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Spring 2026

Sun, 10 May 2026 22:16:59 GMT

Ministry Highlights

Jesus has been on the move! I'd like to start by reporting on several ministry items that I mentioned as prayer requests from last time , including:

Purchasing our first building,

Planting our second French church plant,

Finding a Spanish pastor,

And the Relevant McGill appologetics conference.

Brookhaven Building - As of this last Wednesday I signed on behalf of our board to formally take ownership of the building we use as our worship gathering space for Church 21 West Island . ��

We've been effectively managing the building since April 1st, recontracting with tenants (scouts, AA, etc). and services (maintainance, cleaning), but now it's official. We even had to form a "building management committe" which is the first time I've ever had to say those words since moving to Montreal. �� But it is a good growth step for us, to be incarnationally invested in the community (vs. always just renting and moving around).

As mentioned last time, we are doing a capital campgain to finish paying for the building, and to gear up for some much needed renovations. You can watch this video for more infomation, as well as a peek inside:

Prayer Request #1 - That the LORD would provide what is needed for this capital campaign, both to purchase and rennovate.

If you'd like to learn more or even get involved, you can find all the details at church21.ca/reach

Second French Church Plant - Vision and core group nights for our second French church plant have begun in the Delson building where Church 21 South Shore congregation meets (in English), with the ultimate goal of formally launching Église 21 Delson this fall:

The team is SO excited to finally be engaging with our context in Delson in French. It is a town of 6,000 people and, unlike other areas we're in, Delson is 99% French speaking. So this is a hugely important project for reaching this area with the gospel.

Prayer Request #2 - That the LORD would guide this core team as they seek to be engaged with the neighborhood around the building this summer.

Spanish Project - I can report that we're making progress on the Spanish project as well. We have a very solid canidate and are now just working through the logistics of funding the project so we can hire him / request a clergy visa. Nothing formally locked in yet so no pictures on this, but please be praying. We have so many Spanish speaking particpants in our Downtown congregation and it is a challenge to care for them well.

Prayer Request #3 - That the LORD would help us make wise partnerships for this project and for favor in the visa process (always hit or miss).

Relevant McGill - I am very happy to report that Relevant McGill was a huge success this year. It's very clear now how God's timing was working, as the existing leadership structure of this campus ministry was in the final stages of stepping back, the LORD knew to bring us back in. Pastor Tim did a great job revitalizing this week of apologetics, speakers coming in and engaging with hundreds of students (see Tim at top of this photo):

And as a follow up to contacts made there, Tim ran a weekly meeting called Exploring Jesus where Chrsitans and non-Christians alike engaged with the Jesus of the Bible, and the teachings of Christianity. From here things will wind down a bit for summer break, but then take off again this next fall as the over 150,000 university students flood back into Montreal (highest ratio of students to population, per-capita for any city in the world).

Prayer Request #4 - That the LORD brings other core team members to the Church 21 University project as they seek to reach these students for the gopsel.

Iranian Project? - A new opprutnity not metnioned last time is that we've had an influx of Iranian folks engaging with our Downtown location. We hosted an internatinal student dinner around Christmas this past December and a bunch of those who attended turned out to be Iranian students, and so then we held another dinner event specifically for Persian New Year where the gospel was preached and copies of the Gospel of Luke in Farsi were given out. Not sure what the LORD is doing but we might have to start praying about a worship service in Farsi. ��

Inter-Church Ministry - I had the opportunity through our Movement Montreal church network to give pulpit relief over Christmas break at Hudson Community Baptist Church, which you can catch here if you want :

And I was invited to speak on "Leaving a Legacy" at Rosemount Bible Church's men's breakfast, both of which were great opportunities to reinforce our collective effort, as churches united in spirit, to reach Quebec for the sake of the gospel!

Finally, we had what was probably our last "All-Church" gathering of all of our congregations (six currently) this past Feruary, which included baptisms, and our first ever choir:

The reality is that we're only able to fit about half of our whole church body in this larger space, and it's gotten harder for us to convince those who live further away (such as at our Vaudreuil church plant) to make the journey Downtown. We'll still try to pull off our all-church beach baptisms day this summer, but might shift to "area" gatherings where those congregations that are closeset together meet up together a couple of times a year. This will be more sustainable as we grow from six congregations to nine or ten over this next year.

In all, we are feeling incredably blessed by the LORD's work, and so thankful for the huge team he has put together for this mission. We just had our first ever Elders (Pastors) & Wives retreat, not everyone even fits into the frame of the shot, this is only half of the group (we're all doing an encouragment exercise in this shot):

There is always more to share about ministry, but I'm sure some of you are waiting to for me to get to the family highlights, so here we go...

Family Highlights

Ben has just completed his second year at Heritage Bible College in Ontario. We had a chance to visit him there a couple months ago when we were there for a leadership conference (and it was just before Katie left to be with Gavin, so the last time all together as a family):

Ben is staying in Ontario over the summer to do pulpit fill, preaching at churches to give pastors a break while they're away on vacation and / or churches that don't currently have a pastor (a growing problem, even as we seek to plant new churches ��).

Though it took a couple of extra months, Katelyn has finally moved to Hawaii to join her husband. It was a sad but joyful sending:

What was supposed to be two flights over 13 hours turned into four flights over 23 hours due to many delays and changes, but eventually she made it! ��

They are settling into new life together, which has included adopting a kitten, which they have named "Star Destroyer 5000" (Star for short):

Priceless. ��

And after MANY months of searching (and praying) Emma landed her first job outside the home at this amazing Montreal-style bagel place only a few minutes from our house:

it's a small family owned place and has been such a blessing! She wanted to do something involving baking, and now she gets to bake Montreal-style bagels as well a make a host of other goods.

Despite almost being empty nesters, Severine has kept busy with her THREE part time jobs...

Co-directing The Learning Tree homeschool group:

2. Leading hospitality for our regional church events:

3. Providing pastoral care to the wives of the many pastors on our team.

She also spends quite a bit of time engaged in helping her mom with errands and medical appointments.

As for me, I'm continuing to write here and there as I have time, and hope to release my next book soon... ��

Life has been full but good, and we are thankful.

Prayer Request #5 - That the LORD guides us as we enter into this next season of life, parenting adult children, and grieving a bit as they move away.

Funding Highlights

Thank you for your faithful support of our ministry in Quebec, and your care of our family. Last time I reported that ou r ongoing monthly support had montly shortfall of about $300 CAD (approximately $220 USD).

Many of you responded with either a one time gift and / or increasing your monthly giving, which collectively made a huge difference, and we cleared our 2025 shortfall and even went a bit over, thank you!

As for 2026, it's still early in the year but if everything stays the same, it appears that we are 100% fully funded , praise God.

We are however still looking for new partners to help raise funds both for the Brookhaven Capital Campaign (as mentioned above), as well as raise 10,000 CAD to help replenish our "church planting warchest." WHY MORE? With three new church plants planned for 2026, we are a bit out over our skis and I've encouraged our entire team to see if they can't help replenish the warchest. We've got about another 10 years of serious church planting to do in Montreal itself before we shift our primary focus to sending French speaking teams into the wider reaches of Quebec to plant.

(That'll be another ten years, and then perhaps I might need to lie down a bit. �� )

Use the buttons below to jump to either giving opporutnity:

Your investments are making a real difference in this province, both in existing churches, church plants, and to help reach the lost. We've baptized over 100 people in the last five years, the vast majority of them being brand new believers. Again, Jesus is on the move!

Thank you again for your prayers and your generosity as we seek to serve Jesus here and plant more churches ! ��

Blessings,

Brian & Severine

Winter 2025

Sat, 27 Dec 2025 19:25:58 GMT

Family Highlights

Merry Christmas!

I am writing this during Christmas break, mindful that some Christmas cards have gone out to our support team, which then point them to this page, and I have not yet managed to get to writing an an actual update. �� It has been a terribly busy fall / winter, building up to the big event just three weeks ago where (if not obvious from the photo above) Katie & Gavin were married! �� The wedding weekend was a beautiful time getting to know his family, gathering with so many loved ones as well as witnessing and celebrating this solemn and momentous event of two lives being joined together in Christ to form a new family. We are so thrilled for both of them and couldn't be happier to welcome Gavin into our family as a new son-in-law. They are so perfect for one another and the story of how God brought them together seems truly miraculous and definitely God-ordained.

Gavin is currently deployed to Hawaii, and despite getting the ball rolling months in advance, Gavin & Katie still have not yet cleared all of the bureaucratic hoops the U.S. military require for them to be assigned housing. So sadly, despite being married, Katie is still living at home with us, navigating marriage through an iPad and a five-hour time difference. ��

Prayer request #1 would be that the LORD would give them favor with officials and provide everything needed to get assigned housing so that they can live together soon.

As for the rest of the family, Ben is halfway through his second year at Heritage and couldn't be happier, studying Greek, working as a Resident Assistant and playing volleyball among other things. Emma has completed her SATs and is looking for additional work to save up to join Ben at Heritage for a one-year program in the fall. Severine is in full recovery mode from a year of wedding planning in addition to continuing to help run their large homeschool group. And for me, on top of helping with each of our family member's activities noted above, I have been very, very busy with ministry stuff...

Ministry Highlights

This past November we had another twenty baptisms, and we successfully planted Church 21 Vaudreuil . The new congregation has been doing well, reaching new people with the gospel.

There have been the usual challenges and spiritual attacks, but nothing we're not used to by now.

Prayer request #2 would be that the LORD would protect the new congregation, its leaders, particularly Pastor Jesse & his family.

The Christian organization Montreal Youth for Christ, who are the landlords of where our Church 21 West Island meets, have given us formal notice that they intend to sell the building. As it is zoned exclusively for religious worship (the property cannot be redeveloped into condos) the next owner will almost certainly be a church entity, in which case they would most likely terminate the rental agreement of Church 21 West Island (as it can be confusing to have more than one church occupying the same space, etc.). However, because Church 21 West Island merged with "Reach Montreal" a few years back, we actually run the charter of that older organization who were the original owners of the building many years ago, and have the "right of first refusal" (meaning it gets a shot at purchasing the building back before any other buyer).

Long story short, after much negotiation during the fall, we (acting as "Reach Montreal") have made an offer to purchase the building. There is an inspection scheduled for January and then if all goes well, we hope to close on the sale by January 31st.

We are operating our first capital campaign to complete the purchase, as well as raise funds for some very necessary renovation (the image above shows one possible version of said renovations). If you would like more information about getting involved, we have a detailed capital campaign document I can send you, just message me . As you can imagine, this whole new unplanned thing has taken up some of my time. ��

Prayer request #3 would be that the LORD would give us wisdom as we seek to become church property owners for the first time.

The Church 21 McGill project has pivoted to being Church 21 University . This is going to allow us to reach a wider array of students, as well as hopefully help bleed off some of the massive amount of people who are visiting our Downtown location, overwhelming Pastor Peter who is in charge of that congregation. We hope to start worship gatherings in the spring, but in the meantime Pastor Tim, the University project lead, is helping to run Relevant McGill, a week-long apologetics event on the campus, followed up by an Exploring Jesus series at our church, for university students.

Prayer request #4 would be that the LORD would open the hearts and minds of students to the gospel during Relevant McGill, that the organizers would have favor (and not opposition) on campus, and for Pastor Tim as he lays the foundation for a new church.

We are also planning to start gatherings this summer for our second French location, Église 21 Delson, with an eye toward a more official launch in the fall. This will be a tag-team effort by our existing staff, co-planted by our Église 21 Centre-ville and Church 21 South Shore locations.

Prayer request #5 would be that the LORD would reach many new families in this 99% French suburb, and for Pastor Trenton and Pastor Jonathan as they collaborate on this new work.

We also have about thirty-five Spanish speaking folks that are a part of our Downtown congregation, for whom we are actively evaluating pastoral candidates. We're not sure of a timeline but if we find the right guy, we're probably going to be starting a Spanish congregation inmediatamente .

Prayer request #6 would be that the LORD would guide us in the search for a Spanish speaking lead pastor.

