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The Mission of Pathway Church

Greetings Pathway Church (and any others who might end up viewing this)! I hope the day finds you blessed.  As this is my initial foray into the world of blogging, I'm honestly a bit bewildered as to how this stuff works and what I need to do to get it right. Besides the technicalities of it all I'm also stressed about the actual topic and content of my first blog and also what should follow.

At least I've concluded that this space will exist to support, expand, and clarify my message as Pastor of Pathway Church. Sometimes it will expand on a sermon topic, other times it may address an ongoing issue at the church. Other times it will speak to contemporary cultural issues that impact you, our church, and it's ministries (there's a lot of that happening now, right?).  All in all, I hope to impact the culture and atmosphere of leadership (and anyone else interested) in our church by having an extra pathway of communication into the hearts of minds of interested folks beyond the Sunday sermon and service.

So where do I begin? Well with great fear and no shortage of trepidation, I've decided my first post should address the mission of the church and in particular, our church Pathway Assembly of God. From there we'll talk vision and strategy. These topics are important because everything we do, and I mean everything, at the church stems from mission, vision, and strategy.  My hope is that this information will encourage, inspire, and challenge more folks to get on board and get involved.  I know that just as I'm confused about this blogging thing, there may be some out there who are confused at what in the world the church is doing and why, and that this can hinder some from getting more involved.  So this initial post will answer questions like, "Why do they do that?", "Why are we doing it that way?", or even "Why aren't we doing this or that?".

So onward!

Every church's mission begins with what we call the great commandment and the great commission.
The great commandment is to love God passionately and to love our neighbors as ourselves, and the the great commission is to make disciples of every nation.  In general, these two commandments should compose the mission of every Christian church in the world, ever!

However, every local church needs to express that mission in their own distinctive way for their own particular context.  So at Pathway Church we try to express it this way:

We seek to glorify God by helping people take the next step on their journey with Jesus.  

A disciple is literally someone who follows behind, so when I speak of taking the next step on our journey with Jesus, that's the "Pathway" way of talking about discipleship. You see, I believe that everyone's life's journey is really a walk with Jesus. I believe that due to His nature, He is unavoidable.  We are either walking towards and with Him or we're working to keep our distance, to push him further away, and try to forge a path devoid of the Savior, however futile that may be.

The vision that I hope many of you will embrace if you haven't already is to be a church whose community loves to attend and be connected to due to it's indispensable nature (as opposed to a church that exists solely for and in the margins of people's lives).

These two statements serve as both guides and goals for our church. Everything we do; our ministries, our planning, our attitudes, values, and even our budget; needs to be bounded by these two statements.  Pastor Andy Stanley writes of the need to be both deep and wide in our churches. By that he means that we need to build deeply rooted followers of Jesus, but cast a wide net as to who we minister.  For Pathway Church, our mission statement seeks to go deep as it refers to the task of building disciples, while our vision statement is wide in that it compels us to take our eyes off our ourselves and to see our community as our primary base of ministry.

Mission and vision are the answers to the "what?" and the "why?" of Christian ministry.
Strategy answers the "how?" question of our church.  So in simple terms, our church seeks to please God by reaching our community in order to help people follow Jesus.  How we accomplish the mission and vision is called our strategy.  Later this week I'll finish up this little essay as I explain the strategy of Pathway Church.

Thanks for taking the time to read!