It could have been after you graduated from high school, you’ve had to ask, what is next for me? Do I continue my education? Do I go to trade school? Do I go right into the workforce or do I maybe take a gap year?
Or maybe it’s been after college, what’s next? Do I have a job lined up? Do I need to relocate my life to a different city or state?
You could have asked that question after getting married, what’s next for us? What does the future look like now as a married couple? Asking ourselves what’s next is something we probably have done a number of times throughout our lives.The answer to it can provide us with a sense of direction or give us something to work towards. It gives us a pathway forward and helps us to develop a plan to get us to where we want to go next.
The question of “what’s next?” has been on my mind as I come up on being at GracePointe for almost two years now. This has been a question I have been asking God during my times of prayer each day with Him. I have specifically asked, “what is next for GracePointe?”
I believe God has given to me, through much prayer,, conversations and discernment, the answer to my question.
One of the ways that our church is to move forward towards what is next is by looking at our mission statement. For GracePointe, our mission statement is what gives us our direction. It points us to the way forward and gives us a goal to work towards. It answers the key question for us, “why do we exist?”
For a number of years at GracePointe, we’ve answered the question of our existence by saying we exist to offer real hope to real people in our real community. You may have heard us talk about this, share this mission statement with you and we’ve done initiatives around it. I believe that our church has done a great job chasing after this mission for a number of years. I am proud that GracePointe has been a place where people have found community, heard about the hope of Jesus and have been authentic with one another, or been real with one another. I praise God for all of these reasons.
As I have been asking, what’s next, I have felt that something needed to change in regards to our mission statement. God wants to continue to work in our church and through our church to reach our communities, but we need to be crystal clear on our direction and why we exist.
It has become clear to me that GracePointe exists to follow, love and live like Jesus. In fact, that is the new mission statement for our church. We exist to follow, love and live like Jesus.
As we begin the month of September, you will be hearing a lot more about what this means, what it looks like for us individually and collectively and how we are moving forward as a church family. Starting September 8th, we will kick off a brand new series called, “Follow. Love. Live.” Each week we will walk through what it looks like for us to follow, love and live like Jesus individually and collectively.
I wanted to share this with you so that you can begin to pray with us, partner with us and so you are informed about what is happening here at GracePointe. I look forward to sharing with you more and more in the coming weeks.
Pastor Joel