Funding Highlights

As always, thank you for your faithful support of our ministry in Quebec! Usually I am always able to report that we are "fully funded" and going into the next season of ministry with everything we need. However, we have lost a few supporters from our team in the last months, and for the f irst time in several years, we are moving into the New year with a deficit in our fundraising account.

Now, the church isn't going to stop paying me, don't worry on that front. But in as much as we are (obviously) very aggressively seeking to plant new churches (at least two more in 2026, if not three if we find our Spanish guy) we are always way out over our skis in funding all of this stuff. So I'm trying to do my part to keep the overhead cost of our organization off of the backs of these new / young congregations.

Currently our funding account sits at about $2,300 CAD short of where we should be (to just break even for 2025).

Opportunity to give in a unique way #1 would be to make a one-time gift toward the above (current) shortfall.

Our ongoing funding sits at about $1,800 CAD a month. To be fully funded we would be closer to $2,100 CAD a month, so we have about a $300 CAD a month shortfall (about $220 USD).

Opportunity to give in a unique way #2 would be to make an increased monthly commitment toward this (month-over-month) shortfall.

YOUR donations make the rapid pace of these church plants possible, and we desperately need new churches to house the many, many new believers we're seeing Jesus save and bring into our congregations. It's wild.

As always, you have the option of giving either in the U.S. or in Canada (and receiving a charitable tax receipt that works for your country), just tap here to see all options. It is also now possible to donate stock from within either country. If you are interested in that option, message me .

Thank you again for your prayers and your generosity as we seek to serve Jesus here and plant more churches ! ��

Blessings,

Brian & Severine

Summer / Fall 2025

Sun, 03 Aug 2025 14:25:50 GMT

Where are we going?...See the family update section. ��

Ministry Highlights

This past March we celebrated 15 years of ministry in Montreal! Hard to believe. The LORD has been so faithful throughout, as have you all who have been praying for us and supporting us all of this time. Thank you.

The pace of ministry has accelerated in a unique way over this last year, making it a bit more difficult to find a moment to write one of these updates. I am telling myself that something is better than nothing and I will keep this a bit shorter to actually get it done.

We will see how successful I am at that. ��

Right away I can provide a much more significant ministry update by pointing you to a "Seasonal Report" that I wrote for our growing church body this summer. Since we have multiplied into more congregations, it has become more challenging to communicate changes with the whole church. The aim is to write two of these kinds of reports a year for the church, and so I will begin to incorporate those into my updates here as my ministry update, only adding in a couple extra ministry things that wouldn't naturally show up in the church report (like a link to one of my recent sermons, etc.), and then adding the family and financial updates at the end.

That *should* result in more regular updates from me here.

So here is the "seasonal" church report. I'm putting a lighter resolution series of images below so the load time isn't crazy. If it doesn't show up well on your device, you can get a full resolution PDF at church21.ca/reports (and it's in French there as well, if that is your preference):

Prayer request #1 would be that the LORD would provide additional qualified men to take on the leadership of the church plants we have coming up in the next 2-3 years, especially as we press more into French, Spanish, and other languages.

Lastly, here is a sermon I gave this summer (starts at about 28 minutes in):

There is much more but I'll save that for a future update, in the meantime some pretty significant family updates:

Family Highlights

Emma has wrapped up her 11th grade year of high school, and now is looking at SATs and working to save up for a year of Bible college at Heritage in the Fall of 2026. She'll be turning 18 in a couple of months, meaning we'll be at the end of an era as parents. This summer she is enjoying gardening, drawing, baking, and learning to drive... ��

Ben is back after his first year at Heritage Bible College. He has been working three different jobs, helping out with Church 21 stuff, as well as sometimes driving back to Ontario to visit his girlfriend Evelyn. :) He'll be returning to school to tackle year #2 of studies, as well as begin serving as a Resident Assistant in the dorm, leading five young men in regular meetings and shared dorm life.

Prayer request #2 would be for both Emma and Ben as they seek good work opportunities to make money for college.

Most notably, Katie has gotten engaged to be married. �� Her fiancee is a young man named Gavin, and he is an excellent provision from the LORD for Katie. The photo at the top is the three of us in an airplane going to meet him in person for the first time, as he lives in the U.S. and much of their relationship has been through video calls (they met on instagram...long story!). We are very excited to welcome him into our family. He loves Jesus, loves Katie, is hardworking, gentle and kind.

Now all manner of wedding preparations are in full force in our home. It'll be a smaller event so the invite list is mostly family and some friends from Montreal, but we'll for sure post some pictures in a future report. Gavin is currently working in Hawaii so they'll spend the first few years of marriage living there. Which is far away but we're excited for them and know they'll probably (hopefully) be closer in the future.

Prayer request #3 would be that the LORD gives favor and peace of mind to Gavin, Katie (and Severine) as they all work on preparations for the wedding, and for Katie as she moves out of our home and into a new stage of life.

As our kids are quickly growing up / moving out / getting married ��, Severine has pivoted to taking on more work vocationally. Her main occupation continues to be helping to run the Learning Tree homeschool group, which, as was mentioned last time, is now formally incorporated, a pivot that involved a huge amount of work, and then with the location flooding and having to find a new venue, already a crazy year. But then after all of that, one of the other key team members moved away, which increased the complexity of getting through this past year, and then running the play in the spring involved finding a third, new venue just for that. ��‍�� Too many changes all in one year.

If the above wasn't enough change, Severine also joined our church staff for four hours a week, significantly expanding two roles that she had filled in a volunteer capacity over the years we've been in ministry here: leading hospitality for our larger, all-church events and trainings, and providing pastoral care for the wives of our pastors and pastoral apprentices (now like 15 ladies and counting). I don't know if she would have agreed to taking this on this year had she known everything else that would end up on her plate. ��

Add to that the impending wedding, caring for her mom here as she ages and has many doctor's appointments to be taken to, it's been probably the most busy and challenging year Severine has ever faced.

Prayer request #4 would be that Severine has wisdom, strength, and energy for all of these many responsibilities.

For the play this past spring, they tackled the Narnia story "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe" by C.S. Lewis. Emma played Susan, Ben got roped into coming back for one more year to play Aslan, and Katie did basically all of the crazy animal makeup. It was a pretty cool production. In this first photo below, Emma is getting crowned and Ben is behind her, with the dreadlocks:

I'm very thankful for the 20-some years that Severine has poured into the lives of our children, day in and day out, both as a mom and as a homeschooling teacher. It's the end of an era. We are going to be celebrating 23 years of marriage in a couple of weeks, and are often now contemplating the fact that we will essentially be "empty-nesters" when Emma leaves for college, which is just about a year away. So we are spending a lot of time talking about what the next season of life and ministry will look like, and looking back on moments like these with a sense of wistfulness:

Funding Highlights

As always, thank you for your faithful support of our ministry in Quebec!

I have just completed the first draft of our 2026 church budget. It is, for the first time, feeling a little weighty. We have eight congregations in the one big budget, three of which are new plants, and require start up funds. We have many individual, church, denominational, and network partners that are contributing to make this all happen (including you!). But to get through to 2027 is going to be a bit of a big lift, and we are going to be spending a lot of our church planting "war chest" to make it happen.

Toward that end, I am leading our whole team through a fundraising push to see if we can raise an extra $100,000 CAD by the end of 2026 to replenish our savings for the next round of church planting. I think it is possible.

Would you consider giving a one-time gift toward this goal? Or raising your monthly giving by 5-15%? Your faithful investment in the work of the gospel in Montreal is resulting in brand new churches, brand new Christians, and many changed lives.

If you would like to make a one-time contribution towards this goal, please use the donation button below or tap here . As always, you have the option of giving either in the U.S. or in Canada (and receiving a charitable tax receipt that works for your country).

Thank you again for your prayers and your generosity as we seek to serve Jesus here and plant more churches. ⛪️ ⛪️ ⛪️ ⛪️ ⛪️

Blessings,

Brian, Severine, Katie, Ben, & Emma :)

Fall 2024

Mon, 18 Nov 2024 00:04:55 GMT

Ministry Highlights

Ministry has been so wonderfully full, God has been doing so much! Here are the highlights since last winter:

We moved our Leader's Retreat from the fall to the spring this year and enjoyed two and a half days with fifty-two of our Deacons and Pastors (about 85% of our leaders in total from across our English congregations). We spent the time studying "movement dynamics" and how best to steward the work that Jesus seems to be doing through our church.

 Prayer Request #1: Pray for the lay leaders in our church, that the LORD would protect and guide them as they serve.

We had an epic outdoor baptism service this summer, baptizing 13 people, including both children and adult who have become followers of Jesus this year. After the baptisms we gathered around them for prayer by congregation. It's tricky to see so I circled the four groups in the image below:

Folks not in the water are regular beach-goers who are trying to understand what is happening. �� A few good conversations always come of these public baptism events.

We had three more baptisms just two weekends ago (indoors this time) at our all-church gathering, bringing our total for the year to 24. ��

And we installed two new pastors / elders:

Each of these guys spend about 9-10 months meeting with me for an "Elder Cohort" that is both a training and discernment process. Lord willing, Tim (kneeling on the left) will be going on to plant a new English congregation on the campus of McGill University (black dotted circle just below Church 21 Downtown), and Jesse (kneeling on the right) will be involved in a new Vaudreuil congregation (far left on the map below):

You'll also note that we have more long term plans for a second French congregation in the Delson building where we meet in the South Shore in English right now. Projected for 2027, we'll see what the LORD does, but the McGill and Vaudreuil projects have already started. �� By fall 2025 we should be operating in English in six locations (in addition to our current French location).

We are ALSO in conversation around new church plants in Spanish and Hindi. Still early stages but we have potential guys to lead these projects, as well as people to form the core teams to plant.

"Iglesia 21" and "Charc 21" in 2027?... ��

Prayer Request #3: Pray for these new pastors, their families, and the projects in McGill and Vaudreuil, as well as these new-language projects.

Even as we grow geographically, we are also growing up internally in terms of our systems and processes. This perhaps veers dangerously close to being boring, but for those of you who like charts �� here is a "mental model" diagram of our internal systems. Most of the blocks below link to a file or a folder with a program, ministry, partner, or other resources:

If you ever wondered what an Executive Pastor does, systems management like the above is a part of it. Good systems mean good care of our pastors, staff, members, partners and visitors, and faithfulness to the commission to share the gospel, make disciples, and present them as mature in Christ.

On Sundays we've been working our way through Genesis this fall and I had the opportunity to preach on the flood. You can catch the recording of this as it was presented at our Downtown congregation (sermon starts about the 25 minute mark):

One this is only the tip of the iceberg but you get the idea, the LORD Jesus is building his church.

Family Highlights

This last winter we had a chance to visit family in Oregon & Washington (picture at top), including time at a big cabin together in the woods. We each shared what the LORD was doing in our lives, family by family, during the meals over the time we were there. Thankful for a legacy of faith that persists with nephew and nieces / cousins.

It's always very sad when it's time to leave, but we are thankful for the invention of air travel that makes it possible to go back once in a while, even when serving Jesus in a foreign context. (If we were missionaries a hundred years ago, we would have probably never seen any of my family again ��).

And of course life marches on in Canada:

Emma has just turned 17, and is starting her second to last year of school at home. She continues to draw, bake, read, and spend time with her friends (both online and off).

She elected to make her own birthday cake this year, a delicious lemon meringue:

This fall we crossed over into new parenting territory when we took Ben to Heritage Bible College in Cambridge, Ontario, and then just left him there. �� He had a chance to speak in our south shore congregation before we officially sent him off in prayer:

We miss him a lot but we're very proud of him and he's doing very well there, playing every sport they offer and studying hard:

It's been over a year now since his bike accident, his dental work has continued to go well and he's nearing the final stage of healing. The dentist and team have been amazing, and there have been gospel opportunities in the midst of the many interactions we've had.

Prayer Request #3: Thank God for protecting Ben in this accident, and keep praying for the final step of dental repair which should take place this December during the Christmas break.

