… I often feel like several elephants are tied to me, and pulling in multiple directions. So while God is doing amazing things all around (170 people attended last Sunday, many are non-‐ Christians), I’m also constantly letting people down. They come for support, help, or direction, and I simply have to trust that God is bigger thanIam.
The fact is, I’ve probably let you down at some point. I’m sorry about that, I really, truly am. And thank you for the grace, forgiveness, and support you have shown, knowing that we are giving everything we can to sharing the Grace, Forgiveness, and Love of Christ here in Québec.
So what do we do? We’ve narrowed our focus to investment in three priorities:
1) A continued healthy marriage and family.
2) The local church in St-‐Jérôme
3) Supporting churches and individuals.
I’ve trimmed down my involvement in other church plants around Québec on multiple fronts for the rest of 2012. However, if the church in St-‐Jérôme becomes healthy, creating a foundation for multiplication, it’s a huge win for us and the entire Province.
At the end of the day, there is one Person we are responsable to, and His sacrifice makes it impossible to let Him down.
I recently had the privilege of leading part of a French Church-Planting Boot Camp in Montréal. Here are the sessions I had the privilege of teaching to the dozen or so that attended.:
“Preparation for the launch”
“Preparing the core group”
“Sharing the vision”
“Making disciples”
“Building small groups”
“Encouraging Worship Services”
“Community involvement”
In these particular photos, using a toy train as an example, a young believer in our church named Carl walks through his multi-year voyage before becoming a Christian about a year ago. The purpose was to discuss “making disciples”. How do we help and support people wherever they may be on their journey before or after salvation? (Carl did a fantastic job teaching and sharing his story).
Hugues and Danny giving us their “psychopath” look.
Life is like a train set. We have multiple stops prior to passing over the bridge of salvation… and many stops afterward. Unfortunately, most don’t make it to the bridge of multiplication where we begin to “make disciples”.
Danny (afro in the foreground), from our church in St-Jérôme
Monday, my friend Ed drove up from Albany to talk to a bunch of dudes passionate about church planting in Québec. His talks were incredible. The first touched gospel and culture. The second explained the motivation and theology behind the Acts 29 network.
As us guys discussed, Martine and Diane hung out elsewhere. At the end of the day, everyone was encouraged.
One quote from the first talk:
Our Gospel must encourage the church to live differently and to reach out to the community around us. We must faithfully preach and teach the Scriptures and then as people go out into the community. Living out our faith in tangible ways will undergird our voice to speak into the community and speak of issues of faith.
Blessed is the one who finds wisdom, and the one who gets understanding. -Proverbs 3:13
A few books I’m currently working my way through (or recently finished):
As our church planting movement looks to one day impact French-speaking countries radically different than ours (like Haiti or the Congo), we’re seeking wisdom
In a sexually confused world like ours, there are a plethora Christians struggling homosexuality. How do we be honest with this reality, and love and walk beside them?
A couple of later chapters explain the roots of Christianity’s explosion in East-Africa. We pray for la francophonie as well!
Why don’t modern Jews believe the O.T. points to Christ? Rydelnik explains the monumental shifts in Jewish theology a thousand years ago that continue to inform Jewish thought today.
Seeking to solidify my comprehension of Jesus throughout the O.T…. a truly eye-opening book; but simple to read.
The Pentateuch can be rather complex and, for many christians, arid. My desire is to understand it from a 1500BC Jewish point of view… which is anything but arid.
Okay Richie, you bombastically extol the “wonders” of macro-evolution. But really, is this the best defense you can muster? I’m halfway through the book and even less convinced (fascinating read though).
A magnificent walk through the main themes of the Bible. I read it with my Bible open on one side, and a pen and pad on the other (and Don was born and raised in Québec!)
Mark walks through biblical text after text after text on spiritual warfare. This year I plan to teach a short series on the subject and desire to deepen my understanding on all that the Bible has to say about it.
I’ve heard that this is a heart-exposing book… honest and transparent to become a best-seller. As a missionary, I constantly need God to expose my heart.
I’d really like to last… wouldn’t you? Dave is a 70+ year-old guy who has lasted.
Seeking to understand why Christianity was originally an urban movement, and how to apply what I learn to our small movement here in Québec.
Everybody around me is reading it. So yeah, I’m succumbing to peer pressure… want to understand what is affecting them.
Incredible sections on communicating cross-culturally. Just because I taught a subject 5 times doesn’t mean I communicated it. Communication requires comprehension of the listener… and that is a difficult thing to attain.
Liberating people to disciple other people is one of the greatest, if not the greatest challenge in church planting… and in churches, period. Instead of discipling new christians, we tend to draw them in to become a mechanism in the machine.
