A church planting friend recently asked, out of curiosity, “Who are you affiliated with and what is your strategy and/or approach to planting the CORE Church of Troy?”
My response to this question, I thought, would be a great topic for posting on our church website
We are officially working with the Conservative Baptists and their urban church planting arm known as Missions Door, formerly Mission to the Americas. Our approach is more of an indigenous church plant–that is, self-supporting, self-governing and self-reproducing. We are receiving some support from our regional association, CB Mission Northeast, as well as from our sponsoring church, First Baptist Church of Westerlo, NY. So we are not truly self-supporting.
We took over an old Baptist church that had closed and re-started it as an inner-city/mission church with a focus on being a neighborhood church that is intentionally reaching out to the people who live here. Being an indigenous, mission church has resulted in slower numerical growth than a typical church plant because our strategy, the design of which came out of necessity.
Our strategy in Troy’s North Central/South Lansingburgh community, then, is to be low structured and highly relational. That means freeing up our ministry leadership so that they can be in the community connecting with people and building relationships, as opposed to spending a lot of time at the church building running and overseeing programs. We do have some programs which have developed as a result of getting out into the community, assessing the needs of our community and then seeking, prayerfully, how we can be the catalyst in our community to meet these needs.
We have made progress over the past two years as we have spent time breaking up fallow ground and preparing the soil for planting seeds. We are seeing some of the seeds we have planted take root as God works in the hearts of those we have reached with the good news of a risen Savior.