Perhaps the most troubling recent turn of events is that Katie is now 20. ��

Her song "Star Fields" has continued do extremely well, reaching over 250,000 streams just on Spotify (and counting). ��

She's since recorded three more songs and you can expect to see them coming out in succession over the next 3-6 months. The first of these, "Interdimensional Phone", is releasing next Friday, November 22nd:

You can always find all of her music at AloraFarenweh.com

These are all building toward an album project:

Severine has been extremely busy with her work with The Learning Tree homeschool group, which is now (after much painstaking work and translation of legalese) an official non-profit organization! �� Sadly they lost access to the building that they were meeting in all these years due to the massive flooding we had in Montreal basements (which is also where our West Island congregation had the kid's ministry, so that's required a fix for that as well). However, God provided amazingly with a wonderful new location for the homeschool group to meet in that is actually better in many respects!

Since our last update, they've had another TLT drama, this time "Little Women". Kate wasn't in the show but helped with make up (pictured below putting some on Ben, something I never imagined):

This fall Severine and I traveled to a conference in Houston on the exercise of Spiritual gifts (leaning into a growth area we know a little less about). It was a hugely impactful time, and we were thankful to spend it with three other couples from our pastoral team (as well as two new friends in the middle who write some of the curriculum our church uses):

Prayer Request #4: Pray for the LORD to move in a powerful way in our congregations as we seek more of his manifest presence.

Funding Highlights

As always, thank you for your faithful support of our ministry in Quebec! We are fully funded for 2024 and now looking ahead to 2025 .

With the many new church planting projects noted above, we are for the first time dipping into our Church Planting "Warchest". As a result, all of our team members are being asked to help replenish it so that in 2026-27 we can fund English congregations eight, nine, and ten, as well as the new works we're planning in French, Spanish, and Hindi . Some of the guys that we're tapping to lead these projects don't have large North American social networks with the ability to support this kind of work, so we're each doing what we can to help make these possible.

Our family's goal for 2025 would be to raise an additional $15,000 CAD ($10,500 USD) that can be used toward these new projects.

Thank you again for your prayers and your generosity as we seek to serve Jesus here and plant more churches. ⛪️ ⛪️ ⛪️ ⛪️ ⛪️

Blessings,

Brian, Severine, Katie, Ben, & Emma :)

Winter 2023

Thu, 07 Dec 2023 19:12:32 GMT

Ministry Highlights

If the duration between our updates is any indicator, it has been a very full year of ministry. My original intent was to NOT let a full year go by and write an update this fall, but then we had an unexpected emergency (see family update section below). Everyone is OK but it meant in-part that I didn't get to this until now, apologies. Without further delay:

In addition to my endless executive duties (which make for more boring reading) here are some ministry high points from this last year! ✨

We again celebrated baptisms several times this year as a church, including outdoor baptism this past summer:

Prayer Request #1: Pray for the new believers in our congregations, that the LORD would protect and mature them.

As a "regional" pastor, I was involved in helping run many "all-church" events over the course of the year, such as a Fall Leadership Team-Building evening. Leaders from each of our four congregations competed as teams against the other congregations in a series of activities :

YOU: "Wait, wouldn't that lead to disunity in the broader church?"

ME: "Ha, yes we joked about that, but no hard feelings were had, the scores were very close in the end."

Severine is usually super involved in helping me with this kind of thing, often leveraging her hospitality gifting to bless those in attendance with food & drink:

Our Annual Children's Ministry Training Day, where I handle the logistics and the legal portion of our training (safety plan, whistleblowing, etc.). This year we discovered that there is almost a congregation-sized number of people working with children & youth across our four congregations:

We even had a couple of workers from our French congregation make it, even though it was a training day in English. Awesome to have that continuing partnership in the gospel across languages. Praying for that to grow.

I served on logistics for our second ever Xtreme Character Challenge (XCC), an intense 3 day outdoor event for men. It had a huge impact on the team of guys who participated:

(Can't show you anything very significant as a lot of what logistics does at XCC is secret... ��)

We now have youth group twice a month, once in the West Island, and once in Verdun (which I have continued to oversee):

I taught an all-church parenting workshop in our West Island location based on my Skipping Adolescence book material:

And this fall we had our largest all-church gathering ever where we celebrated yet more baptisms:

Each year I lead an Eldership course for prospective elders. (We are constantly in need of adding new guys to our team as we seek to plant more congregations and churches, reaching new neighborhoods with the gospel of Jesus.)

And this fall we installed Peter Smith as new elder / pastor to take up the mantle of our downtown congregation:

We've been preaching through 1 Corinthians this fall / winter, and preaching from chapter 6, I covered the subject Disagreements in the Church. You can catch the recording of this as it was presented at our Downtown congregation (sermon starts about the 20 minute mark):

Prayer Request #2: Pray for unity within the church, and between our five congregations, English & French.

One painful challenge over this last year has been to wrestle through the legal and practical implications of some new laws in Canada and Quebec that essentially make parts of our jobs as pastors illegal. For example, if I pray for someone who is fighting same-sex attraction, or encourage them to fast, or confront demonic influence, I can go to federal prison for five years, and / or face fines up to $50,000 personally (and $150,000 for the church). If I recommend a book or resource on the subject while preaching, I can face up to three years in jail.

Needless to say, we've had to do some work to try to navigate the narrow space between faithfulness to the calling of our ministry and the (probably) legally-indefensible laws that have gone into effect. Sadly, they actually limit the options of those whom the laws are purportedly seeking to help.

Prayer Request #3: Pray that these laws would be amended or overturned, and for protection for our staff and other faithful pastors doing ministry throughout Canada.

After much labor over the last two years, we have (finally) received federal approval of our incorporation of Gospel Movement Ministries (yes, I had to make yet another website). LORD-willing, this is going to allow us to migrate our para-church ministries out of our church charter this next year, greatly simplifying the procedural burden on our church members (if you listen, you can hear them quietly cheering).

That is just skimming the surface, a lot more could be written, but you're probably still wondering about that family emergency (if you haven't already skipped down to read this section out of order), so I won't put you off any longer...

Family Highlights

Ben has been working part-time at a Euro Deli shop about 15 minutes from our house for over a year now. It has been both a good source of income and provided him opportunities for the gospel among his co-workers. During the temperate months, he would usually ride his bike back and forth, as well as to the gym. In late-August, I got a call from a stranger saying that they had found Ben on the road outside their house, having crashed his bike. Lots of blood and even more uncertainty about the extent of the damage. Pretty much the worst kind of call you can get as a parent.

Ben is OK, and we don't totally know what happened (he has a memory gap) but he appears to have gone over his handlebars at high speed. He broke his arm and several of his teeth. Reconstructive surgery for his mouth is going to be a part of his life over the coming months. In case you're wondering, he was wearing his helmet but the force of impact on his jaw and teeth still gave him a minor concussion. Overall though, we are so deeply thankful that he wasn't injured more seriously, and that he has been healing up well.

He also now has a "new-to-him" used car after getting his driver's license, so no more biking for Ben:

Prayer Request #4: Thank God for protecting Ben in this accident, and pray for total healing.

Ben has been serving as the Sound Tech Lead in our south shore congregation for a year and a bit now. He's recruiting, training, and regularly serving our church in this way. And he is now planning to attend Heritage Bible College in Cambridge, Ontario (about seven hours west of Montreal) starting next fall. We had an opportunity to visit the school this fall with some friends:

Towards that end Ben has been saving up his paycheques and spent the last several months preparing for the SAT, finally taking the test just this last weekend (we have to wait a couple weeks to find out how he did). He is now very thankful to have that behind him.

We were in the area of the school because Severine's cousin was getting married in Toronto, having a black-tie wedding on her dad's (Severine's uncle's) boat, so that was a fun opportunity to get dressed up, and to spend time with Severine's brother Jean-Marc:

Ben's broken arm and face were a real conversation piece at the wedding. ��

Severine has been more engaged than ever with the Learning Tree homeschool group, serving on the leadership committee, co-teaching the drama class, and co-leading the annual production. This last year was an adaptation of Anne of Green Gables, in which Ben & Emma had major roles and did such a good job:

This fall Severine and I had the opportunity to travel to Mexico for an Acts 29 (church planting network) conference, onto which we added a couple of days to celebrate our 21st anniversary:

This was Severine's first time to Mexico, and she was thrilled to draw even with me on the number of countries we have been to (I was in the lead, having been to Mexico before on a mission trip in high school).

Emma had her Sweet Sixteen birthday and is wrapping up her third and final year of her Wilson Hill Academy course on Integrated History, Literature & Theology. I very much enjoy discussing things like Dante's Inferno with her during our regular "Papa Time" together, but it means lots of reading for her, which she sometimes chooses to do outside in the snow, barefoot, and dressed as an avocado. ��

Kate spent two and a half months in the UK at Capernwray Bible college with her friend Ruthie (which was an amazing experience!), and then a few weeks traveling in London, Strasbourg and Paris (just in time for some of the riots in Paris, scary times). But then she made it home safe! :)

After getting back, Kate had to get right to work on her next song. She had won a grant from FACTOR (a private / public partnership between the Canadian government and Canadian radio broadcasters) to record a third song, so it was all steam ahead to get it completed before the November due date. She worked very hard, spending a few days in Ontario recording with her producer, and then we managed to time the release with the distributor to be on November 8th, her 19th birthday. :) It's the best one yet:

You can listen to it anywhere you enjoy music by tapping the image above.

Related to her music, she has been creating a series of animated shorts based on her world "The Hollow" and her adventures in it as "Alora Farenweh". You can watch them all in order by tapping the image below:

And excitingly she had one of her posts about her new song go viral on her Instagram. Normally she'll have 1-3 thousand views on a post, but one of hers is at 354,000 and counting! ��

This has been a huge encouragement to her, as it means 3-4 people are listing to her song ALL the time now.

And she's been working on an updated shop as well, with lots of fun things from her song (tap image to visit):

We're very proud of how hard all of our kids have been working over this last year to progress in their respective callings, and we praise God for how we see Him working in their lives and drawing them to Himself and His mission. ��

Support Raising Highlights

2024 Funding Update:

As always, thank you for your faithful support of our ministry in Quebec!

We are looking ahead to 2024 and we appear to be on-track to be fully funded, praise God.

Our current financial goal is to build a small savings buffer in our fundraised account as an exercise in wisdom, guarding against a funding shortfall due to unanticipated changes in our support team and / or the impact of a global financial recession (still seems possible). This allows us to protect the church against an unanticipated burden in covering more of my salary than they had planned for the year to come.

If you would like to make a one-time contribution towards this goal, please use the donation button below or tap here .

Thank you again for your prayers and your generosity as we seek to serve Jesus here in Montreal.

Blessings,

Brian, Severine, Katie, Ben, & Emma :)

Winter 2022

Fri, 30 Dec 2022 17:19:19 GMT

(Above: Men's Regional Camping Trip Event)

Ministry Highlights

The last four months have been some of the busiest in all of our years of ministry.

Coming off of a sabbatical this past summer, it was time to "pay the piper" in September, basically doing two months of work in one to get all of the church's legal & financial requirements completed by September 30th, which includes the budgeting process and getting a quorum together for our annual board and legal member meetings.

Adding to the complexity of this year has been the reabsorbing of our "original" Church 21 West Island church plant. The original project had gone on to merge with an older existing church, converting the church planting project into a church revitalization effort. Our partnership with them continued over the years and now they have formally reintegrated with us, specifically merging with our "new" Church 21 West Island congregation (West Island #2 that spun out during the COVID transition to being multi-congregational) forming a new, stronger congregation in that part of the city.

Our team has continued to grow as well, and I've worked to be more comprehensive in my pastoral care schedule, meeting with 12 different pastors and pastoral apprentices individually on a rotation. Also as a new and growing element of our shared ministry, Severine and I have done quite a bit more "preventative" in-home marriage counselling for members of our pastoral team.

Prayer Request #1: Pray for the protection of our pastors, their marriages, wives, and children.

We had a number of events I've been involved in, including another all-church gathering & baptism, our annual safety training day where we equip our children's ministry volunteers and tackle updates to our safety plan & systems (as well as feed them a bunch of great food), and a men's camping trip with something like 50+ guys spending the weekend hiking and learning about brotherhood (above campfire, also below some of the young men came on the trip with us and hiked to the top of this mountain cliff):

In the midst of this I've been teaching our way through the Five Sola's of the Protestant Reformation with our monthly youth group events, as well as participated in our bi-annual "Sextember" series where we address issues of gender & sexuality from a biblical perspective. I was assigned to address Pornography & Sexual Addiction and preached in three of our locations. You can catch the recording of this as it was presented at our Downtown congregation:

Prayer Request #2: Pray for the release of our city from it's role in human trafficking, pornography production, and sexual addiction.

