Clergy to Receive Church Deployment Office Questionnaire
Diocesan Press Service. March 1, 1971 [92-5]
NEW YORK, N.Y., MARCH 1 - In mid-March the clergy of the Episcopal Church will receive a long questionnaire about themselves from the Clergy Deployment Office, marking the beginning of a new service for the Church, both for its ordained man and for its parishes.
The Rev. Roddey Reid, Jr., newly appointed director of the Clergy Deployment Office, in announcing the mailings has urged full cooperation in completing the forms and returning them on schedule. The Office, authorized by General Convention actions in South Bend in 1969 and Houston in 1970, began work a year ago and is now ready for its immediate task -- the creation of a personnel file of the clergy so the Church can place its clergy more effectively, help the individual to find a more fulfilling ministry, and assemble the information required for responsible policy decisions.
The national Clergy Deployment Office will not be a placement office, nor will it assign men to jobs. The purpose of the Clergy Deployment Office will be to facilitate placement, providing accurate, up-to-date data and consultation to help local people make local decisions. The Office will function under a new Board for Clergy Deployment appointed by and responsible to the General Convention.
The questionnaire will be seeking hard data facts, as well as asking some self-evaluative questions, such as asking a man's work preferences.
This total project, which is being shared in by the Lutheran Church in America and the American Baptist Convention plus the National Council of Churches, has been supported by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund in terms of creating the personnel system. The one system will be used by the three churches in creating their separate personnel files. The first year of the Episcopal Office has been supported by the Episcopal Church Foundation.
It is expected that the new system will be available for use by the Church at large by the fall of this year. Mr. Reid indicated that the Clergy Deployment Office must operate in the continuum of the Church and given the oversupply of clergy and the loose organization of the Episcopal Church, it will be too much to expect immediate improvement in the deployment picture.