How my position change is leading to a change on this blog

What changed

Just over a year ago, with the retirement of our long time senior pastor Don Shoemaker, my role at Grace changed to a hybrid of “Young Adults/Teaching/Vision Pastor,” though it was always thought to be temporary, since we were in the search for a new senior pastor, and my assumption was that I would (at some point) go back to focusing primarily on young adults. But since Steve Williams was promoted from Associate to Senior Pastor here at Grace last November, I’m starting to accept that there is no “going back” – I’m firmly in the “Associate” role, at least for the foreseeable, God-willed future.

Why now

This is becoming especially “real” as we hire a new “Director of Student Ministries and Global Mission” who will take over college ministry, among other responsibilities.  I’ll still be involved with young adult ministry in a post-college context, and will still be around college students in a general pastoral sense, but my days of surveys and on-campus outreach seem to be in the rear view.

What’s next for this blog

Therefore, I think it’s time to re-calibrate what this blog could be. Last year, as part of our transition process, we went through the immensely helpful resource, Church Unique, by Will Mancini. To sum up the process in one sentence, “How has God built your church to make disciples of Jesus and bring glory to himself that is unique from 10,000 other churches?” In that journey, our leadership identified 5 core values that we think make us “Grace Community Church of Seal Beach”:

Biblical Worldview

Faithful Compassion

Known by Name

Participatory Worship

Missional Life

It’s these five values that I want to focus on writing about in this blog. I’ll still have an eye toward how it connects with young adult ministry, of course, but my main focus will be asking how to do more of these five things here in Seal Beach and in the greater Seal Beach area.