Three Questions is a semi-regular series introducing individuals across the NAB by asking them about their story, their ministry, and what they are learning. These features on members of our NAB family also provide great opportunities to pray for them as we get to know more of their story. This week, we hear from Jacob John, pastor of Acts 29 in Vancouver, British Columbia.
What’s your story?
My name is Jacob. I grew up in a nominal Christian home in India. I knew God was real – but the “unless you be born again” Kingdom entry happened years later. Yet, I remember the call of God on my life when I was five through an itinerant evangelist who visited our home. I didn’t know what to do with it, and so I did my best to run away from it. But you can only do that for so long. I trusted in Christ at 23, and God miraculously delivered me from addictions overnight and gave me an appetite to devour his Word. I took jobs at a design agency and a newspaper in the Middle East and served as a youth and worship leader at a local church there.
In 1992, through a series of simple dreams and directions, I sensed the Holy Spirit calling me to migrate to Vancouver, British Columbia. Once in Vancouver, I worked multiple part-time jobs with Teen Challenge, with a printing franchise, and as a sub-editor at a local newspaper, all while partnering in a design and graphics business. In 1997, I was on staff as a worship leader at a Baptist church, and in 2001, I attended Regent College. In 2005, I planted a church called Acts 29 Inc. in Vancouver. Twenty years later, I am still pastoring this church. It’s been a fascinating journey that I did not know could be this fun.
What’s ministry like for you?
At Acts 29, ministry has been focused on raising people as if they were your actual family, not merely “like a family.” We emphasize raising and maturing Christian leaders who look like Christ in terms of their character and purpose, leaders who in turn can raise a family of ten to twelve people who will also emulate the character and purposes of Christ. We seek to have the saints do the work of ministry, as written in Ephesians 4, so that as ministry leaders and shepherds we can keep moving into the “next” that God is calling us to.
An important purpose God has given Acts 29 is to plant churches across the earth by raising pioneers and builders and working with them. In our worship and in all our church activities, we focus on the presence of God and what that looks like in terms of hearing him, stepping out in faith, and the works that are evidence of his guidance.
What are you learning?
As I grow older, God is challenging me in the following ways:
- He is leading me to keep pioneering in ministry and to resist settling for predictable outcomes and management.
- He is calling me to display zeal for the movement and mission of the Holy Spirit everyday.
- He is challenging me to continue to be able to say to those I am raising, “Imitate me in this area, and you will be imitating Christ.”
- He is inspiring me to train people in the adventure of salting, seeding, warring, and harvesting cities and nations appointed to us as a church. It only takes a generation to forget; as is written in Judges 2:10, “And all that generation also were gathered to their fathers. And there arose another generation after them who did not know the Lord or the work that he had done for Israel.”
- God wants me to seek out and ignite the young, those in their twenties and thirties, with the passion of the Holy Spirit.
- God is encouraging me that messiness, mistakes, correction, settling for less than excellence, and revelling in God-dependent inadequacy is of greater value than a well-run service or event.
- God is reminding me that he is not building his church just in sacred spaces, or only on Sundays or through professional pastors and ministers, but throughout the world, as he is actively moving to seek and to save the lost.
- I am learning that spiritual sons and servants must be shaped through our ministry into prophet-theologians so that we are regularly developing new waves of gifted five-fold leaders to equip future generations.
As a church, we have tried to practice hearing God as a core value. The culture of Acts 29 has been profoundly shaped by Spirit-led, missionary, church-planting movement. Time and time again, God has led us into church planting efforts for which we didn’t have the resources or strategies, and every time he has shown up in powerful ways. We hear him through the Word and through the Spirit. Once we have clear guidance from God, resources, budgets, and outcomes – or the perceived lack thereof – don’t matter, because God provides. What matters to him are our initial steps of obedience and faith and then taking a ringside seat as we watch God go to work, resulting in an increase of faith for our next adventure. Everything we do at Acts 29 – from how decisions are made, to how a service flows, to how mission is done locally and among the nations – has been impacted by God leading us in this way. We are wonderfully afforded the opportunity to live out the name Acts 29 each and every day. And we have seen God show up in powerful ways regularly as we let him lead.
What a blessing it is to be part of the great North American Baptist Conference community. Would you please take a moment to pray for Jacob John and Acts 29?