we're moving to . . .

So, I've now had my first taste of the appointment process. After being sworn to secrecy on the life of my wife, mother, and firstborn child as to where I'm projected to be going at this point, I was tempted not to mention anything about it. Matt Reed had some thoughts on this and its implications, which you can read for yourself. But, I figured I could talk about all the fun things that we found out about our prospective dwelling place.

*Note* - in lieu of the word city or town, I will use the term "community." So stop trying to figure out where we're talking about, 'cause we can't tell you.

Here is our journey of discovery:
First, we looked at the church website. From there, we found out the number and type of services the church has, the size of the staff, how current staff members define their jobs, what programs the church has, and a brief history of the church.

Next, we used whitepages.com to find out where the current pastor lives, our potential future parsonage.

Then, we used Google Maps to identify where that is in relation to the church and the community as a whole.

Then, we found information from the tax assessor posted online that identified the value of the parsonage, the size of the lot, the number of rooms, the type of building materials, when the church acquired the property, and who owns the neighboring properties. We also saw what is allegedly the shape of the house.

We then tried to get a view from the sky, but both Google Earth and terraserver didn't have detailed enough satellite imagery to see anything much.

We moved from there to Yahoo maps, where we determined how close the church and parsonage are to restaurants, bookstores, malls, Wal-Mart, banks, grocery stores, drug stores, and hospitals.

Then, we went to the Conference website, where we found the 2005 Conference Journal. From there, we were able to determine the number of church members, the change in size of the church last year, how many people go to Sunday school, how many people are members of United Methodist Women and United Methodist Youth Fellowship, how much of their apportionments they pay, how much the parsonage is worth, the value of the church building and property, and the amount of debt the church carries.

Then, Amanda showed how well she knows me - as we were going to bed, she went to This is Cable, which redirected her to another site where she determined that we could in fact get both cable and high speed internet at the parsonage.

This morning, we looked on e-Podunk (thank you Bart Styes), which provided us demographic information about the community and county such as ethnic origin, education level, marital status, industry, median income, median cost of housing, as well as a history of the community and a list of festivals that are important in the community, as well as historic sites and museums. We also got a link to the community newspaper.

It's amazing that in less than 4 hours, we found out all this information without leaving the couch or talking to anyone, either in person or on the phone. In some ways, it's kind of creepy, like spying on people, but it's also a little better than harassing the current pastor to find all this stuff out. We're so used to looking up information, we can't imagine not knowing at least some of this immediately.

I've been told that the next two rounds of appointments are in early April and late April. Sometime after the third round I might actually be able to tell people. And if the appointment changes in the next two rounds, we'll get to do this information investigation all over again. Joy.