One other big project this past month has been to build out our U.S. donation system. As some of you are aware, we have a separate U.S. legal entity (Church 21, Inc.) that allows us to issue U.S. tax receipts for donations, helping direct funds into church planting across Canada. This project had always run very small & light, but this year we decided it was time to invest in building it out for the long term. For online donations, we'd always just used simple PayPal Buttons (example screenshot below):

As of 2023 we are utilizing DonorPerfect software to radically up our game and improve the donor experience (see screenshot below), as well as sidestep the political issues that have arisen around PayPal over the last year.

**If you are currently using our PayPal button to make donations or have a reoccurring donation through PayPal, please start using our new form in January. I'll be emailing you directly with transition instructions (and this doesn't affect anyone giving through the mail by check, no change there).

Much nicer, and using the highest security & encryption standards in the industry.

However getting this set up turned out to be much more work than I thought it would be. We were extremely close to having it finished when their insurance underwriter rejected us for the credit card merchant terminal, all because we didn't have a specific website for the U.S. entity. So I had to build one as fast as I could, you can check it out here and see what other ministries and projects we're supporting (and YOU'RE supporting by helping fund our ministry, as we serve to make these things all work together):

Prayer Request #3: Pray for the many different ministries that we're partnered with in seeking gospel saturation for Quebec.

2023 will bring new projects, but for now we are enjoying a bit of family time between Christmas and New Years. Here is a brief family update:

Family Highlights

I always get board games for Christmas as gifts, which means we're playing something most every day during the holiday break.

Below: Ticket to Ride Japan, featuring a new "bullet train" variable, highly recommend:

As I mentioned in our last update, my newest book, "Skipping Adolescence" was coming out in in the Fall, detailing the parenting / discipleship pathway we've used with our kids and how to employ Extreme Intentionality & Extreme Creativity in your own parent journey. I ended up creating a workbook as well to help parents actually take action (instead of just reading it and getting excited and doing nothing):

Know a parent? You can find both of those here: brianmichaelstegner.com/#FamilyLife

We had the opportunity to do a book launch / parenting workshop in October, which was a lot of fun:

We're looking at doing another one of those in the spring.

Severine has been very busy with homeschooling and serving on the leadership team of the homeschool group, as well as helping teach the drama class as they prepare to perform a version of Anne of Green Gables in the spring.

And I alluded to this last time because it was coming up soon, in August we celebrated our 20th wedding anniversary:

Ben started a job at a local Euro Deli. He's putting in a lot of hours in the midst of school (as well as still working some ours for our business), saving up for Bible College (even though it requires wearing a hair net and practicing his French):

Emma turned 15 this year and had a Masquerade party (with murders):

Above: One the kids' friends (murdered in the masquerade game).

Kate turned 18 this fall, officially a legal adult!

She is continuously working on world-building, song writing (more in 2023!), and is both working for us and babysitting to save up for college. She's been accepted to Capernwray's UK campus for their Spring semester, which means she'll basically be living like Harry Potter for two and a half months in this castle:

Support Raising Highlights

2023 Funding Update:

As always, thank you for your faithful support of our ministry in Quebec!

We are looking ahead to 2023 and we appear to be on-track to be fully funded, praise God.

Our current financial goal is to build a small savings buffer in our fundraised account as an exercise in wisdom, guarding against a funding shortfall due to unanticipated changes in our support team and / or the impact of a global financial recession. This allows us to protect the church against an unanticipated burden in covering more of my salary than they had planned.

If you would like to make a one-time contribution towards this goal, please use the donation button below or tap here .

Thank you again for your prayers and your generosity as we seek to serve Jesus here in Montreal.

Blessings,

Brian, Severine, Kate, Ben, & Emma :)

Summer 2022

Mon, 18 Jul 2022 15:38:41 GMT

(Above: The family all dressed up for my sister's wedding in Corvallis, Oregon)

Ministry Highlights

Following the last update in the fall of 2021, I began looking towards summer 2022 to where I would be taking a sabbatical.

Like many churches, we're migrating away from the historical pattern of sending pastoral staff away for a long period of time every seven years or so (even though seven is such a nice, biblical-sounding number). Having that rhythm meant that guys were usually half burned out by the time we sent them for rest and then they were gone so long that it was sometimes hard for the church to continue to function well.

The new trend is that you schedule shorter sabbaticals, more often. So we're looking at doing a schedule with our team that involves sending guys away for four months (and always May through August) every five years. That way we're getting ahead of burnout issues and they're not gone so long that their local congregation is really feeling their absence too deeply.

Usually December through April is a pretty intense period of time I refer to as "tax season." This involves issuing tax receipts for our charity, but also preparing for tax filings for the church, our U.S. charity, our business filings, and then personally in Canada as well as the U.S. Overall it's a crazy time for me. However this time around two additional variables were in play:

1. Our church bookkeeper retired.

2. I was preparing to be away on sabbatical and needed to systemize and train an executive assistant role to cover for me while I was away (and would stay on in perpetuity, allowing me to focus on increasing my more traditionally pastoral duties with the staff and other pressing situations).

This new executive assistant role includes the old bookkeeper job but due to a false start with another candidate, I ended up doing all of the bookkeeping on top of my usual duties (which was a unique trial) and only ended up having six weeks to train the final candidate.

All that to say, January through April was a bit of a blur. In January I was feeling like I didn't need to go into sabbatical rest. By May I was thanking God for his sovereign protection of my mind, heart, body, and soul.

A huge amount of boring stuff I could detail but all to say that we made it and now we're about half way through sabbatical, and things at the church are still functioning thanks to God's provision of an extremely competent woman, the wife of one of our pastoral interns who agreed to take on the executive assistant role.

God's provision is always fully sufficient and his timing perfect.

Just before I wrapped my time in April and headed into sabbatical, the LORD threw one last curveball (He does have a sense of humor). The last Sunday in April we had one of our big all-church gatherings where our four English congregations get together in a larger space to celebrate and worship as one larger church. We also had one of our previous church plants join with us so it was a full house, and really all I was supposed to do was set up food & coffee and do an installation of the four new elder / pastors that I had been running our elder class process with in 2021 (originally we were supposed to do their installation in January but we had to postpone until spring due to COVID restrictions):

Prayer Request #1: Pray for protection over these new pastors, and for their marriages & children (they now have a target on their backs).

Anyway, Pastor Dwight was going to preach that morning but just as we were going out the door, maybe about two and half hours before the service was starting, I got a phone call from him.

I remember staring at my phone, thinking, "This can't be good..."

Sure enough, Dwight had tested positive for COVID that morning.

We could have just done a broadcast from his place but getting everyone together only to do yet another video sermon felt bad. So I offered to preach from his notes, and he talked me through them on speakerphone while I drove over. Then I abandoned the food & coffee set up into the hands of my very capable wife and kids and holed up for about an hour in our offices upstairs to try and rewrite the notes to where I could functionally preach off of them.

Full honesty, there was a moment about twenty minutes into that process where I wondered if I had bitten off more than I could chew. But I reasoned that if the Spirit is able to give us the words to speak to rulers on a moments notice (Luke 12:11-12) then surely He could work through me with such a narrow prep time.

By that time, word had gotten around and a lot of people were praying for Dwight and me and the situation in general, and I think that really was what made the difference in the end, all glory to God. You can watch the entire service here and how it played out (gathering actually starts around timestamp 38:30, sermon starts at timestamp 1:14:40):

Now currently on sabbatical, I'm still running payroll and dealing with a few things each week, but very light duty and it doesn't feel like I'm getting drawn back to the thick of ministry. Sabbatical isn't vacation (though we did enjoy some travels in June, see the Family Update below). Instead it provides the opportunity to invest in other things:

First of all, I have a solid reading list I'm working through, starting with reflective, moving into ministry related, and then finally some executive-specific type works. For those of you who like books and would send me messages asking for this list, here you go, ahead of time:

FINISHED

The Weight of Glory, by C.S. Lewis - **Probably one of the best things I've ever read (and I've read a lot of books)**

The Pursuit of God, by A.W. Tozer

The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry, by John Mark Comer

The Intentional Father, by Jon Tyson

Convergence, by Jon Thompson

CURRENTLY READING

Gentle and Lowly, by Dane Ortlund

COMING UP

Biblical Church Revitalization, by Brian Croft

The Disappearing Church, by Mark Sayers

The Reappearing Church, by Mark Sayers

Start with Why, by Simon Sinek

The Effective Executive, by Peter F. Drucker

IF I DON'T RUN OUT OF TIME

7 Habits of Highly Effective People, by Stephen R. Covey

8 Habits for Growth, by Darryl Dash

Atomic Habits, by James Clear

In addition to reading a bunch, I'm investing additional time with the LORD, dating my wife, and have plans to take each of my kids on a short camping trip or some other activity, one on one .

Prayer Request #2: Pray that the intentional time together as a family would lead to deeper relationship.

All that said, I can feel myself already looking forward to getting back at it in the fall, which is a good sign. The last time I was on sabbatical rest it took a LONG time before I could even picture myself going back, a sign that maybe we waited too long and I was courting burnout. Thankful to the team that is suffering my absence and I look forward to returning the favor each summer going forward as other guys cycle out on sabbatical.

Family Highlights

The one thing we very much wanted to do this summer was take a break from Quebec and the political churn of COVID here, and nothing offered that quite like lawless Florida (which also offered the sunshine that is very much missing in Quebec winters):

Following some time in the warmth of the south, we crossed the country to Oregon. We didn't intend to return to Oregon again this summer but my sister decided to get married and so we came back. After being unable to travel so long during COVID, this additional visit with family wasn't unwelcome.

Now as some of you may know, I have a general policy of not performing weddings. I get asked sometimes, and I just refer to "the policy" and ask them if they need help with a spreadsheet or something else. Initially I even told my sister "no" when she asked (see: policy).

But she pulled the "sister card" and so eventually I agreed to do it:

*Let the record show that I still don't do weddings.*

Her new husband is a godly man and we like him a lot. God provided a rain-free event in that it only rained in the moments we were already indoors, which was a special answer to prayer. Overall it was a really wonderful time!

Speaking of marriage, Severine and I are just about a month away from celebrating our 20th wedding anniversary, which is kind of hard to believe. Thankful for all of our years together, taking none of them for granted.

Just before we left for Oregon, Ben turned sixteen and began aggressively pursuing his drivers licence here in Quebec. Unfortunately it is a laughably long and expensive process (clearly they don't want people driving) but he's plugging away through his many months of mandatory classes and the 450 page driver manual:

Emma has increased the frequency of her baking, creating piles of temptations...

You get the idea.

This is a bit out of order but a big project for Severine in this last school year was taking the lead on a drama class in their homeschooling group. You might remember that our kids participated in a musical production of The Sound of Music a few years ago. Well with COVID, that all kind of shut down, but not wanting there to be nothing for the students, Severine thought to do a simple drama class. COVID restrictions being what they were in Quebec, it wasn't likely that they'd actually perform for an audience. However regulations ended up easing up enough in the Spring that it was possible and suddenly it got very real and very busy! In the end, it all came together really well. It was a murder-mystery set on a train type play:

As you probably know, our Kate has her music alter-ego "Alora Farenweh", and about a year and a half ago she release her first song called "Riding a Tiger" . Since then she has been developing an imaginary world she calls "The Hollow" and building new songs, games, and products around this world. You can learn more about her world-building by following her Instagram .

Now, after a great deal of hard work (and support from many of you...thank you!), Kate has released her second song, Acid Atlantis:

We're all very proud of her. You can listen to the new song on any major platform, and she has multiple music video versions you can watch, all available at AloraFarenweh.com

Personally, in addition to reading, time with the LORD, family time, and tackling a pile of neglected home projects, I've been utilizing my summer to finish off a number of writing projects, including my (very) belated book on our somewhat unusual parenting methodology, which I've titled Skipping Adolescence.

