By Adam Miller
Church planter catalyst Gary Smith talks of the embers smoldering in Winnipeg. This city in Manitoba is near where Henry Blackaby stoked a gospel blaze, and this area of Canada’s Prairie Provinces shows signs of life as pastors in the area seek to build church planting leaders.
In Saskatoon, Regina, Calgary, Edmonton and northern Ontario, a dozen or so churches have come on board with a desire to start new churches and raise up leaders.
This is where guys like Aaron Boswell are coming with their skills to forge new works in an area that seems to have forgotten its evangelical heritage.
“I asked a leader ‘who’s the best church planter you know who I could ask to come be on my Winnipeg team,’” says Smith. “He told me ‘Aaron Boswell.’ Aaron was working with International Mission Board missionaries in Paris when I started skyping with him.”
Now Boswell will serve as a North American Mission Board church planter starting French and English bilingual churches in Winnipeg.
But the need for church planters in the Prairie Provinces stretches beyond French and English into Korean, Filipino, more than 60,000 First Nations people, and a litany of other nationalities who don’t have an evangelical church in their neighborhood.
Catalyst Gary Smith worked as a church planter in Montreal and as a regional coordinator with NAMB before taking the post in the Prairie Provinces. Smith’s job now is to facilitate development of church planters like Boswell and to bring together existing churches in an effort to start new works.
“We already have so many pastors in this area who want to see a work of God,” says Smith. “We all are agreed on a common goal of seeing the gospel spread in the Prairie Provinces.”
Stay tuned for more on this unfolding story of God’s work of starting new works in Canada.
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Adam Miller is NAMB’s communications consultant for the Canada region.