The Core Strategy
Having a vision is great but if you don't have a strategy to develop the vision then nothing gets done. Below is a strategy to begin this rebuild vision and see it develop over the coming years..
Firstly - Share the vision and build a Church Planting Executive.
The Rebuild vision will be shared firstly, with the Christian Pastors and Leadership in the CBRM. This gives the local pastors and churches the opportunity to discern what God is saying and decide whether they want to be involved or not. After this sharing has taken place, the vision will be shared with the wider Christian Community in Cape Breton through an open meeting.
From those that are interested in adopting the Cape Breton vision, a dedicated Church Planting Executive will be formed to plan, pray and shape the church planting strategy.
It will be understood that this Church Planting Executive is not a talk shop, that only talks but does not implement, but will be dedicated to action, to facilitate the vision and see it become a reality.
We will also look to enter into friendship and partnership with wider groups or organisations involved in church planting around Canada, or even the world, on the condition that we keep our autonomy as a Cape Breton Ministry and stay committed to planting off non-denominational, Christian churches.
Secondly - Defining Potential Church Planting sites
One of the realities of the church planting that took place in the book of Acts is that it was both strategic and Holy Spirit directed.
There were key cities in the Roman Empire that were on key trade routes and core to the Empire's life. Alongside of this we see the Holy Spirit actively guiding and sometimes restricting the disciples from going into particular areas.
God is already at work on Cape Breton Island, and we need to be sensitive to where the Holy Spirit is actively working and what He is actively doing.
We will get a comprehensive map of the CBRM that shows the details of the residential areas across the CBRM. We will look for blocks or interconnected blocks of housing 500- 1000 homes or families. We will highlight these blocks and mark any churches that are already in those areas. Once this is done we will send out teams to both prayer walk /drive those areas and do a community assessment of those communities.
With a focus to see what the makeup of the demographics are, what needs and opportunities the area has? What community buildings and facilities do they have? How are they connected to other communities near them?
Thirdly - Befriending Ministry / Outreach Van
Once an area has been designated as an area of interest, where we believe the Holy Spirit is confirming the location as a possible church plant, we begin to intentionally send in an outreach / evangelism van, to make connection with the community and befriend it.
The idea is to build a presence in the community and develop meaningful relationships, before a church is planted. The focus of the outreach team is to befriend the local community by meeting needs and integrating into the local community, so that when a church is planted, we are not doing so into a cold, unresponsive context.
Cold church planting is a very risky strategy with 50% - 60% of plants failing by year three. This can be compensated for by developing connections in the community before the church is planted off and then continuing to do presence, friendship evangelism after the church is planted, on an ongoing basis in the community.
We are looking for open doorways and people of peace in the community who will partner with us and even invite us into their local community as friends.
Fourthly - Plant a church off into someone's home or a
community building in the location.
Once some core relationships / friendships have been built in the community, we evaluate what type of expression of church would work best for that community context. e.g. House Group style of church, Coffee House Church, Micro church model / bible study etc.
We are looking to contextualize the church to the community and form an expression of church that resonates with the community that receives the church plant..
The average size of a church in North America is around 50 -60 people. Within the network of new churches planted out, we would be looking for a nice mixture of economy of church size from :- Micro Churches (5-30 people) to Family Churches (around 50 -60 people) to Program sized Churches (100-200 people)
All of these churches will initially be non- denominational and will have a continued focus on being (1) Relationally Minded - (2) Mission focused and (3) Discipleship Making churches.
Once a church plant is established and stable with its own leadership, charity status and finances, it will be free to affiliate with any denomination it sees fit, or stay independant. The one request we will have, is that it will remain a meaningful part of the new network of churches to help encourage, support and partner with the other churches in the network. Church plants are stronger in a network then they are on their own.
Gallery
Scenes from Cape Breton inspiring new beginnings
