More than hiring an associate pastor

Warren Schmidt comes to Neighbourhood Church after serving for four years as student ministries pastor and a-year-and-a-half as lead pastor at Kennedy Heights MB Church in Delta, B.C. He previously served for three years as associate pastor at Zion Baptist Church in Edmonton and for two years as a pastoral intern at Beulah Alliance Church in Edmonton. He has a B.R.E. from North American Baptist College in Edmonton. He and his wife Cindy have a son, Fraser, 6, and a daughter, Jensen, 2.

For the past year, Neighbourhood Church in Nanaimo, B.C. has been seeking “something different”, according to ads it has placed in the MB Herald. The ads were for a full-time associate pastor, but the church says it has been seeking a change in direction as much as an additional person.

Neighbourhood Church is like many MB congregations. It has attendance that averages 100–150, with up to 200 coming on special occasions. It has two pastors, senior pastor James Toews and youth pastor Scott Falk. It has no mortgage on its building and runs two Sunday worship services in a sanctuary that seats about 130 comfortably. In short, the church is doing okay.

What is unusual is that the leadership of Neighbourhood Church came to the conclusion that “okay” just wasn’t good enough. The small city of Nanaimo on the east coast of Vancouver Island was filled with people who had not yet come to know Jesus Christ. Therefore, as its ads stated, church members committed themselves “to grow beyond our comfort zones and impact our beautiful, growing but unchurched city with the gospel”.

After careful analysis of the church’s strengths and weaknesses, the church leaders concluded that the “missing piece” was assimilation – new people were coming to the church, but they were not becoming committed followers of Jesus, and most did not stay.

After a year-long search, on April 1 of this year, the church hired Warren Schmidt as associate pastor. Senior pastor James Toews says that Schmidt was hired because “his gifts complement ours” and his gifts can help the church add the “missing piece”. He stresses that other churches seeking to grow might have a different mix of gifts and have different “missing pieces”.

Toews says that the church approached the situation using the same kind of strategic thinking that a church plant uses – “a church plant has to figure out how to grow its way into viability”, and Neighbourhood needed to figure out how to grow its way from viability to dynamism. The church has established the lofty goal of growing by 20% a year for the next few years and moving from a neighbourhood church to a multi-staff regional church. If it is successful, it will outgrow its current facility in two-and-a-half years. It already has a substantial capital fund toward a building project. However, Toews stresses that, while a larger facility would be helpful, it was primarily the church itself and not the building that was keeping the congregation from growing.

Warren Schmidt is excited about the opportunity. It will be his responsibility to lead in developing a strategic plan for growth and assimilation through gift-based ministry. He sees it as an advantage to be coming in from outside the congregation with fresh eyes.

Neighbourhood Church is aware that in some senses it is blazing new ground and what it learns may be useful to other churches, because there are many viable churches which need help to move to the next level of dynamic growth.

—jc