John Hindley tells us about an exciting new venture in Norfolk
We need more church planters. We need more pastors. We need more evangelists.
The county where I live is in desperate need of more churches, and those churches need to be led by faithful servants.
I serve as pastor for Broadgrace Church in Norfolk and on the leadership team of Acts 29 Europe, and see a similar need across our country and our continent. We are a small church with very limited resources, but we have an ideal context in which to train pastors, evangelists and church planters. We are seeking to do just that through a rural church planting residency.
Local training
I received an excellent theological education at Oak Hill Theological College, and I am grateful for it, but our experience has been that we need to train pastors locally, as few trainees will be able to afford to attend a residential college. I hope some will, but not all will be able to. This has compelled us to work out other routes of training.
Since Broadgrace Church was established in 2009 with a handful of people, the vision was always to be a church that planted other churches. In rural Norfolk, like so many other areas of the UK and Europe, one church is not enough – churches are ultimately needed in every cluster of villages if we truly want to reach this county with the gospel.
While some Christians might be prepared to travel long distances to meet with their church family, their friends and neighbours are not and so many more small, local churches are needed. To enable us as a church to do our part, we need to be training church planters for this ministry in small village settings to fill the large gaps where the gospel is not being preached.
Just get on with it
When our church was still struggling to pay me as pastor, and struggling to work out what it looks like to share the gospel in our world, we took on a resident. We simply had a teeth-clenched realisation that we needed to plant and we would never have adequate resources for training if we did not just get on with it, trusting the Lord to provide. I invite men to bring themselves and their families into financially precarious training with no promise at the end except the uncertainty and slog of rural church planting. I hope it is an exciting challenge to you as well.
In 2013, Daniel and Joy Ernst moved to Norfolk to join Broadgrace Church and for Daniel to train as a rural church planter while working part-time to support himself and his family. Now in his third year, Daniel is nearing the end of his training and I asked him to reflect on this season.
John: What led you to take up this training in Norfolk?
Daniel: My wife and I came to Norfolk on honeymoon and it quickly became our favourite place for holidays. Little did we know that God was already working in us to prepare us for ministry here.
We felt called to pursue training, but for financial and family health reasons none of the traditional training opportunities felt suitable for us. Then it was suggested we could train ‘on the job’ while working part-time to fund it. Two years later, after much prayer and God making the move possible, we arrived in Norfolk to start the residency training with Broadgrace Church.
John: What does your training look like? Give us an idea of a normal week?
Daniel: Before we moved to Norfolk, I was working as an IT consultant in Manchester. Amazingly the director was willing to let me continue working for the company despite moving 200 miles away and only working three days a week! So Thursdays, Fridays and Sundays are my church work days, with Saturday generally being my day off.
In terms of my training, it falls into two main parts. 1) Studying theology with the Acts 29 Oak Hill Academy Course (formerly Porterbrook Seminary). 2) Doing the job! Being part of a small rural church means that I don’t specialise in one area of ministry. I am involved with preaching, teaching, youth work, one-to-one Bible studies, holiday clubs and leading a community group.
John: Obviously work-life balance isn’t easy but what has been the high point of your training?
Daniel: I love being here, I love the work, I love the church and I love the people of north Norfolk and want them to come to know Jesus.
Encouraging and effective
Personally and as a church, we have been hugely blessed by Daniel and his family joining us. More than this, we have been encouraged by how effective this model of training has been. If we are to fulfil our vision of a network of small, rural churches across Norfolk, we need to be training a lot more men and women like Daniel and Joy.
There is great tension between how hard this model of training has been for Daniel and his family, and how he loves it. In some senses this tension is simply a description of Christian ministry life and certainly nothing exceptional. However, it is gripping to think that by embracing the sacrifice of such training we might experience something of the joy and vigour of the churches planted by the apostles and their teams.
On offer
Following the success of the scheme, the elders of Broadgrace have decided to put our experience with Daniel to good use and offer a rural church planting residency programme from this September, either for those wanting to stay in Norfolk or plant in other rural areas. To facilitate this, Broadgrace will continue to offer the Acts 29 Oak Hill Academy Course and we are establishing ourselves as a Learning Community for Union School of Theology.
Rural differences
Church planting in the countryside has much in common with other areas – Jesus is Lord, the gospel is the same and people are sinners! There are particular facets to rural life, though, that effect ministry:
• Society is less mobile: people move less and often have closer-knit families and friendship groups. This means that it is much harder to build friendships than in a city. People are friendly, but they simply aren’t looking for friends. The other side, though, is that we now feel we have lots of friends – because few of the people we have been building friendships with have moved. We also very rarely have to say goodbye to church members.
• Villages are socially mixed. We saw this starkly when we went to the jumble sale for a toddler group, held in one of the mum’s houses. The house was a ‘House’ – a Tudor manor. The helpers from the toddler group included the lady of the house alongside people from two-bed, three-bed and upwards housing, rented or owned. Villages have a cross-section of people. In Norfolk the social housing is spread round the villages, not concentrated. The executive housing is as well! This is wonderful, as it means our church has people from all sorts of backgrounds. The power of the gospel to make family where humanly there would only be suspicion and hostility is beautifully displayed.
• Villages are older: there are fewer young single people or couples without children as many people move into the city and then back to the villages when they have kids or retire. This means that children’s work is central to church life, as is providing a good welcome to older people. The two combine well, if sometimes chaotically, to make church life great fun.
To learn ministry while doing it in this context is a great way for church planters to apply theology into the day-to-day realities of rural life. The same will be true in your context. Who is there in your church who could be the next pastor, sent out as a church planter or deployed for ministry? How can you encourage those people into those ministries? And what is your part in their training? Is Christ calling you and them to the sacrifices of training and study alongside the joy of seeing churches planted, Christ proclaimed and the Kingdom of God grown?
