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Strategy for Growth: Values and Milestones

In my last post I talked about Pathway Church's mission and vision.  Hopefully it wasn't too long or boring for those who cared to check it out.  Today I'm going to follow up with the basic strategy we seek to implement in order to accomplish our mission and vision.

Remember, our mission is to help people take the next step on their journey with Jesus, while our vision is to be a church that our community loves to attend and be involved with.  So what's our plan to make it all happen?  Well follow along, I'll try to be brief. Haha!

In order to explain our strategy we need to talk about two things: values and milestones.

Values

Our mission and vision imply certain values that must be as clear as possible to all involved.  These values will then impact our strategy as a church.  So Let's discuss these values.

First of all, our mission implies that we value a relationship with Christ.  In fact, that probably the most important value of the church.  It's through that living relationship with Christ that we receive eternal life and it's in that relationship that we experience our best life here in this world.

We also know that experiencing our best life includes discovering and using the gifts that God gives each of us for the strengthening of the church and our world.  We believe that living a fulfilled life is more than chasing money and material things.  We understand that the ongoing relationship with Christ that leads to the best life is what we call following Jesus. Together, followers of Jesus are known as the Church.  We believe that the church in this world is empowered by God's Holy Spirit so that it will persevere and be enabled to impact the world the way nothing else can. We know and believe all this because we value the Bible, God's word, in which these truths are expressed.

So from this we can state seven non-negotiable values of our church:
  • Pleasing God
  • God's word (the Bible)
  • All people
  • An ongoing relationship with Jesus Christ.
  • The empowerment of the Holy Spirit
  • The discovery of the individual's God-given gifts 
  • Personal mission leading to global purpose
By non-negotiable we mean that although the wording may change, these values are not open to be challenged or dropped.  They stem from and support the mission and vision of our the church.  All we do will hopefully reflect these values.  Each of these values will be discussed a later post.  They'll also be discussed in leadership meetings at Pathway Church.

In my next post I'll talk about milestones and how they work to provide the basic strategy for discipleship and church growth.

Thanks for reading.

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