Pastor Tom's Journal

I was asked today a searching question: What are you going to do? My friend was referring to the struggles of pastoring a church in a declining neighborhood, hosting sevceral thriving ministries/congregations, collecting less and less financial help as the bills rise, and doing the work of a mission center while living the life of a small congregation. Here is our situation: We have a tiny church doing great work, influencing the city, ministering to many people, and struggling to survive. Every week, we touch lives - lives that do not bring in the resources to support the ministry, lives that are not ready for leadership at the level we need. What are we going to do? Well, we seem to have some orders in place and, I suppose, until they change, we will keep following them.

It was a pleasure to initiate the Fresno Quality of Life Initiative this week at the Fellowship of Joy. Darryl Curry will be leading our effort to rid our neighborhoods of unwanted grafitti. We will be there to remove the tags and hope to accomplish several things as a result: Number 1 - We are in this to love our neighbors. They have been victimized and we want to be part of restoring them. Thus, we share the love of Jesus. Number 2 - We want to restore the pride in community that is lost when vandalism takes over in a neighborhood. Number 3 - We want to serve. That is our calling. That is what our Master did and it is what we want to do with Him and for Him. Number 4 - We want to reach out to kids at risk for the "tagging" lifestyle and those engaged in it to show them that their are other and better ways to build upi their self-esteem, have a sense of belonging, and be loved. That is why we are doing this in conjunction with our Skate Church ministry which is about to laun

The Fresno/Clovis Prayer breakfast was a tremendous opportunity to see the spiritual, business, political, and educational leadership of the city come together as one entity to pray for the welfare of the city, celebrate the accomplishments of the past, and be challenged to continue the taks of rebuilding the walls that are constantly being threatened by violence, addiction, and complacency. I did say complacency. We do like to congratulate ourselves and we have reason to. Fresno is a model of what positive things can happen when the faith community joins hands and hearts together to pray or the city and take its civic responsibilities city. In 14 years, Fresno moved from the least livable city in the country with the second highest murder rate to an All American City with vibrant inner city ministries, and safe and thriving downtown, and people of faith who care. But the mayor and police chief were correct to ask us not to grow satisfied. We have real problems at the street level and

Most of my journal entries are being made at my other site : pastortomsims.com, but I am going to be organizing things here at Blogger. Check my profile to see a list of the blogs I am setting up. Perhaps one will be interesting to you.