So for all of those who have been hassling me about this for the last four years, the wait is almost over. I anticipate a September release. Here is the first look at the cover (you guys are so VIP):

Support Raising Highlights

2022 Funding Update:

As always, thank you for your faithful support of our ministry in Quebec!

We are mid-way through the calendar year and we appear to be on-track to be fully funded for the remainder of 2022, praise God.

We did have a few supporters unable to continue in this year and / or having to make an adjustment down in their giving, but then also several of you made a choice to increase the amount you were supporting our ministry, which softened the overall impact.

In terms of being bi-vocational, our family business still supports a small portion of our income, however it has again halved since our update last fall, which provides some of its own challenges. We are prayerfully wrestling with its place in our lives, but for now are thankful that it provides our three young adults with part-time work.

Prayer Request #3: That the LORD would cause our business to stabilize at just the right level.

As the business is now taking very little of my time, and the church / associated ministries are ever-increasing in their complexity and demands, it's likely I will very soon be moving up in my hours at the church (currently I work four days a week). The organization is growing in its capacity to support itself but our fundraising allows for this growth to happen smoothly and not cause an undue burden.

Your Support = Less barriers to kingdom growth in greater Montreal!

Thank you again, and for your prayers as we seek to serve Jesus here in Montreal.

Blessings,

Brian, Severine, Kate, Ben, & Emma :)

Fall 2021

Tue, 23 Nov 2021 14:57:11 GMT

(Above: Summer Baptism Party at the river, five new believers baptized!)

I've realized it is high time for another update (how the months slip by) and so much has happened since Spring. As usual I'll stick to the highlights and post lots of pictures. :)

Ministry Highlights

Praise God, churches in Quebec are able to meet with very few restrictions! All of our congregations are able to gather without having to split into multiple services. You can check out all of what we have going on at our shiny new website , which now after much labor is FINALLY finished (including the French side .):

We are also thankful that (so far) we are not required to limit entry to only the vaccinated. If you didn't know, Quebec has locked almost everyone into a vaccine passport system that makes vaccination mandatory for most public spaces (excluding only things deemed "essential" like shopping, picking up take-out, or worship services). Like everywhere, this debate has the ability to divide. Prayer Request #1: Pray for unity in the gospel and for the continued freedom to gather in the name of Jesus without increased restrictions.

In the summer we were still able to gather large groups outside and celebrated five baptisms within our English congregations (also see photo at top):

Prayer Request #2: Pray for protection over these young believers, and for the network of folks they now can share the gospel with.

In August I preached to three of our congregations on "Who do you say I am?" as a part of our series in the Gospel of Mark. You can catch the whole Downtown service here (sermon itself starts around 21:30):

In October I preached at Reach MTL for the first time, one of the church revitalization projects in the West Island of Montreal we've been involved in over the years. We had taken a pause on our Mark series in October to do a short run on "Lament & Joy." You can catch my sermon on "Joy" by tapping the graphic below (goes to Facebook, sermon itself starts around 11:00):

Over the summer and in partnership with SEMBEQ (our local, French denominational seminary) we relaunched our church planting, competency-based Masters program "Academy in Context" as Movement Seminary . I worked with Dwight and our graphic designer on the rebrand and built an all-new website for it which you can check out here:

This new seminary is going to play a huge role in bringing church planters into Quebec as they get to spend time IN churches, serving while studying and developing the specific competencies that make for successful church planting teams.

And in addition to accepting several new church planting students this fall, Movement Seminary also launched "Courses for Everyone," an eight-week, three-course program that meets once a month, in partnership with ten other churches in Montreal via " Movement Montreal " (another ministry initiative we're involved in):

Movement Montreal has also partnered in developing a network of youth groups called You(th) Church:

(Above: One of the youth from our congregation helping lead worship at the You(th) Church rally)

Launched just before COVID hit, it had a bit of a rocky start, but it's up and running, gathering all of the youth groups together once a month, as well as providing service opportunities. I've tapped into my youth ministry roots to help launch a local youth church within Church 21, and this past summer they spent a week in the city studying and serving within the homeless population and the local food bank:

Prayer Request #3: Ask the LORD to raise up the next generation of church planting teams to saturate Quebec with the gospel!

Perhaps the most fun we had this Fall was when we gathered all of our English church congregations together into a single worship gathering for the first time in TWO YEARS:

Let's just say we had a lot of baby dedications to catch up on (immediately above)... ��

This Fall has also involved a lot of time investing in our leaders as we've sought to refine systems decimated by COVID and challenged by spreading out into multiple congregations. In each of the follow events, my specific role was to run logistics and do some of the teaching.

Lunchtime during our annual Leader's Retreat Day:

For our Children's Ministry Team Training Day we brought in a trainer to help equip us in working with kids who have experienced forms of trauma:

And for the first time since we spread out across multiple congregations, we brought together all four of our worship teams for an afternoon of vision & equipping and to bless them with food:

(The room pictured above for each of these events is Eglise Verdun, a French church revitalization project we've been involved in and who generously allows us to use their space free of charge. Our youth group nights meet there also.)

End of October, I and most of our pastoral team participated in the first-ever Xtreme Character Challenge (XCC) held in Quebec. It has been a dream for a while now to make this happen, and our hope in sending most of our staff was that we'd be able to rapidly migrate over into holding these in French within the next few years. If you don't know what XCC is, you can learn more about it here . It was the hardest thing I've ever had to do, but the life-change we saw in the men who were there was huge. Jesus works through this ministry and we're excited to have it in Quebec:

(Photo Credit: https://victorgavino.ca/quebec-xcc/ )

Just this past weekend we had our first post-XCC men's event (outdoors in subzero temperatures) where we shared about our experience and challenged the men in a number of areas, including the pursuit of brotherhood (not going into battle alone). Prayer Request #4: Pray for our men to become sold out for Jesus and the mission.

There is always more to include than is reasonable, but just a few additional bullet points:

In September we successfully completed the 2022 budgeting process, which is always a massive project, including gathering all of our members into the world's most challenging Zoom call. ��
Still working with our corporate lawyer to set up a new legal charter to separate out our parachurch operations which are set to massively expand (see notes on Movement Seminary & Movement Montreal above). Now looking like this will be mid-2022 to launch.
I'm wrapping up the Eldership process with four candidates and should be presenting them to our congregations as potential Elder / Pastors in January.
We're continuing to press the fight with MindGeek (parent company of PornHub), protests are now monthly outside of their building. By having them less often, we anticipate being able to involve more churches and have a bigger presence. Prayer Request #5: For government pressure / regulation to increase on this industry.

(Photo Credit: Jessica Bernier Photography )

Family Highlights

Despite the "lost months" of COVID we have much to be thankful for as a family. In the last six months we've celebrated three birthdays, Ben turning 15, Emma turning 14, and Kate turning 17 (and us feeling all the older for it!).

Kate continues to create brilliantly entertaining games:

And yes, she is still working on her music but there have been several false starts in terms of production relationships. She's back to self-producing but working with a friend and enjoying that a lot. We (like you) eagerly anticipate her releasing more songs, but in the meantime are enjoying the world-building she's doing around her forthcoming album (e.g., the game pictured above is actually related to her music).

Ben is nearly as tall as I am now, and has become a weightlifting partner, which is very fun for both of us. Despite COVID, he's managed to maintain a significant number of friendships through online gaming, which he squeezes in between school, chores, and work:

Emma continues to be our baker and reader. If she's not doing school or work, she's often reading or crafting something in the kitchen. I failed to get pictures before we ate them, but she recently tried her hand at a couple of French pastries: Madeleines & Macarons.

And this past summer we were (finally!) able to make a visit to family in Oregon & Washington. Thank you so much for those of you who prayed for us on this request from our last report, very shortly after we asked for prayer, Air Canada refunded our Canadian tickets which we had been unable to use for two years, which allowed us to find tickets from within the U.S. (Boston to PDX) and that made it possible to go even under the COVID travel restrictions, praise God for answered prayer!

We would have liked to see more people but out of respect for my parent's health we pretty much stuck to family activities, such as disc golf and a beach day:

In addition to managing our home & the children's education, hosting dinner guests, ministering to women / pastor's wives in our church, AND helping run the homeschool group we're a part of, Severine continues to find a bit of time to paint and has had some new "patrons" find her on the Gallea marketplace :

And I continue to write (or re-write in this case):

Support Raising Highlights

2022 Funding Update:

As always, thank you for your faithful support of our ministry in Quebec!

As of now, we are fully funded for 2021, praise God. He has been faithful to provide and kept us in His hands.

Looking ahead to 2022, we anticipate receiving approximately 25,000 CAD in support (give or take depending on the USD/CAD exchange rate throughout 2022) based on our current support team commitments.

I have worked diligently over the last two years to adjust our organizational structure to become more self supporting, and are closer to that goal than ever before. COVID-19 has made a few variables harder to anticipate with certainty, such as the timing of new church planters joining our team and their own fundraising efforts (part of which feeds into our organizational overhead, in addition to the shared congregational overhead between our six congregations and various parachurch ministries). On paper everything adds up but making the assumption that one or more of these elements will fall short in some way, I project a general operational shortfall of approximately 2,500 CAD (or about $2,000 USD).

As an exercise in wisdom and a hedge against a shortfall outcome, we are making it our goal to raise an additional $2,500 CAD for 2022.

*If each member of our current support team increased their 2022 donation by 10%, this shortfall would be immediately covered.*

And if you would like to help with a one-time donation, just tap the button immediately below.

In terms of being bi-vocational, our family business still supports a portion of our income, however it has continued to decline bit by bit over the last year. It may be related to the general challenges facing the U.S. economy right now, but regardless the LORD is sovereign. Prayer Request #6: That the LORD would cause our business to stabilize at just the right level.

Thank you for all your prayers for us, and please let us know how we can be praying for you!

Blessings,

Brian, Severine, Kate, Ben, & Emma :)

Spring 2021

Mon, 26 Apr 2021 01:05:05 GMT

At risk of sounding like the the Apostle Paul, "I have desired for some time to write to you to tell you of the mighty works of Jesus in building his church!" Yet the press of ministry these past six months has been so all-encompassing, the pitch of the battle so relentless, finding a moment to do so has been difficult. Even now I feel the weight of things undone as I pause to write this update.

And yet glorifying the name of God by publicly extolling his works is the "one great end" of all of this hustle, and so I am desirous to see that he gets his due. Here's a bit of a snapshot of the last six months:

Ministry Highlights

Winter in Montreal has meant another COVID-19 lockdown, this time much longer and much more severe. Our homes were closed to visitors, all restaurants and gyms closed, even a nightly curfew was imposed where we couldn't leave our homes past 8pm. Again church expression was forced online:

In February I preached on stewardship as a part of our "Remodel" series. You can catch the whole service here (sermon itself starts around 25:50):

Overall winter was a hard time, and yet Jesus was still at work. More were added to our number during this season, and when we were (finally!) allowed to gather in our various locations this spring, we celebrated the new individuals and families joining our church and mission.

One challenge unique to our location on the south shore was that we lost our in-person meeting space, but then (praise God!) we gained an even better one. A French congregation from our denomination had (sadly) closed their doors four years ago, leaving the building empty:

Unlike our previous meeting location, this building is almost exactly as the center of what we call the Montérégie region, the south of Montreal proper (we'd be in the red section below, close to the 'o' in Roussillon):

The church has a lighthouse theme going, with a small lighthouse outside and a tapestry on the inside with an inscription that translates roughly into "A light at the center of the Montérégie region." But no light has shown out of that space for four years. Now that we have limited ability to meet in groups of up to twenty-five again, we've been able to resume gathering in our locations and make use of this space for the first time. And it's hard to convey how excited we are to be the ones that Jesus chose to restore the light in this space.

Let's just say, VERY excited.

Already, neighbors have inquired about the sudden and obvious activity in the church building, and we are looking forward to the moment where we can fully engage the neighborhood under reduced restrictions that would allow us to gather more people and / or at least hold events outdoors.

In the meantime we are thankful for new faces that have joined with us there, within the small capacity we have to welcome them, and are praying for a greater allowance from the government.

