To go back a couple of steps, let’s talk about Thursday night, March 26.

At this stage, we had just finished a visit to Spruce Grove and Stony Plain, and having talked to my sister and my mother in Edmonton by phone, discovered that our planned overnight at Dawn’s place was not going to happen.  It wasn’t a big deal – only 90 minutes south we knew we had a bed at Cheryl’s parent’s place in Red Deer.  We jumped on the highway south through Devon and that led us straight to… Leduc, and a White Spot for supper.  Kind of funny, when you realize that White Spot is a unique restaurant chain that is a household name in BC, but almost unknown in the rest of Canada.  The fact that we drove right to one of the very few that are not in BC… well it was comfortable.  I made one concession – I didn’t have their “Legendary Burger”.   When in Alberta, you have an Alberta steak.

We meant to stop for dinner, to digest in private the cities we had seen and ask God where our hearts were.  We only brought in two packets – Spruce Grove and Medicine Hat.  Looking back, these were the two we preferred from the start, but having reviewed all the options, we were more certain than ever it was between these two cities.

After sitting down, we both found our hands gravitating to the Medicine Hat material.  We tried to be fair and set up pros and cons for the two cities, but it was clear to us that barring an act of God, Medicine Hat was where we were being led.  There are many reasons, from the superficial to the miraculous.  I’ll start there.

When I began to set up this blog, I started surfing around other blogs to see if I could find others on similar journeys.  One of the first ones I found was Jason and Leigh Wilks’ blog, planters in Medicine Hat.  At that time, Cheryl hadjust begun to get interested in Medicine Hat, so on discovering that they were planting there, I immediately began to distance myself from the idea, as I did not see that it would be wise to jump into a town already being evangelized by gifted people with a heart for the Gospel.  However, it never left our radar and when it came time to plan this trip, we still wanted to stop there, so I thought who better to give an honest assessment of the Hat than two planters on the ground?  I contacted them and they graciously agreed to put two strangers up and give of their time – little did I realize how much of a sacrifice they would make for us!

When we reached Medicine Hat, we discovered (they didn’t really tell us) that they were in fact in the middle of a move!  They had their whole lives in boxes and were ready to move into a new house the following week.   Nevertheless, they ordered Chinese for us, from a lovely restaurant and we shared a meal together with Randi Short, their worship leader who moved all the way from Newfoundland to help them with their church launch, back in January.  In between getting to know them and their two sons, we felt completely at ease and connected with them very much on a heart level.

They told us of a city that is successful but changing.  Once one of the biggest cities for retirement, the demographics have been shifting as those retirees began to end their earthly journeys.  It had seen growth as the oil patch, desperate for workers, began to arrange to commute men and women from Medicine Hat by airplane all the way to Fort MacMurray.

Yet, there was still more.  The farming base and longstanding natural gas harvesting (one of the biggest gas fields in the world and the first in Canada was discovered under our feet) had been diversified as just outside of Medicine Hat, the largest centre for greenhouses had grown east of the Fraser Valley, where we are right now!  So cheap vegetables are another feature of the area.  In addition, there is a Goodyear plant in town, obviously the foundational brickworks are still in operation, and even in the surrounding towns there is work whose hub is Medicine Hat.  You can walk into any corner store in Canada and find “Spitz“, salted sunflower seeds – they are produced in Bow Island, just 20 minutes away.  Just north of town is Canadian Forces Base Suffield, one of the largest bases in Canada.  Medicine Hat serves as an important hub, with an extended influence.

The people there are passionate people.  They love their WHL team, the Medicine Hat Tigers (Vancouverites may be aware that this was Trevor Linden’s junior club!) – there is a waiting list of 8 years for seasons’ tickets.  They have a brand new arts centre, the “Esplanade” downtown.  They have a newly constructed recreational facility, complete with a lighthouse and waterslides, wavepool, and the requisite hockey rink all in one building!

