Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

Well there is plenty to write about during this season of life. As a pastor to a large (and growing) congregation here in the STL, I'm used to taking the jackhammer to our most concrete plans about every 3 months. It can cause a lot of confusion and chaos, but for the most part this kind of growth and organizational shift means life is never boring, the Spirit is always moving, and we are continuing to be a living, breathing Gospel-centered church, not a museum.

So with that, I'm announcing here, officially, that I am taking on a new role at The Journey, and I'm pretty darn stoked about it. It breaks down like this:

I am now the Campus Pastor of our Tower Grove location. What does this mean? Well a lot of things, but I'll give you the basics. The Journey is a multi-site church, meaning it is one church with many locations. Right now we have three locations: Hanley Road, West County and Tower Grove. In the next year, there will probably be 4-5 sites. What we (elders) realized recently, was that our idea of being multi-site is the right idea. It fits the St. Louis area really well, it increases the odds that Journeyers will be able to invite their unchurched (or even anti-church)friends to services near where they live without being swallowed up in a ginormous room.

But what we started to notice is that doing multi-site wasn't what it could be for us. We weren't really making the impact we'd anticipated in the neighborhoods where we "live" as a church. I mean we were continuing to grow attendence-wise, but something wasn't adding up. We realized that what we were doing is simply replicating worship services all over town, and while that's certainly a part of what we will always do, and while our services are a huge front door for people encountering the Gospel, we are called to do and be much more than worship services.

So we're taking multi-site up about 10 notches, we're tossing all our chips in, and we're going to start putting roots down in the neighborhoods we serve. The first step for doing this is getting a new leadership structure in place for each campus, and then changing the way we do everything (from classes to forums to serving the poor to you name it) so that we consider everything through the multi-site lens.

So, I'm now the Campus Pastor at Tower Grove, which means I basically become a pastor to an 1,100-person congregation and find myself in charge of the use of our four buildings, and overseeing all the ministries housed there. Within the next 6-months, basically everything that we do as a church now will be done specifically at most or all of the campuses, but tailored to each specific campus and led by peeps dedicated to serving that campus and that neighborhood.

Make sense?

Anyway, that means I will no longer function as the Worship Pastor at The Journey. That job has been split into two jobs: worship director and production director. The worship director will handle all things music, including training new musicians and worship leaders for all campuses. The production director will basically handle production on the global scale (meaning across campuses) and will train and resource staff and volunteers at each campus. He will also manage all the equipment and purchasing and such for all campuses.

The cool part is, I'll still get to lead worship at my campus and will still have my hand/brain in what happens in our services, but I will also get to teach more, as well as being more focused in the living out of my call to be a pastor to people. In a word, I'm excited about it. In two words, I'm damn excited about it!