By Frank Stirk
WINNIPEG, MB—National Start Team advocate Gary Smith has an unusual situation to deal with involving a new church plant that the CNBC Start Team is actually hoping will become more of the norm for future starts all across the country.
Last October, Smith helped start Vision Church in a rapidly growing part of Southeast Winnipeg by bringing together a core of—in his words—“potential leaders.” They began with monthly celebration services and a goal of fully launching the church on Easter. But due to circumstances none had foreseen, that never happened.
“We had to slow down the launch, because about half of our core group will be launching out into new works,” Smith said. “It may sound a little crazy, but it looks like we might start at least six churches this year. We’ve started two this year already.”
Two additional new works are developing: a Bible study in northeast Winnipeg and a “cottage country church” in Bird River, Manitoba, that will operate between the May and September long weekends.
For most of the past two decades, there have been only two CNBC churches in Winnipeg—Garden Park Church and New Life Sanctuary—and none in the rest of Manitoba. But already this year, that number has doubled. In addition to Vision Church, the members of Tabor Baptist Church, a long-established congregation in Transcona, voted unanimously in February to join the Convention.
“The number one thing that they asked for,” said Smith, “was, ‘Can you provide a missions partner for us to help us reach our community this summer?’”
For National Start Team leader Jeff Christopherson, what happened to Vision Church embodies the two basic hallmarks that his team wants to see manifested in all future church plants.
“One is that it transforms its community, that it really makes a difference for the gospel in a geographic area,” he said.
“The second is that it has the DNA for reproduction. We’re hoping to see churches spring up into networks of churches. We’ve seen a couple cases of that, but we want to see that become more normative, with churches really cooperating together to see new churches planted and multiplying.” The key to those goals, Christopherson added, is to help make sure that right from day one, every new start is outward-focused and Kingdom-oriented—prepared and willing, in other words, to give themselves away.
“If you’re talking about creative worship services and excellence and all that kind of stuff when you’re beginning, that’s what are going to be your values five years down the road,” he said. “And if you’re talking about bringing the gospel to the community at the beginning, then that’s what you’re going to be talking about way down the road, too.”
And that means holding all church-planters to a new level of accountability that is “a little more stringent and a little more focused,” Christopherson said.
“We’re asking them some questions on a monthly basis: Are you investing in the gospel in your community?” he said. “We’re just seeing too many new churches reporting zero baptisms, and yet church plants are supposed to be the most effective evangelistic methodology there is.”
But even with these new criteria as to what defines CNBC seeds, Christopherson is “almost convinced that we will report at least 50 new starts this year.”
With Vision Church and Tabor Baptist Church now onboard, the total number of CNBC churches as of mid-February stood at 275. In 2009, there were 27 new seeds planted—eight in Alberta, six in Ontario, five in British Columbia, four in Quebec, two in Nova Scotia, and one each in New Brunswick and Newfoundland and Labrador.
There were no new starts in Saskatchewan last year, but Christopherson is hopeful that under national Start Team advocate Maurice Tenkink’s leadership in partnership with the Kansas-Nebraska Baptist Convention, there will be “two or three” launched there this year. He also expects there will be “some” churches started in northern Ontario, thanks to the ongoing partnership with the Missouri Baptist Convention.
One city in the region that will likely be targeted is Dryden, where its principal employer, the paper mill, is about to close.
“It’s a really interesting time for God to be putting the community of Dryden on the hearts of many churches in Missouri,” said Smith, whose area of responsibility includes northern Ontario. “There’s going to be tons and tons of hurting people there, and maybe more openness than normal.”