Our mission is focused on developing leaders and churches that might reproduce the Gospel through Church planting.  Our process towards this goal is as follows:

PRAYER

We pray that the Lord of the Harvest would raise up harvest workers (Luke 10), that he would place his dream on the heart of a woman or man for a city, a neighbourhood, a people group.  We would invite you to see this prayerful journey as not only the starting point but a common thread throughout the entire journey towards potentially planting a new church.

DISCERNMENT

Our desire for our church planters is that they would have every possible chance to see a fruitful ministry.  Therefore a process of discerning who might truly be called and fitted for such an endeavour is of paramount importance.  Our discernment process looks like this:

Conversation:  Let’s get to know one another.  If you have an emerging calling or interest in church planting we want to hear your story and see where God has been working in you to this point.  To start the conversation, contact Katherine King at kking@transformcma.ca and she’ll get you started.

Pre-Assessment Interview:  At this point we will want to walk you through a pre-assessment interview where a trained interviewer(s) will dialogue with you on some specific topic to help discern if you are “wired” to start the new work you envision.   Our goal is to help church planters understand where they’re strong and where they’ll need support and to help provide that support.

Formal Assessment:  A 3-4 day formal assessment is normative for all church planters and their spouse (if applicable).  Here a team of 12 assessors from various backgrounds will intensely review and evaluate the character, skills, abilities that long standing research and experience has shown are critical to successful church planting.  You will receive valuable feedback from knowledgable people and receive specific suggestions for your development as a leader.  We partner with the C2C Assessment Centre.

COVENANT

At this point our relationship becomes more formal with the planter in the form of a Church Planter Covenant.  Here we agree together the nature of our ongoing relationship in terms of coaching, expectations, developmental goals, Apprenticeship plans, and intended longer-term outcomes towards church planting.

APPRENTICESHIP

The majority of church planters will benefit greatly from a period of Apprenticeship.  Here they will have opportunity to engage their target community as a missionary, learn the culture of the community, soak in the environment, prayerfully engage in the mission, learn from others, build a core team and so on.

PARTNERSHIPS

Partnerships in a church plant can be expressed in numerous ways:Coaching:  Each Apprentice and Church Planter is assigned a church planting coach who will walk with them over the span of several years and meet on a monthly basis.

Task Force:   Within each church plant a task force is established to give leadership to the church plant for the first few years. A task force is an external leadership team who serve as the local leadership of the church plant. This team models leadership for the emerging leaders, as they transition over a three year period from external leadership, to internal leadership.

Praxis / Western Canadian District – Funding:  We are committed to ensuring that any church plant that we partner with has the necessary funding to ensure a sustainable and fruitful ministry for both the plant as well as the planter.

Other Churches:  We work with all of our church planters to establish healthy and supportive relationship with existing churches in the same region.  We assist the church planter in the process of becoming credentialed for tax receipting and organizing the church plant in fiscal manners.

Other Networks:  We are very supportive of a church plant establishing a deep and meaningful relationship with various church planting networks or denominations.  Our goal is to not plant duplicate church plants but a diversity of models and approaches to address our incredibly diverse culture.

Training

We are committed to providing our emerging and current church planters with ample opportunities for training, relationship and development.  This will occur in partnership with other like-minded networks and denominations in the form of regular Cadres (launching in 2012) and Church Planter Incubators (Redeemer Network – launching in fall of 2012).