Cultivating Faith through Church Plants

Tim Sheridan nodded his head and smiled as he looked around at participants attending the Cultivate church planter fellowship meeting hosted by Resonate Global Mission and held at Grace Community Chapel in Teaneck, N.J.

It was a wonderful and even surprisingly diverse gathering, said Sheridan, church planting leader for Resonate. After a long period of not meeting together in person during the COVID-19 pandemic, more than 50 church planters gathered June 1-3 to worship, share stories, and learn more about their work.

“I saw Korean, Southeast Asian, Haitian, Latin American, and African American [including African immigrant] church planters from North America and beyond,” said Sheridan. “There must have been a dozen languages spoken at the gathering. Being there, you felt a strong sense of unity.”

Sheridan opened the conference by speaking on “The Gospel and Church Planting Vision.”

“We see the Spirit at work in church planting today, and we are creating various partnerships to support and follow the Spirit in its efforts,” Sheridan said in an interview.

On Friday morning Arbin Pokharel, founding pastor of Cross-Way Church in Kathmandu, Nepal, gave a presentation titled “Church Planting Movement: Stories and Learnings from Nepal.” In the evening he spoke about “Leadership Formation for the Church.”

Pokharel was asked to speak as a church planter with a global story. He told his fellow church planters that Cross-Way, in 17 years of being a community and a resource church in Kathmandu, has planted over 37 churches in 34 of Nepal’s 77 districts.

Kevin Adams, founding pastor and senior pastor of Granite Springs Church in greater Sacramento, Calif., wrapped up the conference by discussing “Soul Care and Spiritual Formation.”

Moses Chung, Director of Program and Strategy for Resonate, said, “This was the most diverse gathering of church planters I’ve ever attended [while working with Resonate]. . . . Seeing so many planters from so many places was a bright spot for me. We are experiencing a new reality. God is doing the work and invites us to be part of it.”

Right now, added Chung, church planters are starting congregations in Canada and in Florida, in Texas and on the east and west coasts of the United States. “It is amazing and wonderful to see what is happening,” he said.

Church planting is included in the fourth priority of the CRCNA’s ministry plan, Our Journey 2025. This priority calls congregations to “share the gospel, live it missionally, and plant churches.” Resonate leaders, with strong support from other denominational leaders, are deeply committed to church planting.

Attending the meeting in New Jersey were several Hispanic pastors and their spouses.

“It was amazing to connect with other ethnic–minority planters who share so much in common with us. We have a ministry that works with Hispanic immigrants entering the United States. We learned that Koreans are doing the same, and we got to share experiences,” said Mac Soré, a church planter on the east coast of the U.S.

New CRC churches are helping Hispanic immigrants find a place to worship and grow in faith in their own language, said Soré. For many immigrant families, their church becomes a second home where they can find comfort and reassurance among the uncertainties that entail starting a new life in a foreign country.

Mirtha Villafane, former pastor at Latin America CRC in Anaheim, Calif., and now living and working in Miami, Fla., said of the gathering: “It was exciting to learn about the work of other church planters from other states and regions.”

Marco Avila, eastern USA regional mission leader for Resonate, said that he was “very pleased with the turnout. More people showed up than anticipated. The schedule was good. It was not too tight; there was a very good pace.”

Reflecting on the gathering, Joyce Suh, a global mission director for Resonate, said that being part of such a diverse group of church planters helped her to realize that such diversity “is not the future of the CRC; this is already the CRC. . . . Any response to what we saw and experienced is not optional because it already is reality.”

In addition, she said: “I am really glad that I attended this event. I think it was a watershed moment that shows the way forward.”

Suh noted that Korean and Hispanic teams led in worship throughout the event. “The worship . . . affirmed that God was in whatever was happening and being revealed at the event. In addition, it showed again that worship led by others [perhaps outside of our usual boxes] can be a refreshing experience – even with the challenges of not knowing the words or understanding the language.”

Looking to the future, many challenges lay ahead, said Sheridan. But it was clear that the CRC is at a critical juncture. People of many nations are turning to the CRC, attracted by its Reformed theology and its strong emphasis on “contextualization” in planting churches that respond and address themselves to the needs of the people and places in which they find themselves.

Continuing to open itself to people of various ethnicities and backgrounds, both in North America and beyond, will mean that this denomination, with its Dutch roots, will increasingly become a church of many colors, said Sheridan.

Already multicultural congregations are meeting in fellowship halls, living rooms, industrial parks, and inner-city storefronts. “God is very much at work, and we can see that this is a holy moment for our church,” said Sheridan.