I encountered this article in a 2000 issue of a Church Planting newsletter produced by Outreach Canada. Definitely food for thought.
What did you do last summer? At first you may think what Alan Braun did last summer can’t be reproduced. But perhaps it can…
Large Volunteer Core Recruited
Alan is pastor of Abundant Life Christian Fellowship in Penticton, BC. Last spring he invited volunteers from associated churches in the USA to come help, and they did—all 250 of them. An administrator was hired for three months to coordinate this volunteer team. What did the volunteers do?
Following orientation and training, the volunteers surveyed five nearby communities, informing residents that a new church was to be planted and offering a “Vision Video,” where the vision of the new church was shared. In addition, the door-to-door volunteers invited children to a community Vacation Bible School (VBS). Finally, the volunteers staffed seven distinct VBSs and made numerous follow-up home visits.
Results: Five New Churches and a Saturday Evening Service! What happened? 140 children attended a VBS in West Bank where volunteer follow-up calls gathered a new church, which is now meeting with its own full-time pastor. A new congregation is also meeting in a hotel in Osoyoos and three new plants are underway in Penticton.
In addition to these results, a new Saturday night service was started in the mother church. Over the course of the summer mission, 121 persons indicated professions of faith in Christ and are now being discipled.
How Does a Local Church Come to Take Responsibility For Planting?
Abundant Life Christian Fellowship’s vision was to plant a daughter church each year. When its denomination, the Canadian Convention of Southern Baptist Churches, set the “God-sized” goal of planting 1,000 churches by 2010, ALCF went back to prayer. It concluded that, because of its size and strength compared to other churches in the denomination, they would be responsible for 100 of the envisioned 1,000 church plants. This commitment led, in turn, to the goal of planting five of these 100
churches during the summer of 2000.What Can We Learn?
Missionary supervisor, Jim Graham, offering support to the project, suggests several potential lessons for all:
1. Concentrated sowing will produce a harvest.2. Volunteer missions can be the key to reaching large numbers of people.
3. Church planting movements can happen in Canada.
Perhaps we should add a fourth: When denominations set church planting goals beyond their ability to control the outcome, God recognizes dependence and responds.
Who’s Alan?
Pastor Alan Braun arrived to pastor his first church, then with ten people, in 1989. The church now draws 400. He says he has gathered a governing board to look for results. Would he do anything differently?
“Yes,” says Braun, “I would communicate earlier in the process with the ministerial where we intend to plant.” Braun’s reflection on the shrinking influence of the church in Canadian life is: “We’ve been in retreat long enough—let’s get moving.”