Yet, the city is struggling spiritually.  They have one of the lowest ratio of evangelical churches to population in Alberta.  Many mainline denominations are withering away, and seem to have lost heart.  The new developments leave no room for new churches in them, leaving huge swathes of homes unreached.  Three Catholic parishes are merging into one from lack of leadership.  We have heard accounts of large churches with promise embroiled in church splits.  It will be a challenge to locate a place for Sunday meetings – Jason told us that the school board, if we seek space there, requires you to pay the janitorial staff for half a day just to unlock the doors for you.

Emotionally, their people there hurting.   Lifestyles of men leaving town for days at a time does nothing positive for their families.  Family violence is rife, as well as crack addiction as the random drug testing from the oil patch would pick up cannabis which remains in the bloodstream for 30 days, while crack comes and goes in a couple of days allowing them to “clean up” before heading back to work.   Driving through neighbourhood after neighbourhood, we could see the hearts of these people in their driveways, with huge material toys concealing the pain behind closed doors.

No city is without its challenges, but we are excited to be going.  We believe that we can begin to change the community, one heart at a time.  With God at our side, we can make a difference, and see people begin to turn away from the fruitless things of this world, and rely on Jesus and find new meaning in Him.  As I posted earlier, we are excited about the idea of attempting to build a new culture from scratch in a neighbourhood that is under construction – welcoming people and making the love of Christ known from a street’s very foundation and inviting people who move in, into that.  If the love and kindness we show to others becomes the “normal” then people will find it easier to adapt to it, rather than us having to go into a neighbourhood and transform a calcified and resistant fortress mentality so common to suburban life.

We invite you to join us.  Support us in prayer – subscribe to our monthly newsletter, on the right.  We also will need financial partners going forward, so please consider if God is calling you to contribute that way.  We also desire to go as  a team, so we are prayerful already that God would stir up people from anywhere – everywhere to journey with us to Medicine Hat to see God’s Kingdom grown in a fresh way.  We plan to move in May-June 2010.  Thanks again for all your love and support so far!

We tried to reschedule our stay at my sister’s place in Edmonton a day early since things were progressing so quickly, but then I learned why she had not been responding – she has had the flu for a week. When I finally learned what was going on, she was staying at my Mom’s place because she couldn’t even watch her 2 year old daughter she was so sick. She is in good hands over there though. My Mom is a pretty good nurse when it comes to colds and flu.

So, the backup plan was instead of staying overnight in the Edmonton area, we hightailed it back to Red Deer – which was only an hour and a half south anyway. That’s another neat thing about Alberta – everything is pretty close.

On the way south after seeing Spruce Grove and Stony Plain, we stopped for dinner at White Spot! Heh. They’ve even expanded out here. We prayed and looked at the material we had for the top two, and God brought us to a consensus. The deciding factors were definitely not on our list before we left so this trip was absolutely worth it.

So that was the good news. The bad news…

Cheryl was grateful that we would have another extra day to rest up as she was getting uncomfortable in the long rides. Being at her parents’ place that helped too. So we visited her grandmother yesterday afternoon and had a great dinner of Roast Buffalo(!) and went to bed, planning to leave today.

You might ask, “What is Shane doing up at 4am posting a blog entry?”  The answer would be Cheryl and her youngest brother Sasha waking up at 4am (Mountain) and throwing up into buckets.  Now they are both occupying different couches with buckets beside their heads and not feeling at all well.

So now the challenge, in addition to about 30 total centimeters of snow that has fallen on us since we got out here (don’t know if more fell last night or not – I haven’t checked), we have the challenge of waiting for this sickness to pass.  Which puts us…

Right back on schedule.  If we leave tomorrow morning, that is what we planned all along.

In our heart we may have planned this trip, but the Lord has definitely determined our steps! (Proverbs 16:9)

Something I didn’t mention before about the Hat. Didn’t see any Thai food there, but on the way out of town there was a little village called Bow Island. What’s right there on the main drag? A restaurant called “Bow Thai”! Sweet!

Anyway, back on subject. The waiter, Ryan at the Boston Pizza in High River turned out to be one of the most informative… informants we have encountered so far. He kept coming back with more info for us. Once he came back to tell us about the hospital… and for some reason brought up the fact that it includes a psych ward. Two possibilities there – 1) he thought we needed medication; 2) God told him to tell us because Cheryl’s a psychiatric nurse. I am choosing to believe the latter.

