Why I believe in starting new churches

Glenn Townend

From the age of 10 to 15, I lived in Lae, Papua New Guinea. When I went there in the early 1970s, there was one Seventh-day Adventist Church in town that seated 120 people and had about 80 attend. I was involved in street preaching, doing branch Sabbath Schools and public evangelistic series.

The people coming into the church lived a distance from the church, spoke a different language and we could not fit them all into the one building. So in five years, I saw another four churches start in the town.

I went back 30 years later and there are over 25 churches in Lae now. I saw that starting new churches worked in reaching people for Jesus.

When my Dad, Calvyn Townend, now a retired pastor, returned to Australia as a pastor, he started a couple of new churches in his new district around Murwillumbah. I got to preach my first sermon and lead out in these new churches - they gave more opportunity for participation.

Dad had been involved in new churches in Canberra and Melbourne when I was even younger. When I look back at my heritage, starting new churches was a natural thing and seemed to work.

In my own ministry, I have started three churches. One church had a ministry to refugees. At that time, the refugees were coming from central and south America with a Catholic background and they spoke Spanish. They showed interest in religious things but could not connect with an English speaking style of worship. We started meetings in Spanish and had a new church.

Another church I pastored grew to the point that we could not comfortably seat everyone during worship in the building - we had growing pains - so this lead to another new church.

The third church was in an area where there was a huge population and no English speaking church. Starting a new church in an unreached area was a real challenge.

Now in Western Australia (WA), we are seeing a number of new church groups spring up in unentered towns and suburbs, and amongst different people groups and cultures. We are seeing that new churches are a valuable evangelistic tool that incorporates based on personal witness and also using public evangelism.

Jesus said that the harvest is ripe (Luke 10:1,2), he also said that he will build his church (Matthew 16:18). To reach all the different people groups and cultures in WA, I suspect we could have hundreds of new churches.

I believe that is what God wants in order to renew the Adventist movement, create significant lives and transform communities. We can do that when we have the love, passion and capacity to do it.

Glenn Townend is the president of the Seventh-day Adventist Church in Western Australia.

This is a review from Planting our future, the newsletter of the Adventist Church in the South Pacific's Centre for Church Planting.

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