I’m personally struggling with these questions as we continue with church planting in Québec. Here is how Ed Stetzer puts it:
So, they (church planters) sincerely set out with a new formula that will fill the local middle school gymnasium or movie theater with lost people. They have a vision of lost people streaming en masse through the doors on launch Sunday shouting, “I found it!” No wonder that planter will spend the majority of the week getting the production ready. The band, slides, movie clips, coffee and donuts, are all a part of an environment that helps people feel at home. But at the end of the day, the demanding grind of an attractive church can potentially take away from the pursuit of those far from God. Simply put, when you have an attractive plant it can end up solely with an attractional strategy. The end result will be that you “sell” a new and better church (product) to consumers of religious goods and services.
It is possible (and even common) to spend too much energy focused on only one aspect of the church plant: the Sunday morning crowds. There are many solutions, including opening up new lanes to all kinds of church planting, something Warren Bird and I discuss in Viral Churches.
One solution is to personally invest significant time in relationships with lost people and new believers. The sermons may need to be simpler with less “special effects.” The band may need less programmatic direction and more relational investment with you. At the end of the day, the core team and lead planter must personally invest heavily in the harvest. Not only is that great for the moment (for those lost people, etc.) but it creates the culture for the future of every person who connects with your church. The long term future of the new church is in the harvest, not a Disneyfied Sunday morning experience.
I think there are some inherent tensions in Ed’s books and writings (maybe I’ll share them at a later date), but I think he is onto one of the main issues. And effectively responding to this challenge will liberate the québecker church like never before.
Québec is a unique region that has experienced in one or two generations the secularization and modernization that took France centuries to accomplish. While mostly French in language and culture, it is increasingly multicultural, with an Anglophone minority and growing immigrant communities. Pray for:
Political currents that swirl around the issue of separation from Canada. Although such sentiment has waned of late, it is never far from becoming prominent. Pray that Quebec might make a valuable contribution to the redemptive history of Canada.
The Catholic church dominates Québecois identity and culture (more than 80% self-identify as Catholic), but not in attendance. Québec’s church attendance rate is Canada’s lowest. There is a demonstrably low commitment to community activities; in particular, church and faith are highly personal and privatized.
Church planting needs to occur in much greater measure. To bring Québec up to par with the rest of Canada in the numbers of evangelical congregations, 3,000 more churches must be planted.
Ministry vision to Québec and beyond. Christian Direction/Urbanus partners with all denominations in the vision to have a spiritual impact on the whole Francophone world, starting in Québec. French-Canadian evangelicals usually feel more affinity with other Francophone evangelicals globally than with Anglophone Canadian evangelicals.
Saw this over at Ed Stetzer’s stomping grounds. For anyone who is relatively aware of current North-American church-planting currents, this is a hilarious parody (and sometimes not… a parody).
1. You will meet in weird places that don’t feel exactly like church. Our church rocked it in an old car wash for a while.
2. You don’t get to choose your first members. My dad’s first member was a 6’5” homeless man named Jack who used to get sick in the middle of service in what was a small, poorly acoustically prepared for giant men to get sick, car wash.
3. Your oldest members will occasionally bring their own tambourines to service and unexpectedly go up front to play them. To slow songs.
4. A whole bunch of people will think you’re too conservative.
5. A whole bunch of people will think you’re too radical.
6. At some point, someone will complain that the ex-stripper who sings at church is not wearing enough clothing. You will swear they did not teach you how to handle that exact situation in seminary.
7. You will accidentally do a bait and switch, promising a fun pizza event that turns into a get saved right this second moment, that the local paper eviscerates you for.
8. People in your new city will wonder what your pastor does the rest of the week since he only really “works” one day a week.
9. Your pastor will think about quitting approximately 84 times. He will think he is the only pastor who feels that way.
10. Someone on a youth group trip will break a limb. You will trust in the almighty signed parental waiver.
11. A crazy drunk guy will try to break into your pastor’s car to sleep through the cold New England night, will have a nurse falsely call the pastor and say he’s committed suicide and will inexplicably give one of the pastor’s kids a pet snake. (Is that one too specific? Probably.)
12. You will meet in a school and become some sort of ninja black belt at stacking and unstacking chairs.
13. You will be surprised at how few people it takes to find yourself wrapped up in church politics.
14. You will be not so secretly jealous of other churches in your town who are able to have bouncey things at their Vacation Bible Schools.
15. You will laugh at how wildly off base all your fancy plans were for your community but how perfectly God provides at just the right time.
That list could be a bajillion points long and I hope you’ll add to it. But today, I just want to say thank you.
Thanks to the church planters who do the crazy. Who do the impossible. Who do the difficult.
In Ohio and Tanzania, California and Canada, thank you for starting churches.
The Catholic church dominates Québecois identity and culture (more than 80% self-identify as Catholic), but not in attendance. Québec’s church attendance rate is Canada’s lowest. There is a demonstrably low commitment to community activities; in particular, church and faith are highly personal and privatized.
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