two years:

Chris Macky briefly explains that though David is changing his role (to do whatever he wants! :) ), that everyone else who is committed to leading at our church is staying the same! If you ever don't know who to ask, a great place to start is with our office staff.