I went through three different interviews before even going to Oklahoma City for the interview weekend. The weekend in Oklahoma City begins with attending the main campus on Saturday night and then a follow up get-together. On Sunday morning all of the candidates meet at the central office and tour four different campuses. That sounds fine until you realize that you were being interviewed in the car between every single campus. There is absolutely no downtime. You are constantly being interviewed and looked over. Then, if you make it to the Monday morning interviews, that’s where you go in for testing and afterwards the interview process begins again. You are sitting in the lobby and they come out and select you to go back and be interviewed by two people in an office. That goes on for about 10 minutes and then you go back into the lobby and hope your name is called for the next round. This repeats two or three more times. If you make it through all of those rounds like I did, then you are taken into the Conference room where you are told to choose number 1, 2, or 3. After you have chosen a number they give you a topic that you have to construct a sermon off of without using your phone. Some of the topics included plastic surgery and masturbation. After the 10 minutes is over for your preparation you are taken into what they call, Studio B, where their guest speakers preach from. You go on stage and preach in front of a crowd of people. It’s very intimidating. But I did feel like I grew as a leader through this entire process. I do think it was a little bit over-the-top, but they have to weed out all of the non-hackers.
I didn’t get this particular job but I did get another position at one of the campuses which was also a pastoral position.