May 19, 2024
HALIFAX, Nova Scotia – Before starting Port City Church in 2023, church planting missionary Jeremy Dager and his core team worked hard to engage their community leading up to their launch.
Most people they met — if they had any church background at all — understood church from more “high church” denominations like Anglicanism or Catholicism, but at Port City Church, residents were encouraged by the fact that they could better understand the message.
In their first year, they’ve baptized 19 people and have seen attendance rise to about 200 weekly, Dager said. Young adults and college students are exploring faith, having seen other pursuits fail them.
“There’s still a real hunger,” said Dager. “The realities they’ve been living in, they realize, aren’t working. These ideologies they’re encountering, they’re just not working. Even on the university level with college students, they’re thinking, ‘Well, maybe there’s something else.’”
The fruit Port City Church has seen represents a microcosm of what God has been doing in Canada in recent years.
Canadian Baptists saw a record high 38 new plants in 2023, and according to Canadian National Baptist Convention executive director Jeff Christopherson, they have another 50 in the pipeline to be planted in 2024. After 250 churches were planted in 56 years from 1954 to 2010, Canadian Baptists have planted 203 churches in Canada in the last 13 years.
“Our partnership with the North American Mission Board’s Send Network is a key factor in how the CNBC has become the fastest growing denomination in Canada,” Christopherson said.
Send Network announced that in 2023, Southern Baptist churches planted 652 new churches across Canada, the U.S. and its territories. Of the church plants, 61 percent identified as non-Anglo (or majority-minority ethnic/multiethnic).
These 652 plants are in addition to 122 existing, previously unaffiliated churches that joined the convention, as well as another 66 new church campuses started by SBC churches — for a total of 840 congregations added to the SBC in 2023.
“We thank God for the churches planted in 2023. We have a big vision to see God’s kingdom expand in North America over the course of the next decade,” said Send Network President Vance Pitman. “In order for our family of churches to play a part in accomplishing this goal, we must see a movement of churches embracing multiplication, raising up the next generation of church planters and sending them into the field to engage their city with the gospel, make disciples and plant churches.”
Jason Lankford moved to Syracuse, New York with his wife, Caroline, and their three boys to start Radiant Church as part of the Salt Network, a family of churches within Send Network planting churches in major university centers.
“The nickname for Syracuse is the ‘Salt City’” because it was a top producer of salt during the 1900’s, Lankford said. “What would it be like if the Salt City was known, not for its production of salt, but for its production of ‘salt and light’ people in the world?”
As Lankford and his planting team moved to the city, they were welcomed by other churches in the area and encouraged as they began establishing roots. That camaraderie has helped Radiant Church get off to a healthy start as they have engaged the community in and around Syracuse University.
“Spiritual conversations are not as difficult as we thought they would be,” said Lankford. “It has reminded us of the men and women who have labored in this soil long before we got here. We are standing on the shoulders of those who have gone before and ministered in the city.”
Radiant Church launched in January of 2023, and they baptized 12 new believers in that year.
“Send Network, for us, has been just an absolute joy,” Lankford said. “With all of the assessments, coaching and training — Send Network has been a valuable component to our fruitfulness and our longevity in Syracuse.”
Salt and Light Church, another 2023 church plant, meets in downtown Columbus, Ohio, where lead planter Josh Ashwill met an individual who visited one Sunday after spending much of his life struggling with addiction. While he had put much of that struggle in his past by the time he visited, he had not heard and believed the gospel until he started attending Ashwill’s church.
Two days before he was to be baptized, though, the man unexpectedly passed away, but not before he had started inviting a friend of his to come who was reluctant to get involved with a church.
“She had a lot of the similar struggles as the gentleman who passed away,” Ashwill said, “but now she’s immersing herself in the Word of God, and she will be baptized on the first Sunday in June, Lord willing.”
In small town Waynesville, Ohio, Todd Cyphers has been leading a replant with Waynesville Community Church. In his time there, they’ve seen the congregation go from 40 people to 200, and the church has celebrated 20 baptisms, which Cyphers attributes to God answering the prayers of those who continued gathering in the church and praying for revival in their community.
Cyphers also credited the efforts of Ryan Jones, Send Network’s team leader in the region; James Risner, the local associational missionary; and State Baptist Convention of Ohio Executive Director Jeremy Westbrook; and the rest of the convention staff.
“The Lord is using these gospel partnerships to create a strong disciple-making church,” Cyphers said. “We are grateful to be part of the SBC. And grateful for the focus on starting and revitalizing churches that will start more churches to reach our neighbors and the nations.”
