February 2022
A note from Ted
Midwest Alliance Director
THE MIDWEST MISSION
February 2022
In pro sports it’s been axiomatic for years. You can’t have significant and sustainable success unless you have a good farm system, baseball lingo for a good program for developing your own future players. Yes, you need to add free agents strategically to fill timely gaps but the core of a successful franchise in any pro sport is its farm system.
The relevance to church planting, particularly here in the Midwest, is significant and is why we have been so strongly emphasizing the need to develop our own church planter “pipeline” (or, if you will, farm system). If we are going to see sustained and meaningful church planting going on in our region then we must make it a priority to pray for, identify, and invest in the developing of future leaders from whom will come most of our future church planters.
For many years, the method of finding men to plant has been called “cherry picking”, looking for men in seminary or in existing ministry positions who are pretty much ready to roll – i.e. pick the low-hanging fruit. That still needs to happen. But it has its limits. With the needs as great as they are, we must develop a strategy of planting orchards and not just “cherry picking” (yes, I know I’ve used three different metaphors in three short paragraphs!) and thus home growing men from our region to plant in our region.
The idea is for each presbytery to develop its own “pipeline” of prospective planters, from seminary students, campus staff (of all stripes), and Assistant or Youth Pastors, to even college and high school students. To this end, we utilize tools such as the Church Planter Readiness Seminar (an early assessment tool developed by MNA) and the Assessment Center. We need to see churches and presbyteries providing summer and student internships, and apprenticeships. Maybe yours could be one of them? This pipeline dynamic is a key ingredient in becoming a healthy church planting ecosystem, or self-perpetuating entity.
One of my goals for the Midwest Alliance is to see every presbytery routinely identifying its own farm system and having a plan for investing in and developing its own local leadership and future church planters. Many have started doing this and, cumulatively, so far, we have about 120 men in the Midwest “pipeline”. In so doing, our earnest prayer is that in due course God will raise up the needed laborers for the harvest that is plentiful!
And seeing the multitudes … Jesus turned to his disciples and said, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few. Therefore, pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest that he will send out laborers into his harvest”
(Matthew 9:36-38)
Ted Powers
Director of the Midwest Alliance
Prayer Requests:
Please pray that Ted would provide wise and effective leadership for church planting in the Midwest region, resourcing the churches and presbyteries of the Midwest region and providing the “connective tissue” for things we do collectively as a body.
Pray for the Catalyst event in April in St Louis as a way to equip and resource leaders, move along in vision for the region, and provide encouragement to those on the front line of ministry in the region. Pray that this “by invitation” only event will be well attended and serve the region well.
Pray for these four new church plants/planters who are in the initial stages of gathering a core group. They’ve not yet begun public worship:
Mike McBride in Greenwood, IN a south suburb of Indianapolis in an area of 500,000 people with no PCA church.
Casey Cramer in Dayton, OH. This is a daughter church of S. Dayton PCA.
Steve Van Noort in Sterling Heights (Detroit), MI, a diverse community with 15,000 Chaldeans.
Matt Ryman in Wayzata, MN, a western suburb of Minneapolis.
Please continue to pray that God would raise up planters for:
Fargo ND
Lincoln NE
Kankakee IL
St Cloud MN
Louisville KY
Ft Wayne IN
Rolla, MO
Wyandotte, Ypsilanti, Northville, and Auburn Hills, all in the greater Detroit area.