Moving to Toronto

Dear friends,

Diane and I believe God is calling us to move to Toronto, Canada, in early 2012 to plant churches.  (Toronto is 1½ hours from Buffalo, New York.) For our blog on “Why Are We Moving To Toronto to Plant Churches?” www.churchplanting.net/blog

Our assignment is to aggressively plant reproducing churches in this huge metropolitan area of 8.5 million that has only 1-2% involved in an evangelical church.  Our strategy is to follow the church planting principles and practices of Jesus and Paul. We plan to do this by starting a unique church planting church. This church will be highly evangelistic, apprentice church planters, and be designed to frequently reproduce itself over and over. We will send more on our vision later.

Please prayerfully consider teaming with us to fill Toronto with healthy churches.  Here are some of the ways you can be a vital part:

You can join our “Toronto Planting Booster Club”. Booster club members contribute to the cause in a variety vital ways.

• Prayer: This is a big move for us, especially since it involves moving away from two of our sons in San Diego, and further from Paul and Christy and our new grandson Owen.
• Adopt a neighborhood church plant or new campus ministry by financial gifts or mission trips.
• Financially support our church planting team. We thank God that John’s salary will be provided by the North American Mission Board, but Diane will still be raising support and we will have the usual church planting expenses. We are also hoping to help support other teammates, such as apprentices.
• Administrative tasks – which can be done for the cause via the internet.

You can also move to Toronto and join our church planting team. This can be short-term (1-4 weeks) or long-term (6 mo to several years).  See below for more details.

We thank God for what He did during our last 5 years.  In Burbank a dying church was replanted and restored.  In San Diego 3 new churches and 3 more university ministries were started.  All these works have long-term pastors or leaders in place.

For highlights of our last 30+ years of church planting ministry see “about us” on the CPL website, www.churchplanting.net.

We thank God for you,

John and Diane Worcester

www.ChurchPlanting.net

Johnw@ChurchPlanting.net, Dianewo@gmail.com

John: 619-262-9397, Diane: 619-261-1292

Tax deductible contributions can be sent to:

Church Planting Leadership
7225 Keighley Street, San Diego, CA 92120

More information on joining our church planting team:

A wide variety of gifts and abilities are important for church planting. By the grace of God your efforts can help spark what we hope will develop into a church planting movement someday. We are also looking for people who can get jobs in the area, or raise support and serve in the areas of evangelism, discipleship, small groups, children’s ministry, administration, or etc.

We are also looking for:

• Veteran church planters who will apprentice future planters as they plant together.
• Long-term founding pastors, or sequential planters to plant for various people groups:
• Anglo Canadians
• Chinese Canadians (over ½ million)
• South Asians Canadians (over ½ million) (Hindu and Moslem)
• Most other people groups (50% of those in Toronto were born outside of Canada.)
• Church planter apprentices
• “Take over” pastors for the dozens of new mid-sized neighborhood churches (50-150 people) that we envision springing up over the next few years.
• University ministry starters and apprentices.   The greater Toronto area is a major educational hub, with 450,000 unreached students.

Why Are We  Moving To Toronto to Plant Churches?

1.  Diane and I believe it is the call of God on our lives.  After much prayer, we both sense it is the right direction, and counsel has strongly affirmed it.

2.  The NEED is great. God’s heart breaks over the overwhelming lostness of this densely populated region of 12 million.

• We estimate that only 1-2% of the people in the Toronto to Montreal corridor are involved in an evangelical church.  Mission experts would classify this as an unreached people group, and it is right here in North America.

• The vast majority of the few churches that do exist are plateaued or declining.

• The Canadian National Baptist Convention (CNBC), the group we will be working with, has less than .02% of the population attending their churches in Ontario (the most influential province in Canada). As in most evangelical denominations, CNBC baptisms are dramatically down since 2006.   If we are going to start turning the tide in the cosmic struggle to win souls in Toronto, we will need all the help we can get from stronger churches and organizations from around the world.

Look at the chart below for comparisons between Southern Baptist (SBC) work in USA to Canadian Baptists (CNBC) and let it motivate you to help send workers to the harvest fields in Southern Ontario, where Toronto is.

• Ontario does not have many other large strong evangelical churches like both San Diego and Georgia have.  For example, in San Diego 60,000+ attend Calvary Chapel related churches. Atlanta has several churches like NorthPointe, that have more members than all Baptist churches in Ontario combined.

• There are 450,000 college students in the Greater Toronto Area alone. The best estimates are that less than 2000 students attend any “on campus” evangelical ministry. This is less than 1/2 of one percent.   We must field more workers for this highly strategic mission.

3.  We also believe Toronto is a good fit for our gifts and experience.

• We have planted churches in tough areas which have similarities with Toronto.

• Since we will not only be planting directly, but also working through other planters, our experience in assessing, coaching, and training planters will be useful.

• We also have had a good deal of experience with different nationalities.  This is important for GTA because it is probably the most international city in the world.  In fact more than half the people that live in GTA were foreign born rather than Canadian born.

• Few organizations are successfully planting churches. Discovering better ways to reach people and plant churches is needed to have the breakthrough results we all desire. Our experience in the innovation area also makes this a good fit. See: http://churchplanting.net/?p=104

4.  Other reasons we feel called to Toronto include:

• Great alignment with leadership:  we will get to work with outstanding missional thinkers and friends like Dan Morgan, Jeff Christopherson, and Gary Smith.
• North American Mission Board (NAMB) has made Toronto a high priority “Send City”, which means they will be channeling significant church planting dollars there.
• John was raised in the nearby Cleveland area. Since he did not hear the gospel growing up, he has a heart for those in a similar plight.