(Immediately above: Severine reading scripture on a Sunday)

We (very briefly) had a much greater gathering allowance for Easter weekend, which we capitalized on by having all five of our locations gather in two back-to-back services downtown at an Anglican Cathedral where we currently rent office space and broadcast online from (see picture at top). That was short-lived and we're back to the government allowing only twenty-five for the time being. Pray for greater allowances!

Our church is currently running a couple of Alpha Courses online, one downtown and one in the south shore that we are helping with. There are at least seven folks exploring faith through this series, which is amazing. You can be praying for those folks as they wrestle with Jesus and the good news!

There is so much more to share but just to rapid-fire include some other exciting stuff I've been working on:

As of January I've resumed full oversight of the financial systems of our Canadian organization, as well as successfully transitioned our U.S. legal entity to a fresh set of board directors. Now overseeing both sets of books and the related legal filings.
Currently working with our corporate lawyer to set up a new legal charter to separate out our parachurch operations which are set to massively expand (more on that next time).
Bringing four guys through the final year of our Eldership process over the next seven months, two of which are set to be church planters.
Just starting in on the process of bringing yet another missionary couple up to Quebec from the U.S. to be involved in church planting, arrival target of Summer of 2022.
Building a fancy new website that reflects our new multiple location structure (you're seeing the very first public sneak-peek of it right here):

I'm looking forward to preaching a couple times over the next few months as we start off a new series in the Gospel of Mark:

And also to staying up late to pray as our church tackles a week of 24/7 prayer for the very first time:

We're going to build a prayer room somewhere in our house and our kids are excited to be able to get up in the middle of the night to pray. :)

Our battle against MindGeek/PornHub continues, literally standing outside the building with signs (better signs now) and in the past months we have seen huge moves of God. Visa & Mastercard have both cut ties with the pornography industry, and partly in response to this and other pressures from the government of Canada, PornHub removed more than 10 MILLION pornographic videos from their website, nearly 75% of their content that they were unable to verify who was depicted. The've also removed their "download button" which was making the permanent removal of sex crimes videos nearly impossible. Canada and Montreal are starting to own this problem and call this company to account.

There are still huge challenges ahead but Jesus is answering this prayer, keep praying!

(Above: Ben, Kate, and a hint of Emma in the background, protesting in front of the MindGeek world headquarters, along with about twelve other people on International Women's Day.)

Again, you can follow this effort by joining the facebook group here: facebook.com/arreterexploitationhub

One project I haven't been involved in yet but want you to know about is the new Acts 29 Canada Podcast our team has been working on:

Already several episodes have come out dealing with issues such as "Should churches in Canada be gathering? (considering the laws against gathering in some provinces), "Rethinking Discipleship, and "Mental Wellness." You can find these and more here: https://acts29canada.com/podcast-001/

Finally, this past March we celebrated 11 years since moving to Quebec!

Hard to believe it's been that long, but as I always say, all you have to do is look at our giant children and reality hits...gone are the days where we see these little faces:

Family Highlights

One thing we WERE allowed to do this past winter was go snowboarding/skiing (Ben & Emma pictured, note the contrast with the above photo):

(Though if you can believe it, we were still required to wear covid face masks on the slopes!)

I finally pulled the trigger on publishing a couple of "just for fun" writing projects that I had picked at on weekends for the last couple of years:

(You can find them on amazon by tapping the photos above.)

And as mentioned in our last update, in January Kate released her very first single: "Riding a Tiger"!! Professionally produced & mastered, it was a huge project and we're very proud of all of her hard work. She also invested many, many hours making her own music video (with some lighting and filming assistance from Papa & Mama).

You can find her song on every major music platform, and her music video on her artist website . :)

Kate is currently working on self-producing an album full of songs. It might be a while before she finishes it, but it's going to be awesome. :)

Severine has continued painting and even has a couple of larger canvas pieces hanging for sale in a massage therapy office in Montreal (one of them pictured below):

Her COVID-restricted birthday activities largely centered around shopping for art supplies:

Ben has been working on pre-filming a bunch of content for an upcoming gamer themed YouTube channel and Twitch stream, no pictures yet, more on that next time probably.

And Emma has continued to sharpen her cooking and baking skills. Here's her putting the finishing touches on a cake for my birthday:

Part of being in lockdown involves playing games as a family, which feeds into Kate's other creative passion, game design. Pics of us playing her latest game "Realms":

(She made everything by hand except for the dice.)

One of the saddest things from the past six months is that yet AGAIN we made the painful decision to cancel a trip to visit family, friends, and supporters in Oregon & Washington. :/ We just don't know when we'll be back out to see everyone, these are challenging times. We miss you all very much but trust that God will make a way for us to visit you someday soon. Prayer toward that end would be appreciated.

Support Raising Highlights

Thank you again for your faithful support of our ministry in Quebec! :) A number of our supporters responded to our call late last year to give 5% or 10% more this year, which has been a huge encouragement.

As-is the nature of support raising, we've also had some folks who were not able renew for 2021, still leaving us with a (projected) gap in our funding for this year.

As a result I have about seven months to raise approximately $7,000 USD ($9,500 CAD).

Will you pray with us toward this goal?

And if you would like to help with a one-time donation, just tap the button immediately below.

Thank you for your prayers for us, and please let us know how we can be praying for you!

Blessings,

Brian, Severine, Kate, Ben, & Emma :)

Fall 2020

Mon, 26 Oct 2020 18:03:47 GMT

Well it's been a crazy season of pandemic-style ministry...so much so that it's been over five months since our last report (the Summer 2020 report didn't even happen!). There's so much to share that right away I'm going to mix up the format of these updates and start with our ministry highlights:

Ministry Highlights

After a long season of broadcasting services online and small group Zoom meetings and outdoor events and attempting to HOLD the center of our church TOGETHER, we FINALLY were able to resume worshiping in-person (socially distanced) on the weekends in the movie theatre downtown, in both English and French:

Though greatly limited in our seating capacity, there were enough high-risk folks and medical professionals who couldn't safely attend that we were able to accommodate everyone who could safely meet up in person, as well as continuing our live broadcasts for everyone at home.

However our wonderful reunion was short-lived. :/

October rolled around and Montreal went back into a modified lockdown. Initially it appeared as though we wouldn't be able to meet in any sized group and that the Quebec government was discriminating against churches and other religious services by allowing other types of meetings to continue. All of the denominations (and even other religious groups) banded together to fight for an end to these discriminatory policies, and by God's grace, when a full-lockdown of Montreal came a couple of weeks later, the government included a provision for religious groups of 25 or less to start meeting. Almost everything else is shut down, but the churches are open!

In response our English & French congregations immediately split up into little groups of 25 or less meeting across the greater Montreal area, wherever we could find spaces to gather (the theatre where we usually meet is still forced to be closed). Here is a picture from our first-ever worship gathering on the south shore (all spaced out by family units and masked):

The picture at the very top this page is of Kate & Ben greeting folks and ticking them off our registration / contact tracing page for this same south shore gathering. (What strange times we live in!)

Our second week into this new arrangement, I found myself preaching at four different gatherings in total, first downtown Montreal at 9am and 11am (which was also our live broadcast one):

And then I had to hustle down to the south shore to do a third at 1:30pm, and then drive out for a fourth at 4:30 pm in the west island (about 40 minutes apart by car). I felt like one of those ye-old circuit riding preachers of the 1800's...all I was missing was a horse:

However four locations totalling 100 people still falls far short of being able to accommodate everyone, and no room for visitors, which is a weird and unfortunate problem to have. So we've labored to create more and more local spaces for this type of safe gathering. This weekend we actually held SIX services in FOUR locations, including two in the south shore. To keep track of it all, we have to ask people to register ahead of time:

That also allows us to comply with the contact tracing rules. Obviously one person can't be everywhere on the above schedule so some of those will have live preaching an others will watch the broadcast version, but still get the have the in-person community experience.

This next weekend we're opening a seventh location in "NDG", a neighborhood just west of downtown and the part of Montreal Severine grew up in! Honestly, it's very exciting to see the gospel being preached in all these neighborhoods all over Montreal. Only our God can take something like a pandemic and use it for good in a city like Montreal.

We've just wrapped up a sermon series on "Who is God?" based on Exodus 34:6-7 where the LORD describes himself to Moses:

You can find older messages on our website , and if you ever want to catch a live broadcast, it'll be available at 11:00 AM EST on church21.online.church and on our Facebook page .

Another ministry-first, thanks to COVID, was running the annual members meeting by Zoom, trying to walk through a 500 line budget spreadsheet without putting everyone to sleep:

Our church has always felt called to help address the issue of human trafficking, and in line with that, our fight against the pornography industry continues. One of our international church members lost their work status for now and has decided to devote herself to leading the charge on this movement locally. Thanks to her leadership, protests outside MindGeek (parent company of Pornhub) world headquarters are happening weekly now:

You can follow this effort by joining the facebook group here: facebook.com/arreterexploitationhub

This is only scratching the surface of all that Jesus is doing in Montreal, and what ministry has been like these last five months. That said, we are enormously grateful to be involved, and for all of the amazing people He has added to our team over the years.

And this month we celebrated an extra special anniversary, 10 YEARS of ministry with Dwight & Jessica Bernier:

Hardly a day goes by that we're not thankful for this "arranged marriage" Jesus put us into way back at the beginning of our ministry adventure in Quebec. What a blessing it has been to be partners in ministry with them! Please be praying for us as we look at the next ten years, and the energy to keep up with Jesus and everything He has planned. Here are a few specific request that you can be praying for with us through this winter:

Continued favor with the government, that we can continue to meet and in larger settings.
Wisdom and endurance for our teams as they continuously seek to minister in these changing & challenging times.
That Jesus would reach the hearts of Montrealers all across the city.

Family Highlights

Despite all of the challenges of life under COVID restrictions, we were still able to take our annual camping trip with friends. We weren't 100% sure it would be open, but in the end it worked out...except for the fact that the shower facilities were closed the whole time. Other systems* were employed:

(*Severine powdering the hair of our co-camping friend Sheila.)

Personally I had a bit of time off last week to catch up on writing. I'm never as far along as I'd like but I have several projects I'm picking at, including a parenting / discipleship book I've been meaning to finish for years. Finally put some real time into it last week, and I hope to release it not too far into the New Year, along with a few other smaller projects. In the meantime you can find all of my existing work at brianmichaelstegner.com

Severine has released another collection of watercolor paintings and continues to see them sell, which is exciting (and pays for the paint supplies!). You can follow her painting journey on Instagram at @pulpandpigmentco and visit her shop on Etsy .

We always knew she could sing, but during the pandemic Katelyn has taught herself the ukulele, discovered a talent for songwriting, written a dozen really amazing songs, and caught the eye of a music producer friend of ours. She's had three recording sessions so far and, as of this past weekend, I think they've captured all of the pieces for her first single. The mix should be completed by next week, and then it will be off to be mastered. As parents, we are both proud and mildly bewildered by how quickly this has all happened. You can follow her progress on instagram at @alora_farenweh

All three of the kids have resumed school and are working part time for our business, so these are very busy days for all. Ben & Emma have grown up quite a bit during the COVID months. Recent apple picking day:

And all three kids have also officially outgrown Severine, who is now the shortest member of our family, if you can believe it. She's not in this shot but here's photographic proof of their tall-ness:

Severine's other major project this fall has been her participation in the "board" of the homeschool group our kids are a part of. There have been huge headaches to work through with constantly changing rules for gathering. Overcoming is a big theme of life right now. She has spent quite a bit of time working with these two amazing ladies over the last few months to make it all happen:

In all, much to be thankful for, including God's provision! I'll wrap up with a quick update on our support raising progress:

Support Raising Highlights

I just want to start by saying thank you again to our support team. The unwavering faithfulness of your support of our ministry and family during this unprecedented time has been a huge blessing and encouragement to us.

Up until this fall, I had been working three days a week for the church (at least on paper) and putting the other two days into completing the transition of our home business back into our home. However after about a three year hiatus, I have resumed the lead on the financial management of the legal entity that houses our churches, church planting projects and related ministries. Another pastor on our team who had been running things over these last three years needed a transition and I felt like the timing was right to step back into that role. I'm thankful for the systems he built as our organization grew quite a bit in both size and complexity during those years, and now we are working to finish the handoff.

