A Vision for the Future:

I think one of the hardest things for me to hear from people who are going into the ministry, or have just joined the ministry is that when you get into church ministry, you go from working in teams (like you did in College) to working alone. In addition, one of my friends tells me that rather then being able to go out and cast his net into the waters to bring new people into the faith, he spends a lot of time jumping through hoops... 

I guess one thing that I see happening in the American Church is that pastors get caught up in fitting the profile of the ideal pastor. Namely, having to do 10 hours of Community Service like stuff... Being prominent and serving on some city school board or something like that, making sure the facilities are kept up, and all that. At the end of the day, it is just kinda wild that pastors spend their whole lives preparing to "do ministry" and perhaps they never really get the opportunity to do so when they have to "fit the profile". Don't get me wrong, everything they are doing is good stuff, but for some of us, who have the burning heart of an evangelist, we need to be out there. My suggestion is that at a church like the one I hope to kindle, pastors would only work part time at the church, and the rest of the time they would spend out in the community, either working or building the kingdom... Economically, I don't know how this will work out, either for the pastors or for the church, but it just seems like a healthy model for a team of evangelists, namely a team I would like to work with/for. 

Jon's Dream for a Church Plant!

This is the blueprint for the church that I hope to be a part of some day... in a lot of ways, I hesitate to call it a church. Instead, I'd prefer to think of it more as a place where people can come to get their ministry tools sharpened. I would hope that there would be all kinds of things going on in this space that would make it a community center for some, a church for some others, and a place for people to come to get filled for yet some more. The room would be versital enough that it could either have a stage in the middle, which would be like church in the round, or it could have the stage towards the front, so that it could be more of an auditorium...

I have tons of prayers for the place, I feel like there has been this huge epiphany in my life and I am getting this neat vision for the future of the church I am going to help start, but I guess this revelation is really just a work in progress.