The Journey

You read that title right! The time has come: The Journey is fording the mighty Mississippi to start a new campus in Illinois. A launch team is already on the ground working toward launching this new campus publicly in the fall. The Journey Metro East will join the Journey's three other campuses (Tower Grove, Hanley Road, and West County) in bringing the gospel to the St. Louis metro area. This blog will be regularly updated to keep you in the know about the developments of this new site. But first, let's take some time and cover the basics.

Who will lead this new Journey campus?

As a campus pastor, I will lead this new site in connection with and under the oversight of the other Journey elders. Since I am transitioning into this new role in the Metro East, I will be transitioning out of my responsibilities as the Family Pastor at the Tower Grove campus toward the end of the summer.

So why is the Journey starting a new site - and why in Illinois?

From its inception, The Journey has been dedicated to helping people live the gospel in their local communities. This is why we are a church-planting church. This is also why we have become a multi-site church. It has become clear to us that our Metro East friends were having a hard time attending church in St. Louis and bringing that church experience to their neighbors across the river. The Journey is a gospel-centered, missional church, and we believe starting this new campus will equip our members and regular attenders who travel from Illinois to connect more easily with their neighbors and local community.

Where in the Metro East will this new site be located?

The launch team is meeting weekly and plan to launch publicly in Edwardsville. We believe that area will be a good location to connect with the greater Metro-East community.

How are Darrin and the rest of the teaching team going to handle the load of a new campus?

Obviously, there is no physical way our teaching pastors could travel to all our sites to teach on a Sunday morning. There may be teleported polar bears on Lost, but there are no teleported pastors in St. Louis! Instead, we are going to leverage technology in the form of video capture. So the Metro East campus will be a mixture of live teaching and video teaching. Our teaching pastors will be recorded on Saturday nights and the video will be played on a large, bright screen on Sunday morning in the Metro East. This will be a huge advantage in that it (1) will equip this new church site with the incredible preaching of our teaching elders, and (2) will free me up as the campus pastor to focus on shepherding and connecting personally with our new community.

How can we get help and who do we contact?

If you live in the Metro East, you can join the launch team to help get this new campus off the ground! If you can't be part of the launch team, you can still join in the fun by praying for the leaders of our church, the launch team, and the Metro East community. If you would like to find out when and where we are meeting (or you have any other questions), shoot me an email at .