Pastor Jim at Pathway

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...

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 followe...

Milestones Ministry: The basics It's been months since my last post. Holidays, birthdays, winter, graduations, laziness, etc. But now I'm back on track.  The time off has given extra time to work through milestones in my own heart and mind too. My hope is that my leaders will read this and gain greater insight into my heart and vision for our church and come alongside to make it happen.  So here's the basics to a milestones ministry as a strategy for discipleship. If I haven't stated this already, I believe that the term, "discipleship" is used best to describe the entirety of the what the church is doing rather than just one aspect of church work.  For our purposes and throughout these posts; outreach, evangelism, fellowship, spiritual growth, worship, care are all aspects of Discipleship. Milestones: A way to set goals and to measure how far we've traveled.  A milestone marks major steps along our journey, allowing us to know where we are, how far ...

Mission, visions, and values are valuable tools to help us clarify and focus on our true goals and develop strategies to reach those goals.  Without mission and vision we lose sight of our true objectives.  Accordingly, the church as an organization tends to drift; being swayed by personalities, trends, and moods from within and without.  We conflate pleasing God; our ultimate goal; with pleasing ourselves, our traditions, our kids, our friends, or even the world. When this happens the church ceases to be the church.  When the church ceases to be the church, it ceases to act with power and influence in the world.  It becomes irrelevant.  To avoid drifting the church must be married to its mission.  It's vision must be relevant to its world, while remaining true to that mission.  The values we hold arise out of and at the same time sustain the mission and vision.  Together they work to create who we are as a church.   However, these ...

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 churc...

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 hea...