John Louk

I recently returned home from the School of Congregational Development in San Diego. One of the plenary speaks was Pastor Sam Yun, who is starting a church in the northern California Bay Area called Embrace ( www.embracechurch.org ).  I felt a bit of a kinship with Pastor Sam, or P. Sam as his congregation calls him. He’s a church planter like me. He’s a fourth generation pastor. So like me, he grew up as a PK, a perfect kid. No, it stands for “pastor’s kid.” His dad is also retired, and like me, much of what he knows in ministry is from first watching his dad. Unlike me, he said his dad is quite the SOB…son of a bishop, that is. P. Sam’s grandfather was a bishop of the Methodist church in Korea. As a preacher he was incredibly powerful. As a bishop he was scary; he was very strict in his episcopal leadership. But to P. Sam, he was just his grandfather whom he loved, who would sneak ice cream with him. His great-grandfather was the first generation pastor in this family. So...

We have been reorganizing our leadership structure and adding Staff this year. So far we have a new Director of Discipleship (Tim King) and a new Worship Coordinator (Jodi Anderson). We have more positions we’re working on, as well (Service Coordinator, Youth Director, Community Ambassador). In the meantime, our leaders have heard a few questions about whether we should be doing this when currently we’re not fully “in the black,” financially. This is a good inquiry and deserves an answer. One of our major goals the last two years, and we’ve talked about it for longer than that, has been to implement a staff reorganization to get the right leaders around the table to lead people and ministries to carry out our mission to make disciples of Jesus for the transformation of the world. These are also the areas we identified before our building project as being most important. Back in 2011 our Study Committee spent time researching for our building project and met with leaders to dis...