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Job Description:

Meet Grace Covenant Church:

Grace Covenant Church is a community of believers transformed by God’s grace, connected through relationships, and committed to service. 

God moved, people responded, and lives were changed in the beginning. God put it in the hearts of a handful of people to come together to study His Word in a more profound, more personal way. They were from different denominational backgrounds but shared a love for God’s Word. They connected with a Dallas Theological Seminary student, Dick Flatten, and began to bring him to Austin each week to teach the Bible Study. As they shared their stories of personal spiritual growth, others began to join them. 

They began to consider the possibility of forming a church around expository Bible teaching. God stirred that desire as they prayed, and Austin’s first Bible Church was formed. They took the name Grace Covenant Church from the Bible study they had been doing on the Book of Galatians. God instituted a grace covenant through Jesus, and we were free from the covenant of the Law. Dick Flatten graduated seminary, and he and his wife, Ann, moved to Austin so he could become the founding pastor.

In the fall of 1969, the group became too big for a living room, and the owner of Continental Cars allowed them to use his showroom as a meeting place. Cars were rolled out and chairs set up, nicknamed the Continental Chapel. The first church service was held on September 14, 1969. The concept that “Every believer was a minister” took root in our DNA. The role of pastors and leaders was to equip believers for the personal ministry God would entrust to them. 

Through the years, God used the idea of connecting people with His Word and His Spirit to bring about change in a person. Grace has planted other Bible churches around the Austin area. We’ve launched ministries like Mission Possible, Community Bible Study, Mothers of Preschoolers, and Celebrate Recovery. We have 92 missionaries serving worldwide, of which 85% of them grew up or were raised within our church. 

We don’t articulate our vision by using numbers of church plants or people reached. We still believe that grace transforms the life of a person. Our vision is for a person to learn to love God, obey His Word, connect in community, and engage in personal ministry. We still exist 50 years after our founding to help guide people to become like Christ in all of life. 

About the Missions/Mobilization Pastor:

Grace Covenant Church has the vision to reach Austin by empowering the people of Grace to take on local, domestic, and international opportunities to be the hands and feet of Christ. A vital component of this vision is to add the Missions/Mobilization Pastor to give leadership to this effort by connecting with current and future missionaries and building relationships with organizations to find opportunities to serve. This position will have a passion for recruiting, disciple, and leading the Mobilization Team responsible for the Missions and Mobilization efforts at Grace Covenant Church, helping fulfill our mission and reflecting our core values and also providing leadership that would include imparting vision, planning, and implementing strategies, supervising staff members and coordinating activities, and mobilizing volunteers.

 

The Missions/Mobilization Pastor Will: 

• Build relationships locally, domestically, and internationally with opportunities.

• Build momentum of getting the people of Grace Covenant mobilized into serving.

• Embrace the mission of Grace Covenant Church.

• Connect other ministries at Grace Covenant with missions.

• Create opportunities to serve and connect people at Grace Covenant to those opportunities.

Ongoing Responsibilities:

Grace has a rich history of missions. We contribute support to 92 individuals engaged in ministry outside of Grace Covenant Church. Grace’s history of missions has reflected Grace’s overall culture of pioneering work. It was the first independent Bible church in Austin when Grace was founded. Many of its founders and early elders were entrepreneurs. People at Grace have a history of following Jesus’ lead in starting ministries. We desire the church’s mobilization efforts led by this pastor and the Mobilization Team to continue encouraging this pioneering work.

The mobilization role is too large and too significant to be performed by one person. In addition, one of Grace’s core values is ministry done in the context of a team. While many people at Grace are interested in missions and ministry outside of Grace, these people are not currently organized. Not all church needs to be managed but one of the Pastors of Mobilization’s primary goals in his first year will be recruiting and organizing a Mobilization Team to lead the church’s efforts in five areas:

• Care | caring for people engaged in ministry supported financially by Grace.

• Send | recruiting, training, and sending people to do full-time ministry outside of Grace (e.g., traditional missionaries or para-church workers).

• Lead |  leading or mobilizing people through short-term missions’ trips and volunteer placements locally and internationally. Work with other pastoral and ministerial staff to integrate mobilization for service into their relational discipleship process. 

• Tell | communicating Grace’s work in mobilization to the people of Grace through stories, prayer requests, and vision casting.

• Grow | growing a “third way” to do cross-cultural ministry.  Traditionally, the cross-cultural ministry has been accomplished by sending “full-time missionaries” to foreign countries.  This long-term focus was often augmented by short-term missions trips used more for vision casting than cross-cultural ministry.  Long-term missionaries and short-term trips were the two ways for a church to “do” cross-cultural ministry.  With the advent of cheap airfares and cheap internet and technology, cross-cultural ministry can now be performed through international student ministry or regular short-term trips augmented by long-term relationship building through technology.  This approach may even be preferable to the two traditional methods in certain situations.  While Grace has always been open to this third way and has some examples of this type of ministry, there has not been a concerted effort to develop this third way.  We believe this third way represents a significant way to mobilize the people of Grace.  This type of mobilization is consistent with Grace’s pioneering culture and the prevalence of people involved in the high-tech community in Austin.

Discipleship of the Mobilization Team members will be part of the Pastor’s role.

Other Responsibilities:

• To provide pastoral care as part of the religious care rotation.

• To fulfill additional responsibilities as delegated by the Senior or Executive Pastor.

 

What You Bring: 

Education & Experience

• Undergrad degree required.

• Seminary degree preferred.

• At least 3-5 years of experience.

Personal Characteristics

• Passionately loves Jesus.

• It is committed to a dedicated walk with God that prioritizes church and family.

• Solid work ethic.

• Has an authentic, genuine spirit in their faith, work, and relationships.

• Team player who enjoys having fun with a staff team.

• Understands what is happening in local, domestic and international missions currently.

• Passion for relationship discipleship - seeing the mobilization of people as part of the discipleship process.

• Excellent communicator.

• People person.

• Shepherding heart.

• Team builder.

• Able to network with other churches and mission organizations, and agencies.

• High EQ.

 

What it's Like to Live in Austin, Texas: 

Austin is the state capital of Texas, an inland city bordering the Hill Country region. Home to the University of Texas flagship campus, Austin is known for its eclectic live-music scene centered around country, blues, and rock. Its many parks and lakes are popular for hiking, biking, swimming, and boating.

Residents of Austin are known as Austinites. They include a diverse mix of government employees, college students, musicians, high-tech workers, digital marketers, and blue-collar workers. The city's official slogan promotes Austin as "The Live Music Capital of the World," a reference to the city's many musicians and live music venues and the long-running PBS TV concert series Austin City Limits. The city also adopted "Silicon Hills" as a nickname in the 1990s due to a rapid influx of technology and development companies. Some Austinites have adopted the unofficial slogan "Keep Austin Weird," which refers to the desire to protect small, unique, and local businesses from being overrun by large corporations.

Emerging from a strong economic focus on government and education, since the 1990s, Austin has become a center for technology and business. Several Fortune 500 companies have headquarters or regional offices in Austin, including 3M, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, IBM, Intel, NXP semiconductors, Oracle, Tesla, Texas Instruments, and Whole Foods Market. Dell's worldwide headquarters is located in the nearby suburb of Round Rock. About education, Austin is the home of the University of Texas at Austin, one of the largest universities in the U.S. and is attended by over 50,000 students.

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