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WestCoast Association creates new church strengthening position

By Frank Stirk

NORTH VANCOUVER, BC—The WestCoast Baptist Association is poised to become the first group of churches affiliated with the CNBC to call a full-time staff person who will oversee church strengthening—and more.

“There was a season for us to be planting churches, and now there’s a season to look very, very seriously at strengthening our churches,” said WBA Vice-Moderator Alan Au.

“For the last two years, we’ve had in our budget a church strengthening line item, but we haven’t had any money for it,” added Victor Thomas, WBA Moderator and pastor of The Point Church.

“But we had it there just knowing that we wanted to have such a person at some stage. We were waiting, and now God has seemed to open up a door of opportunity.”

That opportunity opened up as a result of changes earlier this year within both the CNBC and the North American Mission Board. These involve NAMB placing greater emphasis and resources on planting new churches in 27 cities, including Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal in Canada.

For the WBA, this means NAMB is now responsible for funding Church Planting Coach Ray Woodard—which in turn frees up enough funds to create a new position called the Church Ministry Catalyst.

“‘Church ministry’ is much wider than ‘strengthening.’ ‘Strengthening’ seems to apply to where we have weak churches and we go in and help them. But ‘church ministry’ will focus on more of what we should be doing anyway, especially disciple-making,” Au said.

“So our focus will be to start hopefully a movement to make disciple-making churches. We have been very weak at reproducing more leaders and equipping them so that they can go and actually make disciples.”

As for the use of “Catalyst,” Au said the executive board wanted to bring the position in line with Woodard’s new title of Lead Church Planting Catalyst for B.C., and to stress that this person “will not be doing the work just by himself, but will be organizing, leading and facilitating that work through a team of skilled volunteers.”

Among the Catalyst’s responsibilities will be to develop and implement church strengthening systems that can be replicated in WBA churches, and to strengthen and coach pastors, church planters and other leaders in such areas as disciple-making and children’s and youth ministry.

And because of the high percentage of ethnic churches within the WestCoast Association, this individual will also need to be able to relate to and work with their leaders.

“This person will become our senior staff member and the face of our association,” Au said. “So we will look to this person to provide leadership to the entire association.”

The Catalyst’s ultimate goal will be to help ensure that every single WBA church, seed and congregation is healthy, reproducing, sustainable, and cooperating.

“I am delighted that the WBA is seeking God for someone who would assist its member churches in adopting church strengthening behaviours,” CNBC Strengthening Churches Team Leader Hamish Buntain wrote in an email. “Such a person would be a significant asset in helping equip, resource, and focus churches in their desire to be disciple-making communities.

“As a consequence, I expect that this association will witness a greater transformation of communities into Christ-likeness. I pray that God would honour their faith and initiative by providing both the right person and the resources to see this desire realized.”

“It’s wonderful,” Thomas said, “that we can come to this point and close the backdoor, as it were, and keep adding people through the front, through church planting.”

Anyone seeking further information about the position of Church Ministry Catalyst can contact either Victor Thomas or Alan Au.