Guest Blog – Staff Introduction


Jon Kilbourn
I wrote this blog as a way to help you learn more about me and this new role at Grace Community.


My role at Grace Community

In 2014, God led my wife and I to become members at Grace Community. This year God graciously provided me with a new way to serve the church as their Ministry Intern. The commitment is 12 hours per week for one year. During that time, I continue to work in Cardiac Rehab at South Austin Hospital. Here’s a summary of my role at the church:

  • Mobilize ministry teams through ongoing communications and support of their volunteers, with an emphasis on the outreach and children’s ministries.
  • Coordinate church communications through various platforms which includes the website, blog, facebook page, and other online tools.
  • Manage facility needs by coordinating maintenance requests with our facilities stewardship ministry and communicating with our service providers.
  • Development through regular reading and discussions with our Pastor.

How I see God at work in Grace Community

Throughout the last four years, God has shown his kindness to me and my family in various ways through the people at this church. When I have had seasons of discouragement, doubt, and marital struggles, God’s provided trusted brothers and sisters willing to counsel and encourage me in the Word. When our second daughter was born prematurely and had to stay in the NICU for 11 days, people brought our family meals every day for weeks. I see God at work in many people’s lives here through their generosity, hospitality, and seriousness by which they receive the Word.

What God is teaching me recently

One of my favorite pieces of wisdom I came across last year happened as I listened to an interview with Sportscaster Ernie Johnson. When the interviewer asked Ernie about his experience adopting, he began to describe in a grateful voice the lessons he was learning raising his disabled, then 28 year old son from Romania,

On a daily basis it puts me in an attitude of servanthood, because we’re caring for a man now who can’t do anything on his own, so we have to do everything for him. And so you get him up in the morning and you wash him and you take him to the bathroom and you dress him and you do everything for him. And any time he has an itch you have to scratch it. He doesn’t have the strength to do that. It puts me in a very good place of just having to serve and trying to keep that mentality throughout the day.

In other words, it is never a bad place to be when we are pressed out of our comfort and into a opportunity of servanthood. To hear this was completely humbling. How often is it my goal to avoid any situation that requires more of myself? Yet, how much more humbled should I feel when I consider this is exactly what God has done: Almighty, the Creator and Ruler over everything, became the greatest servant to his own creation out of the “immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.” It’s because we want to rule that he came to serve. Even on our best days, his grace would still be too great to be merited. This is the grace of the gospel I need more than anything in order to grow in a heart that longs to serve others even when it’s at my own expense.


Feel free to reach me at jon@gracechurchtx.org with questions or comments.

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