Dwight Huffman climbs up a hill and looks down on the town lying below him.
Dwight Huffman climbs up a hill and looks down on the town lying below him.
The cool Canadian breeze ruffles his hair as he
surveys the environment, a vast wooded area untouched by development –
until now.
What had been pristine wilderness now is being
slowly transformed into the town of Chestermere, a rapidly-growing
community of about 5,000 people not far from Calgary, Alberta.
Now, as he looks down on the development, Huffman
considers the possibilities and asks himself the best way to bring
Christ to its residents.
“Chestermere is representative of many towns springing up around the province of Alberta,” Huffman notes.
“Some of these towns have no evangelical witness,
but that’s why we are here as Canadian Baptists. We want to discover
the needs of the community and meet those needs in the name of Christ.”
Huffman is no stranger to church planting.
While in seminary, he started two churches and served as pastor of a
third before he became a Southern Baptist North American Mission Board
worker.
Today, Huffman is less of a planter and more of a
scout in the vein of the old fur trappers who first trudged through the
rugged terrain of Western Canada.
The only difference is they were traveling by foot
and looking for beavers and bears, while Huffman drives by car and
visually maps the terrain for others to follow and share Christ.
Huffman serves as the strategy coordinator for
Western Canada, which is made up of British Columbia, Alberta,
Saskatchewan, Manitoba, the Yukon and the Northwest Territories. In
that role, he travels about 37,000 miles a year in his car. His area is
about the equivalent of the Continental United States, but has less
than 140 Canadian Southern Baptist churches.
“I’m responsible to see the day when every Canadian
in Western Canada hears the gospel from someone they trust and for
every community to have a Canadian Southern Baptist church that is
equipping believers to walk with God and hang around lost people.”
With such a vast area to cover and so few laborers
to help, Huffman has pioneered a strategy that is gaining acceptance
across the convention.
“We have developed a three-stage strategy of
scouting, pioneering, and settling,” he said. “The point is to multiply
the number of people involved in reaching new people, new communities
for Christ.”
At the core of Huffman’s approach are the scouts.
They go into a town or neighborhood in advance of a church planter to
engage in simple exploring.
“The uniqueness and genius of this strategy plan is
that it requires almost no church-planting skills that we’ve
historically identified,” Huffman noted.
“Anyone can go to any neighborhood, walk and talk
with God, hang around that neighborhood, and do a casual interview with
some of the people they meet.”
Scouting can be done anywhere – in a restaurant, at a gas station or in a foursome of strangers playing golf.
“For example, in one case, it turns out that the
scouts were golfing with the mayor and a high school principal,”
Huffman relates. “In that context, they built trust and were invited to
come to that city and conduct a sports clinic and a variety of other
ministries.”
Huffman says his inspiration for the approach came
from reading about the coureur de bois – runner of the woods – sent out
by the Hudson Bay Company to explore new lands in search of Aboriginals
willing to barter their furs.
“You had these runners who would initially identify
these communities and build trust,” Huffman notes. “Then, they would
set up a little trading post and pioneer a little group there. But
eventually, more people would come and settle and that group would grow
into a community.”
Critical to a successful scouting assignment is
finding “a Lydia” (Acts 16:14-15) who will open up her (or his) home as
a safe place to build relationships and start a Bible study, Huffman
explains. Only when that core group shows potential for becoming a
church is a planter enlisted.
But to reach the goal of having an evangelical
church in each community, Huffman needs more scouts. And for that, he
say he is counting on help from Baptist churches throughout North
America to share his vision and partner with him.
“We are organizing our churches so they all see
their role as scouts,” Huffman says. “We want to prayerwalk every city
and every neighborhood in Western Canada. A lot of my tasks are related
to scouting new areas and sharing that information with others. We’ll
get pastors from the United States to come up and bring teams from
their churches.”
As Huffman settles into his car to begin the drive
to the next community, he paints a picture of the vastness of his work,
and the need for others to walk with him.
“About a three-day drive north of us is Yellowknife
(in the Northwest Territories),” he says. “When I came to (this)
position, there was no Southern Baptist work in the Northwest
Territories. It would be similar to there being no work between
Jacksonville, Fla., and New York City.”
Yellowknife sits on the eighth largest lake in the
world and is the capital of the Northwest Territories – but there is no
Canadian Southern Baptist church there.
Huffman and a friend visited the area in 2001. They
discovered many settlements that only could be reached by crossing ice
bridges. They left, praying that God would send laborers to fall in
love with the area.
They found it in David Hahn, who was studying a map
one day tracking his son, who was on a trip home from Alaska. As Hahn
did so, God put the Yellowknife area on his heart, Huffman notes.
Hahn got in touch with Huffman and visited the area from Louisville,
Ky. Then, after seeing the need, he and other members of his church
began visiting the area regularly, serving as scouts.
“We recently traveled the territory all the way down
the McKenzie – that’s like driving from Atlanta to Los Angeles – and we
found villages that we are relatively sure have never heard the
gospel,” Huffman says of one trip. “The value of these scouts is
immeasurable.”
Unfortunately, Huffman says he feels Canada largely is a forgotten country to many Southern Baptists.
But that can change – as the story of Hahn illustrates, he emphasizes.
“Canada is a place where an English-speaking person
can come and walk with God and hang around lost people and see a
movement of God.”
(For more information on church planting in Canada, visit www.ccsb.ca/cp/)