From June 1st – August 31st our new hours of operation are as follows:

Monday: 7 am – 4 pm
Tuesday: 7 am – 4 pm
Wednesday: 7 am – 10 pm (community workshops in the evenings)
Thursday: 7 am – 4 pm
Friday: 7am – Midnight (live music in the evenings)
Saturday: We are closed, but our space is available to rent.
Sunday: We are closed, but we have worship gatherings at 6 pm.

Click on image to enlarge.

For the month of June in our worship gatherings our theme is “this beautiful mess”. We will explore what it means to be part of this church community, in this neighbourhood, in this city, at this time.

This will be a very cool series as pretty much all of the people doing the speaking/teaching are pretty new to it. For most, this will be their first or second attempt at speaking in this way. We’re excited about what they will have to say… and about the way that the other elements (inter-actives, music, creative segments, etc.) of the gatherings tie in to the weekly theme and help create meaningful experiences.

June 7th: We all matter – Jeanette Eby
June 14th: We all pursue the Kingdom – ???
June 21st: We all connect and belong – Matt Thompson
June 28th: We all serve – Susan Neudorf

You won’t want to miss one week.

For the past several months we have been actively having conversations about, listening for, and thinking through how we organize ourselves at The Freeway in terms of leadership. We have been working on developing a model for our organizational structure which will help us to move forward in terms of our mission at this time in our community’s life. This is, of course, not the first time we have re-structured ourselves. We seem to constantly be striving to ensure that we are poised and ready to face the challenges of today and tomorrow as much as we possibly can. One of the amazing things about this community is how flexible and adaptable we have been since the beginning.

For the past couple years we have basically had two leadership groups/communities/teams: the cohort (6 people) which led the church community, and a management team (6 people) which led the coffee house. In an effort to more actively blur the line between the coffee house and the church community, and to simplify decision-making and leadership development, etc. about a year ago we decided to join the two teams into one group for all intents and purposes.

We are changing this structure up at this time for three main reasons: 1) We have found that the current team is too big to really work well. 2) Yet we want to bring more (and some different) people into the leadership community. 3) We really sense and discern that Jesus wants us to do this at this time.

Here’s what we have come up with:

We will form four new leadership hubs. Each hub will be made up of about five people (including a leader for that hub). The four hub leaders will form the “new” cohort and will meet weekly to concentrate on overall vision of The Freeway and forming each other spiritually as leaders through the development of some key practices.

Each hub leader will also meet (likely monthly) with their own hub in order to engage in leadership development, make decisions, and basically ensure that the mission of that hub is being accomplished.

So, this new system of organization will, hopefully, allow us to:

1. Have the cohort not be a decision-making group, but a visionary group who help discern the path forward for The Freeway.
2. Keep decision-making more focused, flattened, grassroots and team-oriented.
3. Double the number of people currently in leadership, while keeping each team to a “lean and mean” five people.
4. Allow hubs to be practical, vision-oriented and mission-oriented all at once.
5. Make it way more possible for coaching and mentoring of leaders and emerging leaders to happen intentionally.

Here is an overview of the new hubs we are creating:

• The spiritual formation hub will facilitate weekly worship gatherings, church planting initiatives, leadership development, and networking opportunities/connections.
• The neighbourhood, culture & justice hub will facilitate the planning and leadership of our coffee house programming and to develop our church community’s ties to our neighbourhood and to justice.
• The children & youth hub will facilitate, develop, and plan all programs and initiatives relating to youth (including the development of some community-based youth initiatives).
• The coffee house hub will facilitate the day-to-day operations of the coffee house.

We will attempt to flesh all of this out further in subsequent blog posts. In the meantime, drop us a line if you have any questions.

Our friends (and part of the The Freeway community), 2x the Mono, were featured on Cable 14. Very cool interview:

You should come.