There is a kind of Gospel Language that is expressed when we follow Jesus’s instructions to love God and love others. Whether it is spoken through words or conveyed through actions, this Gospel Language can be heard and seen at churches all across the North American Baptist Conference. One of the ways it is expressed at McKernan Baptist Church in Edmonton, Alberta, is through MELL, their English-language learning ministry.
In some ways, MELL is an outgrowth of years of investment the church has made in connecting its pastors and leaders to the NAB’s missional and formational ministries such as Blue Ocean, where leaders from across the NAB are introduced, or reintroduced, to what it means to be a missional people who are being formed into the image of Christ and therefore seeking to draw others into that kind of life transformation. Would you consider giving to the Ministry Resource Fund, which helps, in part, make resources like Blue Ocean possible?
Pastor Dan Schroth, the lead team pastor at McKernan who helps oversee MELL, said the missional/formational training at Blue Ocean affected the way he understood ministry as a pastor. He said it was a privilege to meet with other NAB leaders “while also working through some profound lessons on how to engage culture with the life-giving message of Jesus’s tremendous love, healing, and work of reconciliation.”
At McKernan, the English classes began with three simple words: “You. Me. English?” In the best English she could muster, Maria, a Ukrainian refugee, asked Fern Reirson, a retired teacher, to help her improve her language skills. At first, Fern was reticent, but God, and others, kept prompting her. . . .
Discover Resources to Promote the Fall Offering
How well equipped is your congregation for the ministry of evangelism? How do you evaluate your church’s health in that regard? How would you identify equipping gaps in your congregation’s evangelistic faithfulness? If you find yourself asking these questions, or you think these are great questions to consider, as a pastor or leader in your church, then you will want to take part in Reframe: Equipping Your Congregation for Evangelism, a four-week evangelistic training.
This training will provide an evaluative framework to help you assess your evangelistic equipping efforts. It will help you to recognize gaps you may need to fill and distortions you will want to correct and provide a clearer path forward toward helping your church become more evangelistically faithful.
This online training consists of four, 90-minute weekly sessions that begin October 30 at 1:00 p.m. (Eastern). Register by Monday, October 28 at the link below. Training is free for NAB ministry leaders
Here at the NAB, we love celebrating church planters and international missionaries. One of the ways we do this is through the Missionary of the Week. This document is published four times a year and includes pictures of church planters and international missionaries, synopses of their ministries, and prayer requests. The most recent edition is now available to download on the NAB website. Simply follow the link below.