I wanted to share the good news with you that I have accepted a part-time pastoral position at Christ Community Church in St. Charles, IL as their College Ministry Pastor. I'm very excited about the opportunity and believe that God has led me to this new ministry venture. Truth be told this is something I had always envisaged as a complement to my academic ministry in the university. Those of you that know me know that I came to academics through the church ministry and have felt that it would again have a place in my vocational life.
Christ Community Church is a place my wife and I know well. We were on staff here in the mid-to-late 1990's as a youth pastor. I left CCC in 1999 to pursue high education. This pursuit took me back to DTS and to Cambridge, England. In God's providence, however, we're back the far-western suburbs of Chicago and back at CCC. God is very cool. CCC is a very different place than when we were here over a decade ago, although James Nicodem is still pastoring the church he began over 25 years ago. The church has over 5000 attenders with 2 extenstion campuses and a 3rd planned for this year. The college ministry called Crave has a great amount of potential with about 80 students currently attending a weekly meeting. But with not much more going on than that we're looking to take it to the next level. The major university in our sphere of mission is Northern Illinois University (NIU) in Decalb with a number of other community colleges dotted around.
I'm sure with this new component to my vocational life I'll be blogging a good deal about ministry in addition to the scholarly stuff.
