Skip to main content

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.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
1 comment
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
Read more