ï(Re-)Introducing Our New Director of Christian Education!ð

A Director of Christian Education is a church staff member charged with creating and administering CE programs, providing learning opportunities for people in the church of all ages and demographics, training teachers and leaders, and being a resource for the programs and people of the church. A DCE in no way replaces, but instead provides guidance and leadership for Christian Education committees, leaders, teachers, and the whole church.

Advanced scholarship in the field of church administration indicates that a church in our position—growing steadily from pastoral to program size—needs, at the very least, a full time pastor, an expanded part time music ministry, and a full time DCE, and even more part- or full- time program and support staff (Mann, The In-Between Church. Alban Institute, 1998).

To address this need, the session, at a specially called meeting on Sunday, September 19, voted unanimously in favor of the personnel committee’s motion to expand the ministry of Vivian Hare from part time choir director/musician to full-time Director of Music and Director of Christian Education, beginning October 1, 2005!

Vivian’s qualifications as music director are already well known; if anything, her DCE qualifications are even more compelling. She is a Certified Christian Educator of the PC(USA) with nine years of DCE experience in program-size churches. She graduated from Presbyterian College with degrees in both religion and music, and earned her master’s degree in Christian Education from the Presbyterian School of Christian Education (now federated with Union Seminary in Richmond, Virginia).

In addition to countless experiences leading seminars and facilitating church-related retreats and events of all kinds for our denomination, Vivian has been a first-grade teacher’s assistant at Carolina Beach School, an executive at the PC(USA) headquarters in Louisville (Director of the National Volunteer Office), a teacher of English as a Second Language, a Volunteer in Mission for more than two years in Taiwan, and our music director since 2002. She is a member of the Association of Presbyterian Christian Educators and the Presbyterian Association of Musicians.

Congratulations, CBPC, on taking this crucial, pivotal step for the ministry of Christ’s church!