Here’s a video update:

We quite like High River, but not sure about the need there.  The real trick about this trip is separating our own emotions from the will of God.  They could be the same, but they might not be.

Here is a great page to see the BC road conditions for our drive there and back.  Live webcams.  (Geez I hope I don’t get bad traffic from saying that!)

Here is a schedule of our trip:

Friday, March 20
Driving and staying in a hotel on the Trans-Canada, probably around Revelstoke.

Saturday, March 21
Driving to Red Deer to drop off the boys at Cheryl’s parents house.

Sunday, March 22
Driving to Medicine Hat in the morning. Exploring Medicine Hat and Redcliff in the evening and staying with church planters — Wilks Family.

Monday, March 23
Morning, continuing prayer-walking and exploration of Medicine Hat area. Evening, driving to Lethbridge and staying with the Farries family.

Tuesday, March 24
Exploring Lethbridge and spending the evening with the Lister family.

Wednesday, March 25
Driving to Okotoks, exploring and prayer-walking. Spending the evening in Calgary with Shane’s cousins.

Thursday, March 26
Driving to Edmonton, and spending the evening with Shane’s sister and family.

Friday, March 27
Explore and prayer-walk through Spruce Grove and Stony Plain. Drive to Red Deer

Saturday, March 28
Drive home.

Keep checking for our video blogs!  Barring technical difficulties, they will begin tonight!

We finally received the packet of information from the Spruce Grove Chamber of Commerce yesterday.  It was, in its lateness, the most complete package we have yet received.  It even included a copy of its local newspaper.  Inside that newspaper was some surprising information.  They actually summarize all the activity of the local RCMP office in the paper!

Here in Surrey, that would be the whole paper itself.  We only get the highlights – the murders, the home invasions, the busted grow ops, etc.

In Spruce Grove, the most serious crimes are theft of ATVs (we don’t have one), RV’s (we don’e have one), and cars (there were like 2 in the week).  After that, it descends into a list of eggings (snicker) and inappropriate use of paintball guns (oh the humanity!).

Now that’s a culture shift that is welcome.

What were they? Mostly in the way of forcing me to ask some hard questions about assumptions. How important are Sundays to new church? How important are big catchment events? How relevant are they to the people we are trying to reach? Is full-time ministry a given, have I looked hard at my reasons why I think that necessary? Those are some of the questions he laid on the table before me and caused me to think about.

Of course, going home, I was prepared to grab hold of such questions and wrestle with them. In my debrief with Cheryl of course, I was still in this “engagement” mindset which rubbed Cheryl the wrong way. She isn’t a debater in that sense, so it took me a bit to get past that and switch gears as it were.

I am excited that he shook the tree for me with regards to getting more information about the settings we will be investigating. I am going to be calling Lorne at Outreach Canada today to see if I can get a better spiritual “lay of the land” for where we are going. Cam also said he would send me some contacts for the communities we are going to, to listen to people on the ground there.

• Sunday we had a lady in the church let us know that they have relatives in Southern Alberta who have a Bed and Breakfast.  They have hosted church speakers and evangelists before, and she suggested we contact them for a place to stay as we investigate.
• Saturday night I stayed up far too late with an old friend, talking about life and our church planting dreams.  It is good to have people behind you.
• Speaking of good to have people behind you, I had an old forestry school friend join our prayer network this morning!  It feels like my heart for this calling grows two sizes every time someone unexpected joins our prayer network newsletter list. (By the way, if you haven’t signed up for it yet, it’s on the sidebar to the right.)
• One of my own private plans for the scouting trip was to seek God with a 5 day fast before we leave.  I mentioned that to a couple of close friends and they have courageously volunteered to join me in fasting and praying for God to reveal his plans to us on this trip.
• God’s got a number of challenges for me this week, and I am looking forward to meeting them all head on.  From leading an Awana Director’s meeting to meeting with some friends to deal with some issues, this week has some real experience in store for us both!