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EDITORIAL
Healthy growing churches

Jim Coggins

The vision of the Canadian MB Conference, established a couple of years ago by the Executive Board, calls for the Canadian Conference to assist its member congregations to be “Healthy, Growing Churches Reaching Their Worlds”. That is a powerful vision, and a balanced one. It recognizes our desire to put more of our resources into evangelism and church planting, but also recognizes the need to keep the already existing churches healthy. After all, the Kingdom of God will not be advanced very much if we plant 10 new churches but see 10 existing churches fall apart and close down.

Reaching Their Worlds.

The “Reaching Their Worlds” or evangelism part of the vision is already being implemented. The Canadian Conference Board of Evangelism’s Key Cities Initiative is an important part of this. This Initiative calls for the Board of Evangelism, in cooperation with the relevant provincial conference, to plant up to 10 churches in a single Canadian city in 5 years. The first city chosen, Calgary, is well on its way to achieving its goal. Now the Board of Evangelism has begun to plan for the second key city.

From my perspective, the Key City Initiative incorporates at least a couple of key principles: First, it recognizes that the bulk of the Canadian population now lives in cities, and cities are where there are relatively fewer churches. In other words, it is focusing our resources on the area of greatest need. Second, the Key Cities Initiative is based upon cooperation. It recognizes that, especially in meeting the massive needs of the city, we need to work together.

In addition, the Board of Evangelism has hired an associate director, Bruce Elwood, to assist existing churches in doing evangelism.

This is not all, however. The work of evangelism is not being left to the Board of Evangelism alone. Key to the Canadian Conference vision is that all the ministries of the Conference work at fulfilling all aspect of the vision. For instance, while MB Herald tends to focus more on the “Healthy Growing Churches” part of the vision, we also produce a twice-a-year evangelistic issue called Encounter. (This is an opportune time to remind you that our next Encounter, coming out Feb. 18, will focus on “People”. We have lowered the price to 20 cents a copy for bulk orders to make it more affordable; copies should be ordered by the end of this month.)

Healthy Growing Churches.

Similarly, all ministries of the Canadian Conference are working to help our churches be “healthy and growing”.

One major program in this area is the ReFocusing Network System (a joint effort of the Boards of Faith and Life, Christian Education Ministries and Evangelism). This strategy offers a three-stage program for renewal and vision development for first church leaders and then churches. Terry Walling of Church Resource Ministries, the developer of this strategy, was the main speaker at the 1998 Canadian Conference convention in Burnaby, B.C.

The ReFocusing strategy makes use of another strategy, Natural Church Development. A key part of the latter is a detailed survey to be filled out by congregation members; it helps a congregation understand to what extent it reflects the “eight essential elements of a healthy church”. Half of Canadian MB churches have used this tool to evaluate and improve their ministries. The speaker at the next Canadian Conference convention, in Hepburn, Sask. in July, will be Christian Schwarz, author of Natural Church Development.

The Church.

In the Herald, we try to cover a good balance of topics: church issues, conference business, social issues, personal spiritual life, evangelism. However, we have also sometimes devoted a series of consecutive issues to related topics (infertility and miscarriage, for instance).

Beginning with this issue, and extending over the next few months, we are going to be publishing a series of issues focusing on the church.

In this issue, we will be looking at the church generally. The article “What’s so special about the small-town church?”, for instance, looks at one particular kind of church, but in so doing it points out that there are many kinds of churches meeting many kinds of needs, each fulfilling its unique role in building the Kingdom of God.

In future issues, we will focus on specific aspects of the church: faith planning, leading the church, the church as community; the church in conflict, the church reaching out, and financing the church.

We still believe in providing balance. We will interrupt our series to do an evangelistic issue (our Feb. 18 Encounter) and an issue on Easter. We also hope to publish a series of issues on personal devotion (prayer, the Bible, spirituality and personal evangelism) next fall.

However, for the next few months, we want to focus on the church, to look at “Christians organized collectively”. I am convinced that we need to understand far better what it is that we do together. I hope that the Herald issues over the next few months will help us achieve more completely the goal of being “healthy, growing churches”.

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Last modified January 12, 2000.

© 2000 Mennonite Brethren Herald.
Published by the Canadian Conference of MB Churches.
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