busy

This is me, except I don’t wear ties. 🙂

As I stated earlier, I’ve been M.I.A. recently. I haven’t really been too busy to blog, it just felt like it was time to take a bit of a break. There were a lot of things at work where I had fallen behind and I need to get caught up. So, here are some of the things I’ve been working on:

Policy Manual/Volunteer Training: We’ve been working on our Policy Manual for an ungodly amount of time. Well, we’re pretty much finished. We’ve got a few pieces to wrap up, but for the most part it is a done deal. It feels so good to have it done. As a result, we’ve held two training sessions where over 100 of our volunteers have come for training. We were thrilled with the participation and look forward to connecting to the rest for official training. For the first time in years, this Policy Manual and the training is getting our volunteer teams on the same page concerning policies and moving in the same direction with our mission, values and strategy.

Defining Vision and Critical Path Steps: For the past few months the directional team has been meeting to re-tool Gateway’s vision statement and determine our critical path steps for the next year. Our directional team has really been coming together over the past several weeks and it is exciting to connect better as a team, but it hasn’t come without a cost. We’ve been every Tuesday from 8:00 AM until 12:00 PM to continue to work through this stuff. It’s a lot to sort through and decide, but we really are shaping where this church will go for the next 10-15 years.

ELI (Emerging Leadership Initiative): Gateway has a ministry that helps equip church planters and over the years Gateway has help plant several like-minded churches around the country. The director of ELI has a year-long development track for these church planters. As we’ve been looking at launching new campuses, we decided not to re-invent the wheel when it comes up to preparing future ministry leaders. So, last month we launched four cohorts who are going through this year long residency together. My elementary director and I are leading a children’s ministry cohort. This experience is stretching me as well as the three guys involved.

Well, those are the big things. All this has been on top of all the other projects I’m currently involved in. Hopefully some of this stuff will spill over to this blog and I can share some of what I’m experiencing/learning and open up the conversation to others as well!