The flip-side of this is that I am no longer able to get by working any less than four days a week at the church, the job is just too huge. Toward that end, we've hired someone to take some of the customer service for our business off my shoulders and their training is just about complete, so the timing of everything is working out OK, but due to COVID-19 I have not had the opportunities to continue support raising as I had originally planned.

I am working with the church elders to determine what is possible for 2021, how we might get to four days a week financially with some adjustments, but as there are few guarantees in the months to come under the pandemic, I'm moving forward assuming that we will need to fundraise this additional amount for 2021.

Praise God, with existing commitments from supporters and the churches we serve, we are already 85% funded for our 2021 ministry year, and we are prayerfully seeking the LORD to provide $704 USD / $930 CAD in new monthly support to get us to 100%:

If you would like to helps us reach 100%, just use the button at the bottom of this page.

Thank you for your prayers for us, and please let us know how we can be praying for you!

Blessings

Brian, Severine, Kate, Ben, & Emma :)

Spring 2020

Thu, 14 May 2020 22:37:02 GMT

As I sit down to write this quarterly report, I am finding it hard to comprehend that it's only been three months since I last did this. It feels more like nine months ago, a year even.

And what a "year" it's been!

The very first time I read about this "new virus" in Wuhan, China, I remember thinking to myself, "I will always remember this moment as being when I first learned of the virus that destroyed the world." I briefly pictured what it would be like to live in a post-apocalyptic scenario...and then I went on with my life because my brain is always having random thoughts like that and I've learned to ignore them.

Thankfully my brain was mostly wrong and we haven't experienced a total meltdown of society, and yet we are in the midst of something historic, something that is going to leave a lasting mark on the way that we do life across the globe.

But the amazing thing in the midst of all of this is what we're seeing Jesus do through the Internet during this time. It appears that unprecedented numbers of people are hearing the gospel and responding. And of course it's hard to know how accurate any statistics ever are, all the more so as we're all confined to our homes and families, but in as much as researchers are able to verify anything they say, God appears to be on the move. Just like the gospel initially spread along those reliable Roman roads, the gospel now is reaching new areas and new hearts through the superhighways of the the online world!

I'll detail more in a moment about how our own local ministry is going, as well as a family update, but first here is an update on where we're at in terms of our support raising project:

Support Raising Highlights

First of all, I just want to say thank you to all of our supporters. We have not had a single one drop out during this uncertain time, and for that we are very grateful, both to you in your faithfulness to us and our ministry, and to Jesus in his provision for our family. However there still have been a couple of recent challenges:

1. Following up my solo "book tour" visit to the west coast, the next stage of our support raising efforts involved plans for a whole-family trip to Oregon & Washington State in June. Initial planning included my being scheduled to preach at one church and doing Q&A at two others, but as of now we are having to consider this trip indefinitely postponed.

2. Our online business lost another 20% of its revenue over the last couple of months, which forced a staffing move that we had been seeking to avoid: As of a few weeks ago we had to let our manager go (who was also our very last "employee") and migrate the business back into our home. It was just not possible for us to pay him a full time salary anymore, and we had not yet managed to become fully funded to work full-time at the church, so: o ur new arrangement is that I am working three days a week with the church, and two days a week running the business as a self-employed person. While this means a significant cut to my additional "volunteer" hours at the church as well as a split in my focus, it does represent a sustainable income for us while we continue to work towards being fully funded for full-time ministry work. That would allow us to again hire out some of the business work and free me for more ministry hours each week. A blessing in the midst of all of this is that our children now have the opportunity to work with us and are each putting in many hours each week. Our homeschooling efforts now extend into personal finance: learning about giving, saving, and investing, as well as starting to save up for college (it begins...).

As a result of the above two realities, we've re-targeted our short-term fundraising goal to be fully funded for those three days a week. Thanks to several one-time donors that helped get us started in our first year, we are funded through the end of this year, but are only 87% funded on an on-going basis. We are looking to raise annual commitments of an additional $450 USD a month (equal to about $600 CAD at the current exchange rate).

And that's one thing that has been really positive in the last little while, the USD / CAD exchange rate is EXTREMELY favorable at the moment:

That means for any of our donors in the U.S., your gifts are going a lot farther than they normally would when they're converted into CAD. So as a practical reality for those of you who tend to give annually, now is a great time to make that donation and have an extra 10% thrown on top by the exchange rate.

Want to help take a bite out of that monthly target? Contact us !

Ministry Highlights

Obviously everything about ministry has changed in the last couple of months, but just prior to when things got crazy we had two last moments of normalcy on one weekend:

First, we had another one of our baptism parties and saw several people from both our French & English congregations be baptized. This included two brand-new believers in our English church, both of which are coming out of an occult background. Severine has had the joy and opportunity to invest time into both of these young women's lives (one pictured above under praying hands, one below), but overall we're just awed by the work of Jesus to free people from spiritual bondage of the most aggressive kind.

Severine also provided translation for the event (French into English), which was a first for her! :)

The next day the kids and I, along with a few others from our church, participated in a protest outside the world headquarters of PornHub, the largest central repository for the hosting of pornography online.

The aim of this protest / moment is to draw attention to how their business model supports human trafficking, and specifically the trafficking and abuse of minors, all in the hopes of it coming under regulation. It's way past time for the government to start taking this issue seriously. You can learn more and sign the petition at traffickinghub.com

But then after that eventful weekend COVID-19 really hit and, sadly, this was the last time our church was all together. We had no idea. :/

Like everyone else, we had to very rapidly adapt. So many things were put on pause as we worked out the technology side of keeping the church connected despite a total ban on gathering. The anchor point for both our French & English congregations has become the Church Online Platform. You can can check each of them out below (English & French):

https://church21.online.church/

https://eglise21.online.church/

If you notice and are wondering about the three different logos on their video, our French congregation has combined efforts with both our French house church team in the west island (Le Clocher) and the re-plant we're involved with in the suburb of Verdun (Eglise de Verdun).

As an English congregation we use the above online platform for daily morning prayer as well as our weekend "gatherings" (and set up for Sunday morning operations never looked so strange):

That's me trying to manage both our broadcast platform and the live feed on Facebook, while displaying it for our family to join in worship. Based on the analytics from each, just on the English side we're reaching something like 150-250 sets of eyes each Sunday morning, plus additional views as the content is watched later. If ever you want to join us to see a live broadcast, you can go to the link listed above at 9:45 AM EST. We just started a new series based on the book Emotionally Healthy Spirituality:

It's a topical study, but still very grounded in the Bible, and already we are beginning to see some of the positive effects of opening up on this topic. If you've not read the book or studied this material, you can join with us! Videos of the past weeks are available on our website here:

https://church21.ca/sermons/

Speaking of which, this time has also allowed me to complete some long-awaited updates to our church website:

And of course we Zoom quite heavily for staff huddles, meetings, Elder Board meetings, and all of our local city groups.

In sum, I have spent many long hours in the past weeks to help provide technical builds and support, as well as act as a clearinghouse for communications via social media and email. But it's all worth it as we've seen Jesus work in usual ways to reach people who would otherwise never darken the door of a church. We've had fourteen people indicate they've made a decision for Jesus in the past five weeks through the online platform. The anonymity of that system makes it hard to confirm / follow up with these folks but if even half of them are legitimately making this kind of decision, we are thrilled. Our hope is to draw them into the light and towards an outdoor baptism this summer (if the law allows).

Pray for these new believers that Jesus will complete the work he has begun within them!

Family Highlights

A few months ago I found this video we took of our kids the day before we left for our move to Quebec:

How different they look today!

That's Severine and the kids from a few weeks ago when we went on a family hike (to try and stave off going stir-crazy in the house after so many weeks of social distancing!). We've tried to get outdoors each week to either go hiking, walking, or biking. That has sometimes involved picking creative destinations:

Hm...I'm just noticing how huddled we look in both of those pictures...here's one where you can actually see some of our faces:

Mother's Day gaming this past Sunday. :)

Seriously though, as homeschoolers we've experienced significantly less disruption than many other families and don't have too much to complain about. I've been able to continue to work and Severine has been able to continue to homeschool the kids. We do very much miss our friends and family and are greatly anticipating the day that things go back to normal (even if that's a new normal, we'll take it). One of the hardest things has been figuring out how to care for Severine's mom who lives alone in the city and is high-risk for COVID-19. Severine very carefully visits every two weeks, bringing groceries, home cooked food, and (properly distanced) human contact.

Thank you for your prayers for us, and please let us know how we can be praying for you during this time as well!

Blessings

Brian, Severine, Kate, Ben, & Emma :)

P.S.

Severine hasn't gotten tired of painting yet:

Winter 2020

Sat, 08 Feb 2020 00:03:15 GMT

Who is under that hood? It's Emma making snowballs! Severine and the kids went outside today to enjoy a crazy 30-40 cm of new snowfall (and it's not supposed to stop until tomorrow??).

Oh the joys of living in Canada! :)

Despite the cold it's been a very busy & fruitful winter. Here are our Support Raising, Ministry, & Family Highlights since our last update:

Support Raising Highlights

As of today there are nearly 2,000 copies of One Thousand Churches in circulation (counting both digital & print editions) in seven different countries. An additional 1,500 "page turns" have been counted by Amazon's Kindle Unlimited subscribers (folks who read books through a Netflix-style subscription). That's potentially hundreds of new hearts & minds turned towards the mission of Jesus in Quebec in prayer! We continue to hear from readers who have been touched by the book and are in awe of God's intricate plans to bring glory to his Son.

In November I had the opportunity to spend two weeks on a sort of "book tour" visiting with both supporters and church leaders all up and down the west coast.

I ended up driving well over a thousand miles, from Seattle to Portland to Corvallis, OR, hitting Albany & Lebanon, then back up through Portland and Seattle, out to Redmond, WA, then to Abbotsford, BC, and then back down to Rainer, WA. Then it was home again to Montreal by red-eye flight.

It was a fruitful time, resulting in many new relationships and several new supporters.

In December I had the opportunity to go on the Apologetics Canada Podcast to talk about the book and what Jesus is doing in Quebec. It was a huge opportunity to get the word out to their large listening audience. If you missed that you can catch it here:

Thank you (again) to everyone who has helped to share about the book. If you STILL haven't gotten yours yet, you can locate where to get a copy in your region here: stegnersonmission.org/books (and you'll also find five videos on that page explaining more about the book, why I wrote it, etc.).

If you believe your church would be interested in our mission, please message us so that we can send you a print copy to take to your missions board or pastor.

We've raised another 15% of our funding since our last update and are currently 55% funded!

Please be in prayer with us as we seek to be fully funded, and consider if God may be calling you to join with us !

Ministry Highlights

If you ever decide to plant a church (or several), give me a call first: there are a few things you should know, like how complex things get when you migrate your core leadership from two guys having coffee to a team of 15 on a shoestring budget and in two languages.

Answer: Very complex, very quickly.

For example, here is a shot from our leaders meeting we had a few Sundays ago:

Those are all leaders, meaning each represents anywhere from 3-10 folks who they themselves are leading, discipling, and shepherding.

That is JUST the English leaders. Add on to this that there is a whole other group of French leaders, each caring for more folks, you can see how quickly things can get crazy. Let's just say that the learning curve has been steep.

Yet it's so exciting to sit in a meeting of so many (young!) people who are incredibly gifted and incredibly serious about their neighbors and coworkers hearing the gospel, and seeing the many new and growing Christians in our church reach maturity in Christ.

We enjoyed a joint bilingual "Christmas" service in mid-December, packing out one of our theaters even after many students had left for Christmas break:

Despite all the challenges of growth, we're making a lot of organizational progress! Here are some of the projects I tackled as the Executive Pastor in the past few months...

1. Getting our org chart onto paper for deeper clarity within our church staff and leaders:

(Just imagine trying to explain that to someone verbally? Thrilled to finally have that on paper.)

2. Testing and validating a new online donation platform that allows us to receive Canadian donations with ZERO credit card fees ( see an example of it in use here ).

