Around Town: Baptize Canada, Jeffrey Greenman, Missional Leadership

Several local churches joined congregations across the nation last Sunday (June 8) as part of Baptize Canada. The purpose:

Baptize Canada represents a historic opportunity for churches across our nation to unite in celebration of new life in Christ.

On Pentecost Sunday, congregations from coast to coast will gather at outdoor venues and in churches to witness the public profession of faith through baptism, creating a powerful national testimony to the continuing work of the Holy Spirit in Canada.

Nine churches in this area took part:

• Avant Life Church (North Vancouver)
• The Way (Vancouver)
• Relate Church (Surrey)
• Richmond Pentecostal Church
• Forest City Church (Burnaby)
• Sonrise Church (Surrey)
• BURN Canada (Surrey)
• Aldergrove Alliance Church
• Above & Beyond Christian Fellowship (Abbotsford)

Forest City Church included the baptisms as part of its service at its Burnaby locations, with its YouTube coverage including this statement:

Today was a really special day at Forest City Church and across Canada – Baptize Canada Sunday, happening alongside Pentecost Sunday.

Pastor Amy reminded us that Pentecost is when the Holy Spirit came on the early believers, launching the church 2,000 years ago. This powerful moment gave them boldness and unity, and baptism became their public way to say, “I belong to Jesus.”

Here at Forest City, we celebrated 12 amazing people getting baptized in Christ Jesus – joining that Spirit-filled community. It’s exciting to be part of a movement that’s still alive and growing today!

The Way Church baptized people at both Jericho Beach and Cates Park. From its Facebook page:

What a powerful Pentecost Sunday – celebrating public declarations of faith through baptism, praying for more of the Holy Spirit and worshipping Jesus together.

We joined with @baptizecanada and over 50 churches across our nation, celebrating hundreds of baptisms – a unified declaration of new life in Christ from coast to coast.

Surely God is in this place. Holy Spirit, come!

The Way baptized several people at Jericho Beach in Vancouver and more at Cates Park in North Vancouver.

Avant Life North Shore posted on Facebook:

Powerful moments as we celebrated with our church family that decided to be baptised this weekend. The old has gone and the new has come! Never the same again.

Richmond Pentecostal posted on Facebook:

Baptism Sunday “I HAVE DECIDED!” This Pentecost Sunday, we partnered up with @baptizecanada, a movement of celebrating new life in Christ in Canada.

It was a privilege to celebrate our six baptisms that mostly came from our Alpha Canada programs! What a joy to witness God‘s power through their testimonies!

God is moving all around us in a mighty and a sure way! Be filled, RPC Church, this is a holy moment season. We’re coming alive in the power of the Holy Spirit! If you’d like to follow Jesus and get baptized, contact us or send us a dm!

Baptize Canada is already planning ahead for 2026; the date will be May 24.

Jeff Greenman interview

Jeff Greenman will stay on at Regent College as a Research Professor after he steps down as President June 30.

At the end of this month, Dr. Jeffrey Greenman will retire from his role as Regent College’s fifth President.

In this interview on the school’s site, Jeff reflects on his experience of leading the College over the past decade and looks ahead to his future involvement with the Regent community.

Following are a couple of portions of the interview:

As you approach the conclusion of this chapter of your story with Regent, what do you consider to be some highlights of your time as President?

By God’s grace, there have been many highlights. I’m grateful for what God has done in our midst over the past decade. And I’m grateful for all the hard work done by my amazing colleagues as we have worked together on some major projects.

There are quite a few things that I could mention, but I’ll constrain myself to just three.

A definite highlight was seeing the capital campaign called ‘Deep Roots, Wide Reach’ exceed its goal. It was our first such campaign since 2007. We faced the unexpected and quite unwelcome challenge of doing almost all of it during Covid, with its various restrictions on travel, in-person meetings and so on.

Through countless Zoom calls, God provided amazingly. That was such an encouragement to me and to our whole community.

A second highlight has been reaching an agreement to sell our parking lot to Polygon Homes. This process began with conversations in summer 2019, and we’ve seen the groundbreaking just a couple weeks ago.

This project will enable Regent to offer student housing for the first time in decades. The Board of Governors has been trying to find a way to develop that space for student housing for about 20 years, so this is a very significant step.

