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What is a Pastor?

Everyone has their own view of what pastors are and what pastors do .  Typically, our view comes from either our personal interactions with someone in ministry, the traditions we’ve grown up with through our church life, or maybe our views are just an amalgamation of cultural stereotypes we’ve heard and seen from whatever media we take in on a regular basis. Every church has views on what a pastor is as well .  Those views too, may stem from the same things mentioned above or they may come from that church’s particular historical and ministry context. Most likely that church’s understanding of a pastor isn’t a monolithic one.  Rather, different age groups, genders, and individuals will understand the person and role a pastor differently ultimately placing differing expectations on him or her.  Part of a pastor's job then, is to understand and manage those expectations so that he or she can be what God in Christ has called them to be rather than to feel forced to be something else .
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Pathway Leadership expectations

We've discussed leadership in many ways, either through this blog or in our Sunday meetings. We've looked at Acts chapter 6 to gain insight into how leadership works in the church. In this post I'm going to sum things up and draw some conclusions about the importance of understanding leadership for Pathway Church. Leaders take responsibility The essence of leadership is taking responsibility.  Unless someone takes responsibility to do what needs to be done in order to build a successful church then nothing will happen.  Things that are broken won't get fixed, change that needs to happen won't, a desired future will never be reached.  We're going to be working on the spiritual life of the church, how a church assimilates newcomers, what ministries are needed, reaching outsiders, and church finances.  These are five of the most important activities a church our size should focus on. However, without successful leadership, how can these tasks be prioritized, ev

Leadership: The Seven

The Importance Of The Seven Acts chapter six points out the vital need for qualified congregational leadership.  This is needed so the ministry of prayer and the word can remain the priority of the church apostolic leaders. This priority doesn't seek to minimize the congregational needs of the church that arise or to diminish the roles of those who serve in those areas.  On the contrary, the story in Acts 6 points to how important it is that those needs are met by the church.  Indeed if those needs aren't handled appropriately then the church runs the risk of veering off it's God intended course.  Also, meeting the contextual needs of the church has a role in confirming the message that is being shared to the world. The apostles didn't ignore the need, nor did they simply say, "find someone els to get it done and don't bother us".  Rather, they thoughtfully addressed the problem and confirmed it's importance by establishing qualifications and by ma

Leadership: Acts 6:1-7

Leadership is our first point of discussion for the passionate core-transformation team.  For a church to be healthy, it must have a healthy, vital, effective core of leaders.  Without effective leaders the vital functions of the church will never be accomplished. Let's point out a few general truths about leadership and the church before we get into what Acts teaches us specifically.  So here are a few things to note about leadership: 1. Everyone desires to lead in some form or another.  This is shown by how irritated or even angry we get when things don't go our way or someone doesn't behave in a way that suits us at church.  We reveal that impulse to lead when we tell ourselves (or whisper to our best bud), "They should do things this way", or "I wouldn't do it that way, this is how it should be done".   This behavior reveals that somewhere inside of us is the desire to influence something or someone in a way that we believe is right or be

The Plan: Evaluation and Transformation

In my last post we discussed the need and the basic  job of a passionate core/transformation team.  Basically, it's job is to regularly evaluate the effectiveness of vital church activities and then to make the needed changes, based on their evaluation, so that those activities continue to be effective in the life of the church as it moves forward in an ever changing culture.  Churches have life-spans like any other organization, for continued life it must strategically and regularly evaluate the effectiveness of its methods and ministries if it's going to continue forward with purpose, passion, and power. For Pathway we need to focus on six areas of our church life.  These areas are essential to the continued life and growth of our church, must be seriously evaluated, and must the roles and tasks within these areas must be fulfilled to the best of our knowledge and ability. Before I list these areas. it's important to understand that to evaluate our church is to evalua

The Passionate Core and Transformation Team

Hey all.  If you're reading this it's mostly likely you've already been invited to what's being called our church passionate core and transformation team.  However you may have no clue as what this really means and why this team is so important to you and your church.  This post is to clarify that for you and to hopefully encourage you to commit wholeheartedly to this team and it's mission for our church. So continue reading to find out more. First and most importantly, there's the real-world need for a living, active, vital church. A church that impacts the lives of it's members and the community around it.  This world needs Jesus more than anything else and the church, as his body, is Jesus in world – as long as it remains connected to Him, the head.  When the body is connected to the head, the church moves with the purpose, passion, and power of Jesus in the world and even the gates of hell cannot prevail against it! The issue is that the church (fil

Fulfilling the Mission: Momentum to take the next step

If I were going to sum up what I've discussed over the past few months it would be something like this: Our Mission: To fulfill the Great Commission by helping people take the next step on their journey with Jesus Our Vision: To fulfill the Great Commandment by being a place that honor's God while being irresistible and indispensable to our community. Milestones Ministry Next a strategy is needed to accomplish the mission and vision of our church. I call that strategy our Milestones ministry. At it's core it's simply a way to establish goals, a way to plan how to reach those goals, and a way to hold ourselves accountable.    Fulfilling the Mission: Creating the momentum to take the next step. In order to take the next step we need to ask two simple questions:  (1) where are we going?, and (2) how do we get there?  The answer to question number one is about our goal.  Our goal in helping folks take the next step is to make fully devoted followers of Je