For our Ministry Profile this week, we caught up with Steve Drinkall, leader of Pathway.
Tell us about Pathway
The Pathway Collective is a network of people and groups of people who are seeking to work out their faith in Jesus and the implications of this for their lives. The basic idea is to help people see themselves as agents of Jesus in their own city and support them in that endeavour. Pathway is our attempt to lower the bar of what it means to be church in order to raise the bar of what it means to be a disciple.
How did it start?
A few of us started a Pathway group 5 years ago in response to the busyness that we found in the church. We concluded that the majority of our time and effort should be spent outside the walls of the church however the more committed we became to the church the less time we spent with family and friends attempting to live like Jesus.
We asked the question, “What are the few fundamental things that we need to be considered a church according to the New Testament?” We came up with a surprisingly short list and one that could be lead and implemented by almost any growing believer.
Our dream is to start a movement of churches in Brisbane that can be run by “pretty good” volunteer people rather than “unbelievably good” paid people.
What has happened?
We currently have 5 groups who are linked to the Pathway Collective along with many individual people who connect in via our podcast and the web. Several people have decided to follow Jesus for the first time and now run their own group with friends of theirs. Many more existing Christian people are understanding their faith better and putting it into action in the context in which they already live.
How is your approach different?
As Alan Hirsch says, “it is not that the church has a mission but rather that the mission has a church.” God is showing us that “churches” are what we end up with as a by-product of doing mission. We don’t spend effort trying to build and start churches, instead we mission the gospel in our area. If we do that well we will naturally end up with some churches.
What have you learned?
We have learned from the Willow Creek principle of “one life at a time’. When we really know the names of individual people, love them, serve them, pray for them etc we find that God changes peoples hearts. Almost all of our successes have been in working “one life at a time”, almost all our failures have been from trying to organize something that will help large groups of people in a blanket fashion.
Thanks Steve for your time!!!