At the same time, the funds from the sale have approximately doubled Regent’s endowment, which helps make us financially sustainable in the long term by providing for things like student scholarships and faculty chairs.

Finally, I’d say that the establishment and growth of the MALTS (MA in Leadership, Theology & Society) program has been a very important personal highlight. I have been involved with this program since the planning stages, and I stepped in as acting director of the program for two years during my presidency.

What I find so compelling about MALTS is that it gives fresh expression to Regent’s core ministry – blending substantive academics, an integrative vision, personal and spiritual formation, deeply communal learning, and in-depth mentoring – in a new way that is flexible and accessible.

Our students love the experience they are having, and virtually all our MALTS students finish the program on time in two years.

As you move into a Research Professor role, how do you anticipate your relationships with Regent faculty, staff, students and the larger Regent community will change? What do you expect to stay the same?

The role of Research Professor at Regent means that I’ll still be teaching several courses each year as well as pursuing several writing and editing projects. So that will keep me connected with Regent students.

I’ve had several academic projects on the back burner for a long time while my focus has been on leading the college. I am excited to be able to give attention to these projects, which will also keep me connected to my faculty colleagues.

What will change significantly for me is that this new role allows for no part whatsoever in administration. No more meetings or committees or involvement in governance. Stepping fully aside from that realm is totally right and proper.

I’ve had my turn at leading the college, and I am passing the baton to Paul Spilsbury, someone whom I hold in the highest possible regard. I’ve observed that at other schools it’s proven quite unwise for former presidents to remain involved in administrative matters. I want to support and encourage Paul in every possible way as he brings his gifts and vision to this role.

Go here for the full interview.

Dr. Paul Spilsbury will assume the role of President July 1. He will be installed October 25.

Certificate in Missional Leadership

Tim Dickau speaking at St. Andrew’s Hall.

Tim Dickau is an Associate at the Centre for Missional Leadership (CML) and Director of the Certificate program.

He is inviting local congregations to take part in this valuable process, which is based on the UBC campus and involves participants from across the nation:

What transitions are being called forth from churches in our post-Christian era if we are to be faithful to our call as witnesses of God’s restoring work in the world through Christ?

This is the question that the Centre for Missional Leadership has been grappling with in our Certificate for Missional Leadership.

This past April, the Centre for Missional Leadership graduated its third cohort in the CML program, with a hybrid model of both in-person and on-line congregations participating.

We had 13 congregations join us for this year’s course from Victoria all the way to La Chute, Quebec. We have learned much in the first two iterations of the course and have made some important changes with positive impacts that have included:

• • Shortening the program from eight sessions over 18 months to five sessions over 9 months.
  • Shifting from one large project in the second year to four smaller practical assignments.
  • Adding a coach for each congregation.

Each of these changes proved to be fruitful for our participants. Especially encouraging was to observe how most of the congregation took up their assignments in between the sessions. These assignments included talking with residents and agencies in their neighbourhoods, doing an asset mapping experiment, hosting a community meal and discerning their next missional steps together.

Because so many of the congregations completed these assignments, the discussion in our teaching sessions was the most robust we have witnessed from any of our cohorts.

The feedback on the involvement of our coaches was also very positive. Having a coach to support the congregational cohorts in taking up their practical assignments proved to be integral to the completion and learning from these assignments – and marks the CML out from other similar programs. We intend to continue this practice of finding a coach for each of the congregation cohorts in next year’s course.

We have witnessed the ways in which the course has provided that spark of impetus and imagination for congregations to take creative missional risks. These creative ventures have included the start of a community garden, the launch of a number of community meals, involving the neighbourhood in the redesign of the church’s outdoor spaces and a community-based chair yoga program that has welcomed over 80 people (a number of whom have become part of their congregation’s worshipping community).

If your church is looking to take a next step in its missional engagement, stalled and wondering how to get started, or discerning the viability of your congregation going forward, join us this fall as we launch the program for a fourth time.

If you can gather a cohort from your church of between three to 10 people, we would love to accompany you as you make the transitions being called forth in current cultural context.

For more information on the CML program and to register, go here.

Events & Jobs

Events are listed below, but there is also an Events page and a Jobs page on the Church for Vancouver site.