Church Planting – inevitable!!!

As you are reading this, there will be a dozen of people from London in Toronto at the first ever Church Planting Conference in Ontario.  I am planning to spend two additional days, into Monday with other pastors and church leaders discussing the direction for church growth in our region.

From the first day of my ministry here I had been sharing with you the need for church planting, the need to have more churches in London.  I have communicated this through newsletters, sermons, blogs and in personal conversations.  9 years ago I hoped that there would be at least 5 Adventist churches in London by 2015.  So far we added only one – Spanish congregation, and the opinions among our members are widely divided.  Some would rather have a big mega-church, with variety of ministries to offer, and an impressive presence in the city.  Others would like to have many churches regardless of size, but located in different areas of the city, guaranteeing more personal involvement and multiplied presence. 

Reality is that more than 95% of churches today in America are small churches, with membership less than 80.  Not all small churches are doing well.  Yet, small churches have significant advantages – better fellowship, where you know each other, better pastoral care, where a minister can attend to people’s needs, better discipleship and accountability, more personal involvement in ministries, and church services, more spiritual harvest!  Large churches may offer greater performance quality programming, and for consumers it is OK to come and receive.  But with size comes increased challenges of pastoral care, discipleship, and opportunities for personal ministries.

When you consider our current location and facility, how can we grow here?  Our church membership exceeds 220, and when factored in those who worship with us and have their membership elsewhere, the church family is nearly 300 people.  We can sit only 200 in the sanctuary, and no more than 100 in the fellowship hall.  How can we accommodate growth?  How can we grow numerically in this location?

One option suggested was to go to two or three services.   Growing in numbers without investing in bricks and mortar.  For the past two months we had been trying this option.  We had promised to continue 4 months trial and will conduct evaluation by the end of March to decide the future direction.  However, our parking lot is not conducive to in and out traffic between services, as there is only 1 entrance. People are also sharing some concerns about other logistics of two services. Without moving, there remains only one alternative – planting a new congregation.

I remember sharing with you a few years back, that if London would be Grenada we would have 191 churches, if London would be Jamaica we would have 115 churches, Zimbabwe proportion of churches per population – London would have 54 churches!  Even by our Canadian average stats we should have 5 (five!) churches being 11^th metropolitan area in Canada!

Please prayerfully consider, that for the Kingdom of god to grow new wineskins are needed for the new wine (Matthew 9:17)