The following is the announcement made by John Helm, an IHCC elders, at the end of services on Sunday, July 2nd:

My name is John Helm. I’m an elder here at Indian Hills, and I’ve also have spent the last year serving as part of the Student Minister Search Team.

As many of you know, we have been without a full-time Student Minister since last June, when our former Student Minister Parker Wray left to join the United States Navy. We came to you at that time to let you know that we were starting the process to find his replacement, and that we were looking for a leader, someone dedicated to a relationship with Jesus, someone talented, and someone who would love and serve our students.

I’m up here this morning to announce that we have found that person. After a year of reading applications and conducting interviews and several committee meetings and a lot of prayer, the search team recommended Nathan Bruley to the elders for approval. After prayer and discussion, the elders have hired Nathan Bruley to be our new Student Minister.

We appreciate all your prayers and support as we’ve gone through this very long process.

I want to talk to you a little bit about that process. Over the course of the last year we received a lot of resumes. From those resumes we found three really good candidates. We ended up interviewing two of those.

They will both be great student ministers somewhere. But in the end, they weren’t the guys for us. We hired Nathan, who has served the last year as our interim. I can tell you that when we asked Nathan to serve in this interim role a year ago, none of us – not the committee, not the elders, not even Nathan – thought we would be announcing this today. None of us had any intention that Nathan would come on full-time.

But two things happened in that last year that changed that. First – Nathan has done an incredible job in the Student Ministry. The program has never missed a beat. It is so rare that a ministry can continue to move smoothly through a transition period, but Nathan kept everything running like clockwork. But he did much more than keep things running. He built relationships with the students, giving them his time and attention to encourage them in their walk with Jesus. He built relationships with the volunteers and parents, working to make sure that trips and events were put together with care and attention to detail.

We knew that Nathan was trustworthy. We knew he had a strong relationship with Jesus. We knew he would be hard-working. But he exceeded our expectations and ended up being the exact kind of person we were looking for with this hire.

And the fact that he did all of this while working a full-time job outside of the church, preparing for his and Rachel’s second child, and continuing to lead our Rooted adult Sunday school class shows his dedication to this church family.

The other thing that happened in the last year was that God put a call on Nathan’s heart for ministry. Nathan has always loved the church. He’s served in this church in many areas over the years. His father was a minister, so he knows the pressures and stress of ministry. But he and Rachel have been feeling more and more that full-time ministry is where God wants them to be.

So a few months ago, we started the process of looking more into the possibility that Nathan was our guy. Nathan had to go through the exact same application process that the other candidates went through. He was interviewed in the same way the others were.

But of the three people we interviewed, Nathan was put through more scrutiny. Nathan was interviewed many more times. The interviews were a lot tougher, with more in-depth questions. We put him through the ringer, because we wanted to make absolutely sure that he was the right person for this job. He seemed to be, but we needed to know for sure. We were determined that if he got the job it wouldn’t be because we all knew him and because he was doing great as an interim. We wanted to make absolutely sure that this was the guy God had in mind for us.

We’ve been praying for months and months that God would send us the right person. As God has led us through this process, we now believe Nathan is the answer to that prayer.

Unlike our other ministers, Nathan has a degree in business, not ministry. We’ve already seen how that background and organizational skills have helped him in the interim role. But as Nathan grows and learns in this new job, he will also spend the next three years earning his Masters of New Testament at Kentucky Christian University.

As part of his hiring, the church family will provide the funding for this education. As you have helped him grow these last several years as part of the body of Christ, you are now helping him in his start as a minister of the Gospel.

We want to thank all of you for your prayers and support during this process. God has blessed our church family so much, and we can’t wait to see how God leads us in the years to come.

To watch video of this announcement, click here.