(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):
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 :)
