This was a good week for St. George’s church plants. I met with the leadership of the Toronto project on Wednesday, preached and celebrated communion.
I walked them through the 7 “I am’s” of John’s gospel as a paradigm for mission in a post-modern context. Stay tuned St. G’s! We will be working through this as on our sermon series after Easter. Pray for the Toronto project as they being looking for a new location to accommodate their growth and a Sunday evening service. Keep praying that the Master would send them a pastor.
I met with the leadership of St. Paul Anglican Bible Church, Stoney Creek. They are preparing to travel to Virginia in early May to meet with Tom Herrick and the Titus church planting project. Tom will walk them through some re-visioning and develop the beginning of a coaching relationship. Please keep them in prayer, as well. We are praying that this may turn into a broader working relationship between ANiC and Titus with regional meetings across Canada.
Finally, Church of the Messiah in Norwich. Please keep them in your prayers as they wrestle with capacity issues at their current location on Main St. They are also praying and planning to add a second mid-week Bible study.
Our satellite location, St. G’s – Milton, is humming along. Attendance dipped a bit after we cancelled two consecutive services in February (lesson learned! Don’t cancel services!). In the meantime, our youth group is meeting in Milton every Sunday for Bible study and our worship team has begun a Sunday evening jam in Milton as well. They even had me playing bongo and harmonica last week!
On the national front, I met with our CP working group to further develop our policies to foster and support new congregations in ANiC. We are hammering out issues of banking and charitable status for projects, plants and parishes. Please pray for me as I prepare for an all day presentation to the house of bishops and archdeacons on April 14th in Abbotsford, BC.
And lastly, on the international front I met with the Anglican 1000 leadership team this week. We divided up several tasks on the conference call. I am tasked with continuing my podcast interviews with Anglican church planters and catalytic leaders. I have also been commissioned to write a position paper for the ACNA provincial house of bishops. This is really exciting and I look forward to sinking my teeth into it. It will further the work I did a few months ago addressing the question, “What is a church.” In other words, if our God-given mandate is to plant 1000 churches in the next 5 years, what are we planting. I will present the paper to the ACNA house of bishops, helping them to generously define the irruducible minimum of ‘church’ while leaving enough room for differences of churchmanship (Anglo-catholic, Evangelical and Charismatic).
So … all in all, another good week for church planting.
Throw in a Futures Group meeting – in which we worked developed a new approach to identifying and assimilating newcomers while continuing to build our Pastorates – several staff and pastoral meetings, much study and prayer and there you have it. That’s my week.
Praying without ceasing – RD