3. Migrating our staff onto a new payroll system that gives us more direct control as we add new missionaries, vocational students, and interns to our team:

4. Completing a long-overdue update to our policies and staff handbook, as well as implementing an annual review process for our staff to better monitor their work and health, promoting longevity:

5. A new project this winter has been to help Dwight (our founding pastor) with a project called Movement Montreal, which is working with churches across the downtown core of Montreal to collectively tackle demographic ministries in the city:

Our first project is in the area of discipling and mobilizing youth (ages 12 to 17). Our initial event is happening this upcoming February 21st. Please be in prayer for this first step. Already we have received God's favor in that the mayor of Montreal learned about this project and subsequently directed the City of Montreal to give us a small amount of funding, crazy! I have worked to build the branding & online platform, as well as provide operational coaching for our leader working over the youth ministry project. I anticipate significantly increasing my level of participation as the "Director of Operations" for this new ministry over the course of 2020.

And this weekend I'll be closing out our "Paranormal" Sermon series preaching on the subject of "The Occult":

It should be available via Apple Podcasts , Google Play , and Spotify by around February 13th.

Family Highlights

Severine and I have completely transitioned into the mindset of "parents of teenagers." Look how huge they are!

Yes, Katelyn IS taller than Severine now. I believe my wife will eventually be the shortest member of our family. :)

In step with our family discipleship strategy, I took Emma on her "coming of age 12-year-old trip with Papa" this past November. We spent a few days together hiking and exploring upstate New York:

And then ultimately she had wanted to go to NYC to see a broadway show, so we spent the second half of the trip there:

It was a very significant time for our relationship, and marked the end of an era for Severine and I as parents of "children."

Ben is fully back into ball hockey as a goalie, and he and I got to enjoy an NHL pre-season game together:

And Kate and Severine continue to explore their artistic gifts:

Severine created the above as an illustration to accompany an article discussing mental health in an online literary magazine You can check out the full magazine & article here .

That's it for this time. Have questions about our ministry? Want to contact us for any reason? Please message us !

Blessings!

Brian, Severine, Kate, Ben, & Emma :)

West Coast Book Tour 2019

183:776821787 (Brian Stegner) — Fri, 15 Nov 2019 21:00:57 GMT

In case you haven’t already seen, I just released my newest book ‘One Thousand Churches: A Movement to Saturate Quebec with the Gospel of Jesus’.

And in just under a week I'll be leaving for a 'west coast book tour' in Oregon & Washington. Sadly, Severine and the kids won't be joining me for this trip, but if you'd like to connect with me I'll be having TWO 'Stegners On Mission' open house events in the SE Portland area:

Saturday, November 23rd - 3:30 PM to 5:00 PM

Sunday, November 24th - 2:00PM to 3:30 PM

Come enjoy some fellowship and hear about what Jesus is doing in Quebec! I will be:

1. Sharing a bit about our ministry.

2. Answering questions.

3. Giving away FREE copies of 'One Thousand Churches’ (while supplies last).

BONUS: There will also be light refreshments. :)

If you would like to come to one of these open house events, please contact me for the additional details.

Thanks very much and hope to see you there!

Fall 2019

Mon, 28 Oct 2019 16:54:30 GMT

Fall is upon us, school has resumed, and the typical September to August ministry year has launched like a rocket! :)

Here are our Support-Raising, Ministry, & Family Highlights since our last update:

Support-Raising Highlights

The big news is that my new book is out! It's available both in print and on Kindle:

The book launch went really well, over 1700 digital copies were downloaded for Kindle:

And the feedback has been amazing. My primary aim in writing this book was to help folks outside of Quebec learn more about the need and opportunity for the gospel here, however I've heard from many INSIDE Quebec who have expressed how the book has helped to crystallize their own understanding of what Jesus is doing in our province.

Thank you to everyone who has helped to share about the book. If you haven't gotten yours yet, you can locate where to get a copy in your region here: stegnersonmission.org/books (and you'll also find five videos on that page explaining more about the book, why I wrote it, etc.)

If you believe your church would be interested in our mission, please message us so that we can send you a print copy to take to your missions board or pastor.

We're still plugging away with support-raising. Between individual supporters and a small amount of internal funding from our own French & English churches that is slated to start in 2020, we are 40% funded (praise God!), and so as of October 1st I was officially added to the church staff payroll for two days a week.

It's a start, but we're still on a short runway financially before we need to make the transition to full-time. Please be in prayer with us as we seek to be fully funded, and consider if God may be calling you to join with us !

Ministry Highlights

Fall is always a busy time and this year was no exception! On top of finishing the book, here is a quick rundown of the highlights:

In September, I coordinated a massive re-orientation day for all of our volunteer leaders:

We lured them into coming early with coffee and muffins and ran them all through the complexities of setting up and tearing down for TWO simultaneous worship services in a movie theatre building. After the worship gathering, we followed up with an updated child safety training for all of our kids zone, directors, and security workers.

Later in September, we held our annual leadership retreat:

Our theme for this year was on prayer. My role related to this event was to administrate and coordinate all the moving parts, help set the schedule and manage our time, MC the event, work with the camp, etc. It was a very fruitful time for our team and has been super important in setting the tone for our year.

That same weekend, we celebrated eight years as an English church and two years on the French side of things with an all church picnic in a park near our Sunday gathering (right in downtown Montreal):

We held our first ever members meeting with our new, "larger" membership, functioning off of the new bylaws we adopted over the summer. It was a step towards a hybrid model between elder-led & congregationalism that we call 'Lead by Leaders', whereby we extended membership from just the elders down to include the leadership of our church. I'm not sure this has been tried anywhere else before so it's a bit of an experiment, but so far it's working and we've had interest from other churches in our denomination regarding this new model.

This past week, Severine and I attended the bi-annual Church Planting Canada Congress which was held in Montreal this year:

We were able to connect with leaders from all over Canada, including heads of ministries and denominations, and to hand out copies of the book to help spread the message of what Jesus is doing here.

And since August, in addition to doing monthly financial updates in the English service, I've begun doing them in the French service also, mostly translated but with the goal of slowly doing more and more of it in French (yikes!):

Severine helped organize an opportunity to serve a young single mother in our community by doing a cleanup in her home with members of our City Group.

And she helped to organize and lead a women's retreat for twelve of the wives of our pastors, pastoral apprentices, and board members (she's better at administrative work than she's likely to admit!). :)

And this fall I opened up our 'Everyday Jesus' sermon series with a look at living and ministering in 'The City'. It's available via Apple Podcasts , Google Play , and Spotify .

Family Highlights

We attempted to take advantage of the last few warm / dry days we could expect from Montreal weather to do a final family bike ride:

We enjoyed a visit from my parents, which included apple picking:

And a day-trip up to Quebec City:

And Severine continues to amaze all of us with her watercoloring!

Have questions about our ministry? Want to contact us for any reason? Please message us !

Blessings!

Brian, Severine, Kate, Ben, & Emma :)

Summer 2019

Thu, 22 Aug 2019 15:30:07 GMT

Our summer has been a busy one! Here are some Support-Raising, Ministry, & Family Highlights since our last update:

Support-Raising Highlights

We have officially reached just over 20% of our fundraising goal! :) We're not at 50% at this point like we had hoped but we've also been coming to terms with the complexity of support raising WHILE in ministry, and trying to do most of it remotely (versus on the road & in-person). However Jesus is faithful and we haven't run out of runway quite yet on our financial situation. It's worked out for me to pick up about 10 hours a week of customer service work to supplement our income (which is great!) which has reduced my volunteer hours at the church for the time being.

We're trying to hold off on stepping onto the church payroll until we're funded for at least 3 days a week, a goal we think is achievable before the end of the year.

On an exciting note, I'm in the final stages of self-publishing a book on Amazon about the modern church planting movement in Quebec:

Its publication should help expand our reach in terms of ministry partners. We'll be initiating a fresh round of support raising efforts in tandem with its release next month. It will be available in both ebook for Kindle and in print.

Interested in joining our support team? Tap here !

Ministry Highlights

In additional to preaching and pastoral care work, some of the more "administrative" projects I've been working on over this summer to support our pastors, staff, and leaders:

- New membership for church leaders

- Amendments to our church bylaws

- Planning our annual Church Leadership Retreat

- Restructuring of our leadership equipping meetings & coaching schedule

- Orientation / Training for our City Group Leaders

- New downtown City Group leader training

- Codification of our Provincial, Regional, and Local Vision, Mission, Strategies, & Objectives

- Migration of our historical policy documents to the new shared staff Google Drive

- Online filing system for all church document s

- Updating our church database

- Updating our various websites

- Training church staff on new digital filing system

- Taking on some new payroll & HR work

- Crafting the 2020 budget

- Preparations for the annual meetings of the board, members, and directors

You get the idea. Running a church of this size is a lot of work, especially as we deal with rapid growth, finding and training new leaders, new staff, new members, etc. We have wonderful challenges and opportunities!

Catch my latest sermon by tapping here . (EN in the above logo stands for 'English', as we also have French sermon podcast.)

Family Highlights

As of a couple days ago, Severine and I celebrated 17 years of marriage (crazy!).

This summer Severine has continued to explore her new love of watercolor:

Earlier we enjoyed some family time with Severine's mom at a Lakehouse:

And we're currently camping this week with friends & family, enjoying some final sunshine and rest before the intensity of the Fall:

That's it for now, watch for our next update and the launch of the book!

Thank you again for your prayers & support,

Brian & Severine

Spring 2019

Mon, 10 Jun 2019 20:50:01 GMT

Summer is nearly here! It's been a very busy Spring for our family. While support-raising has been top-of-mind, we've still been engaged in our volunteer ministries and in wrapping up a year of homeschooling. Here are some Support-Raising, Ministry, & Family Highlights from the last couple of months:

Support-Raising Highlights

Our support raising work has begun in-earnest, first with the launch of the website (where you probably are right now) followed by the first four batches of our support letters going out to the U.S.

We are currently working on our first batch of Canadian letters.

Live in the U.S. and didn't receive a copy? Or live in Canada or elsewhere and would like one?? Message us and we can get one to you in the next batch (Includes free Fridge Magnet!). :)

Already received one but unsure of how to join our support team? Tap here

We are pressing on towards the goals of being 50% funded by July , and 100% funded by September !

Ministry Highlights

Though we're still only volunteer at this point, this section could be way longer than you would ever want to read, so we're going to go with just the highlights of the highlights...

We held our second major Baptism Party here in Montreal. Six people were baptized and we heard testimonies of what Jesus has done in English, French, and even Portuguese!

We welcomed JD & family to Quebec as new church planters and enjoyed helping them unpack their moving truck into their new home with some of our 'city group' members (see Emma in the center above, JD is bottom right). Brian is working with JD now on getting him set up as church staff while he interns with our church planting region and finishes training & seminary classes.

We celebrated Good Friday in two languages with three of our regional churches gathered together in unity over the Lord's Supper and worship.

As of June 30th our English / French church body has been accepted as a full member of Association of Evangelical Baptist Churches in Quebec (AEBEQ). This was a long, complex process that Brian spearheaded which involved rewriting our church bylaws, memberizing our leaders, and passing a half-day review with denominational leaders.

Brian preached several times since the New Year, you can listen to one on the Atonement from this past Palm Sunday by tapping here .

Family Highlights

The past month and a half of our family-lives has been almost entirely dominated by the annual musical production of our homeschool co-op, The Learning Tree. Kate, Ben, & Emma were all cast as Von Trapp children in a modified Sound of Music show.

Kate was cast as Liesl, which means she got to sing the "16 going on 17" song, which is now permanently installed in all of our brains. :)

It was a first for all of them (and us) and proved to be an invaluable growing experience. Fourteen-hour practices all the final week capped by five performances in four days (whew!).

(Yes they have stage makeup on, don't tease Ben about it.) Severine even dusted off her old high-school & college drama skills and served as Stage Manager throughout. Brian helped with set up and teardown of the venue.

If possible, we'll provide a link to a full video version in a future update! We are very proud of all their hard work.

We also enjoyed a visit from Brian's sister Tera, who flew out in-part just to catch the show.

June 1st marked Ben's 13th birthday, so we are officially parents of TWO teenagers now. Pray for us...

That's it for now, watch for a summer update. And thank you again for your prayers as we follow Jesus on this new path!

Brian & Severine