Coaching and Community: The Journey Pastoral Coaching Approach
THE COMMUNITY BLUEPRINT Journey is a coaching community focused on helping young ministers build strong for a lifetime of healthy and effective ministry. Our focus is not ministry growth but minister growth - as we build the minister, we build the ministry. Our means are not techniques but relationships - God walks with us and develops us through relationships: our relationships with Him and others. The basis and model of our ministry is the life...
Sound Ministry: Why Pastors Must Return to Teaching Strong Doctrine
“I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by his appearing and his kingdom: preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching. For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions,...
Ministry Struggles
SOME BACKGROUND Every January, Journey kicks off the year with retreats for our members, held in the warm climate of Orlando. Members arrive from all over the country for one of our two retreat weeks. Those who cannot afford the cost of transportation are scholarshipped by generous donors – how thankful we are for their partnership in making it possible for young ministers to attend. Our partners make it possible for us to make these...
Resolved
A new year. With the dawning of a new year, we are prone to make New Year’s resolutions designed to improve us or our lives in the year ahead, or maybe even for the rest of our lives. Among the more common are: reading our Bible and praying daily, exercising, and losing weight. But, unfortunately, all too often, with 365 days and yet another new year on us, our list of New Year’s resolutions is...
Journey’s Best Reads of 2022
As we turn the final pages of 2022, I once again offer my list of favorite reads for the year. As always, this is not a list of my favorite books published in 2022, but books read in 2022, whatever the publishing year. If a book is on the best of list, I recommend you give it a read in 2023. As is true every year, in 2022 I read a few good books, a number of great books, some...
History’s Wish List for Pastors
Church History’s Wish List For Pastors – Part II In our previous article, we presented twenty gift ideas for your pastor as suggested by some of history’s most faithful pastors. This wish list from faithful pastors of history includes twenty more gifts you can give your pastor, gifts that will not only be a blessing to him or her, but to you, your church, and the world for eternity. Gifts that keep on giving, part...
Church History’s Wish List for Pastors – Part I
When we were children, we thoughtfully prepared our Christmas wish lists, some of us even forming them throughout the year. We would ready them to our parents, telling them, "If I could just have these, I wouldn't ever ask for anything again." We thought the things that had meaning for us at eight years of age would still be satisfying at eighteen, thirty-eight, etc., years of age. In like manner, when we are immature ministers...
Eight Years – Eight Lessons
I remember the moment the call came. I didn’t recognize it at the time, but looking back, I see it now. Just a couple years before, I was spending a day with a great friend, one of the two men who led me to Jesus when we were teens. As we talked, he said, “Alan, there's something new coming for you. I can hear it; I can feel it. God is leading you into something;...
Young Ministers on the Joys & Struggles of Ministry
Late this summer, we asked young ministers to answer two questions: Question 1: What is the greatest joy, in general, you have in vocational ministry? Question 2: From your experience, what is the most difficult part of vocational ministry? Here’s how they responded. QUESTION #1: What is the greatest joy, in general, you have in ministry? Seeing people take their next-step in following Jesus: First-time commitments to Christ, water baptism, Spirit-baptism, starting new small groups,...© [2015] — Journey Pastoral Coaching