Hello, all. Been a few weeks since I’ve had a chance to really give an update, so I thought I’d take a few minutes to do that today, as well as to dole out a little pastoral “wisdom.”

I’ve been a senior pastor for 2 1/2 months now. There isn’t really a handbook for how to handle every situation you come across and I think it’s okay to be honest about something: there isn’t a great solution for every problem you’ll face. So sometimes you just prayerfully do the best you can.

Get comfortable with the fact that you won’t always know the perfect course of action to pursue in any given situation. Hindsight is 20/20 and it’s difficult to know all the repercussions of any single decision that you’ll be forced to make.

I say all this (vaguely, I realize) to encourage other pastors and church leaders. You will face some difficult decisions over time and you will face opposition from people both in your church and outside of it. The best advice I can give you is simply this: follow after Jesus Christ with all of your heart in everything you do and every decision you make. Filter everything through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. If you do that, if you honestly try to follow hard after Him in everything, then you can irreproachably sit back and let the chips fall where they may.

As a church leader, your integrity is everything. Don’t compromise it.

Even when it’s hard; even when it may cost you your job.

For the last 2 1/2 months I have faced challenges that are completely unique to my church. Without going into details, I’ll just say that there was a lot to do when I started here and a lot of very difficult decisions to make. I feel that we’re through the worst of it, however, and we’re now in a place where we can simply move forward and minister to our community and our world without the distractions of the past. This is more than a “positive” step forward; this is the beginning of a new era and a fresh start for our church.

In the last month we’ve gained a new name, a new facility, and a new website. We’ve left the problems of the past exactly where they belong: in the past. We’ve started fresh and I’m so excited to see what God has for us moving forward. It’s truly an exciting time.

Last week I spent countless hours (countless because I was half asleep for many of them) working on our new website, and I’m happy to announce that it’s now up and running. We’ll be adding new content to it over the coming weeks and months, but it’s now officially open to the public. Check out the new website if you’d like, and let me know what you think about it. You can view it at this link.

I’ll try and post a little more later this week about the series we’ve been doing and how it’s affecting our thought process going forward. In the meantime, I hope everyone had a happy Labor Day.

Be blessed and be a blessing.