Updated Monday, March 03, 2008

Encounter Canada wandering in small towns

By Norman Jameson

BR Editor

Canada is a huge country populated with pockets of people in thousands of small towns, most of which have no evangelical church.

You can help Canadian Southern Baptists identify towns receptive to a new church by doing what many people like to do naturally - spending a day at the coffee shop or other public places simply meeting people.

"Encounter Canada" is a tactic Mark Puckett, a pastor and partnership coordinator in eastern Canada, introduced at the North Carolina Baptist Men's annual conference March 1 in Winston-Salem. North Carolina Baptists are in a partnership with Eastern Canada through at least 2009.

Baptists are virtually the only group starting churches in Canada. In Quebec in the 1960s as many as 90 percent of the population attended a Catholic church. Today, after what became known as the "quiet rebellion" against church control of all areas of life, less than five percent of Quebecois are in church, said Puckett.

He describes "encounter Canada" as basically "walking with God and hanging around lost people," in any of thousands of small towns. He mentioned a recent encounter day in which he and two friends met with the librarian, gas station and restaurant owner and discovered people who wanted to be a part of new church and that the town was about to explode in population because a new mining operation.

"This mindset is different from a normal mission trip in which every detail is planned ahead of time," Puckett said. "We need people to go where we are not. We'll train and identify target cities, but you are on your own until we meet again for debriefing."

He told of a group from Rome, Ga., that discovered their target town sponsored an annual quilt festival, but did not have enough workers to do it well. The church volunteered to come back and help with the festival.

Three years later the town gave over promotion and operations completely to the Georgia church, which made a new church plant the event's "sponsor" and now everything related to the festival mentions the church, which is up and thriving.

Puckett said the surprisingly wide ethnic diversity in Canada provides opportunity for American Baptists to minister in a foreign culture, but in English.

"We need folks to come help with just about any kind of mission project you can imagine," said Puckett.

Mark Abernathy coordinates the Canadian partnership from Cary. Contact him at mabernathy@ncbaptist.org or call (800) 459-5607.