Joel Young Blog.com

Well, today the very long pause on my blog in recent days will be fully explained. After MUCH thought, consideration, prayer, and research I have decided to leave River Valley this summer to lead a church plant in Highland Heights, Kentucky. The church will be called Horizon Christian Church and will officially launch on September 7, 2008. The church will be a very modern and contemporary effort to reach the young adults and young families of the surrounding communities, and I feel very strongly that God has called me to step out a lead in this specific way and am excited about the opportunity.

We are currently building support for the church and hope to find as many missions minded people who will be dedicated to reaching the lost of this world to join us in the endeavor. Please be in prayer for our entire team as we work to get this church off the ground.

There will be more Horizon information to come in the very near future so keep an eye out.

There are many things I have already learned from being a father, but something happened recently that sticks in my mind. My son is getting old enough that he is starting to do things by himself. He can sit up by himself, hold his head up by himself, and is even using a sippy cup to eat out of which he holds by himself. He seems to be needing our help less and less as parents. Now, while I realize that is a good thing, kids are supposed to grow to become independent, I have had a really hard time with it. I loved holding him and feeding him, but now he wants to do it all himself and he gets upset when you try to help. It’s just been hard for me to let go of those things.

And you know what? I think a lot of us as ministers have the same types of feelings about our church members. We know that they are supposed to learn and grow and eventually get to the point where they don’t really need our help with the spiritual basics, but sometimes we don’t allow them to because we won’t let go. It’s hard for us to hear that someone no longer needs our help to grow in their relationship with Christ, but we need to constantly place challenges in front of the members of our church to challenge them and allow them to reach that point.

I know it’s hard to let go, but if we aren’t building disciples of Christ who can grow their relationship with God without someone holding their hand, then we aren’t doing our job correctly. Building true disciples of Christ should be a top priority for every church leader.

If you are involved in graphic design at your church or are always on the lookout for free Christian graphics resources then look no further than creativeMYK.com. This is a fairly new Christian based resource sharing site that allows people to submit original graphic work that they have done to share with the world. I’ve found it very useful in the few weeks I have known about it and have even submitted some of my original graphic work to the site.

Give it a gander.