Understanding our community at Pathway begins by recognizing that God has used our fellowship to connect many people who showed up...well, broken.

For most of us, brokenness produced a life that resembled survival more than freedom. That “survival mode” became a barrier to experiencing intimacy, trust, security, and love in our relationships with God and with others. We found that settling for survival instead of freedom was evidence that no matter what people wanted to believe, they were not able to trust God as much as they trusted themselves.

As we moved forward in understanding truth, we began to leave the old thought patterns and behaviors in the past. God brought genuine healing so that we could stop surviving and start living!

God’s Word teaches that His desire for our lives is to walk by faith under the influence and control of the Holy Spirit. He is showing us what it means to rest in Him and know Him in the deep recesses of our souls. As a result, we can respond to each other and live out of faith in God’s love instead of faith in our self-protective coping mechanisms.

God has also been reestablishing our foundation of truth so we can build our lives securely on Jesus. We are learning to live as He lived by focusing on what God our Father tells us to do and say. Accomplishing this is possible with the leading of the Holy Spirit (1 John 2:5-6; Ephesians 5:1).

We understand that being led by the Holy Spirit is not a guessing game. It is a belief system that is maintained moment by moment, hour by hour, minute by minute, and thought by thought. It is an interactive, lifelong experience to live by faith—choosing to believe the Word of God over what we might otherwise feel or reason with our own wisdom, intellect, or rationale.

The best part is that we are taking this journey together. We are committed to helping each other learn to trust Jesus where we have otherwise trusted ourselves. At times, this process can be extremely messy. However, we have learned that one thing remains consistent for all who have ventured onto this path: no matter what we have been through or what we are going through, there is no safer place to be than trusting ourselves to the loving hands of God.

Let’s be honest. If you don’t have a relationship with someone it’s really hard to care about them or what they are saying.

We are tenacious about having honest and meaningful relationships in our fellowship because Jesus is tenacious about having that with us. He is our common bond and the reason we enjoy each other so much. Almost all of us are engaged in discipleship/mentor relationships that have taken us deeper into understanding the following:

• Who Jesus really is (as a person and as our God);
• Why we can trust Him with our lives;
• How the truth in the Word is authoritative in our lives; and
• How only Jesus, living in and through us, can produce His love in our lives.

The intimate relationships shared within the group provide a safe environment for people to be broken, to heal, to learn truth, and to then walk in that truth. The venue for all of this? Coffee shops, living rooms, cell phones, dinner tables. The sky is the limit.

Our Sunday night Fellowship and our prayer time on Thursday nights are just the whipped cream and the cherry on top of all the time we spend together during the week talking, working through areas of faith and belief, eating, laughing, checking in, and simply caring for each other as friends and family.

Link: Coffee shop – The Laughing Goat, several of us meet there in the mornings.

You can sum up the theology at Pathway into three main pillars of belief:

1. Only God is good (Mark 10:18; Luke 18:19)

   Wow, consider this statement! If only God is good, then everything that is not derived from God is, by definition, not good. This may seem like a hard line, but God does not provide a separate clause for good intentions.

   Since many want to live according to God’s will, the implications of this truth can be staggering at first. However, this is actually a great message of freedom. If only God is good, we simply need to depend on Him to lead, direct, and provide everything in our lives.

   The Bible says it is possible to know God and experience Him in this intimate way when we make Him our priority. This means that we seek to understand His intentions and learn about His true character and nature. We trust that He is concerned with the details of our lives, and most importantly, believe that He loves us unabashedly.

   So we can take a deep breath of relief knowing He has our backs and we no longer have to live every day leaning on our own wisdom.

2. If any man is in Christ he is a new creation (2 Corinthians 5:17).

   The Bible says that all believers are given a new nature when they accept Jesus Christ. This new nature is created in His image, is the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit, empowers us to live like Jesus did when He was on the earth, and is the very reason we can love others with God’s agape love (Ephesians 4:24).

   Our new and old natures are in a daily wrestling match for control over whether or not we live like Jesus lived (Galatians 5:17, Romans 8:5-8). Experiencing God personally and tangibly depends on our learning to live from our new nature enabling the Spirit of God to live through us. All of this comes about by faith.

   God provides so lovingly for us as He takes away the burden of our old sinful nature and replaces it with a peaceful new creation. Now that is love!

3. Without Faith it is impossible to please God (Hebrews 11:6).

   According to this verse, it is reasonable to say that the key to pleasing God and empowering our new nature begins and ends with faith. God never intended for us to be confused on this issue, so the Word has plainly stated the truth about pleasing Him.

   But what is this faith we must have? The nature of this faith is crucial to understand because it is so pivotal in our ability to please God. We had to have faith to believe that we needed Jesus when we began this journey, but God also communicates that we are to continue in that faith as we walk through the journey. According to Hebrews 11:6, faith requires us to believe (and bet our lives on the fact) that God is who He proclaims to be and that He rewards those who seek Him.

   God is - He is the “I Am” (John 8:58). Every aspect of human need can be fulfilled in Him as He is enough and there is no other.

   He rewards those who seek - He is not only the “I Am” but He is our “I Am.” He personally is our reward and provision for every aspect of our lives.

   Knowing and believing the truth is the starting place; making choices according to the truth is living by faith.

   This is beautiful because God’s priority is that we know Him in the same intimate way He knows us. We are His people and He is our God; faith is the choice to let Him be our God in practical demands of our lives. This is not always easy because we have all been conditioned to be our own “god” and letting go of that control is the battle of faith.

Let's start in the summer of 2006! The Lord arranged an encounter resulting in weekly, one-on-one, discipleship meetings. Soon there were two people and then three. From these one-on-one relationships, God grew a church that is still focused toward hands-on discipleship.

Pathway Fellowship launched in February of 2007 where we set up a few chairs in the basement of a sandwich shop. We moved to our current location in 2008 and have been there ever since.

At Pathway, we believe that God builds the church. So we have focused on what He has asked us to do: training disciples. As one group matures, He sends us another group, and then another. As you can imagine, it is a slow but very effective process. The focus of this ministry has always been teaching people why and how they can trust themselves completely to God. Pathway is informally associated with Desert Light Christian Church, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, which oversaw Steve’s ordination as a Senior Pastor.

Steve Villanueva, a native of Albuquerque NM, has been loving and following Jesus since he was a teenager. Through the years, God has continually placed him in many people’s lives as friend and pastor in order to encourage them toward becoming disciples of Jesus.

Steve moved to Boulder, CO in 2004 to build the venture capital business in which he was involved, but God had other plans. Other plans brought a “storm” that led him through the most terrible yet fruitful time of his life, bringing him closer to Jesus than he ever imagined was possible. It is through this storm that Steve learned in a tangible way that only God is good and it is impossible to please Him without faith. This was the same time that Steve wrote We Have Been Lied To: Tearing Down the Walls of Christian Wrong Belief and Unbelief, published in July of 2008.

Steve received a BA in Political Science at San Jose State, got his MBA from the University of Texas at Austin, and his JD from Stanford Law School. He spent years working in the legal, corporate, and finance environment while also heavily involved in the ministry both professionally and as a layperson.