President's Blog

Québec is Canada’s largest mission field. The current reality is that our AEBEQ Region is a mature Region in the least-reached mission field in North America.

After six decades of ministry in Québec there are 83 French-speaking Fellowship Baptist churches and about 9,000 believers in these churches. This is good news.

The stark reality is that the seven million Francophones living in Québec, and the other one million living elsewhere in Canada, are largely unreached with the Gospel. Only 0.8% of Francophones identify themselves as evangelical Christians. Missiologists indicate that until the number of evangelical Christians within a people group reaches the 2-3% threshold, a church planting movement will struggle to maintain momentum and struggle to accomplish the entire mission task on their own.

However, the Region is mature in the sense that it is led by spiritually mature leaders. God has raised up some extraordinary and visionary leaders to advance the cause for Christ in this Region. Since 1971, the AEBEQ Region has been shepherding their growing ministry.

Our New Funding Model

A few years back, Francophone ministry in The Fellowship moved from being funded through support for individual missionaries to strategic partnerships between English churches and new francophone church plants.

After 56 years, the French Mission formally drew to a close as a Fellowship National Agency on December 31, 2014 after ensuring each of its missionaries completed individualized transition plans.

Fellowship churches and individual donors from across Canada are now encouraged to engage in collaborative relationships with Francophone church plants through direct and strategic partnerships that could potentially involve the sharing of resources, work teams, and mutual prayer support. These strategic partnerships are brokered by Fellowship National and managed by the AEBEQ Church Planting Director.

Our immediate objective is clear: to improve and encourage engagement from our English-speaking churches and our faithful team of individual donors to continue in partnering with and funding Francophone church plants so that an even greater harvest of souls will be gathered in the years ahead! Our ultimate objective is to reach a point in Québec where at least 2% of the population self-identify as evangelical, and the AEBEQ Region has sufficient strength to sustain and ensure the continuous multiplication of churches.

It is crystal clear that church planting in Québec has been and will continue to be the most effective way to reach new people and new communities with the Gospel.

Our partnership strategy continues to focus primarily on Québec where 84% of Canada’s Francophone population lives; however, we will also focus on the other French-speaking areas of our country. It is our sincere hope and expectation that dynamic church planting partnerships will be developed between English-speaking congregations and/or individual donors and Francophone church plants across our nation.

The Plan: 7x7=1

Yes, we know…the math doesn’t work, but the plan will! It involves:

• 7 churches and/or donors – Fellowship National is responsible to prayerfully seek out and find churches or individual donors to partner with Regionally-approved Francophone church plants.

• 7 years – Fellowship Regions have the responsibility to manage and encourage these partnerships between churches or individual donors and Francophone churches within their Region. These relationships will be in place for seven years with the possibility of a three-year extension.

• 1 Francophone church plant – Our partnership objective will be to see each Francophone church plant develop and mature into an autonomous, self-governing, self-supporting, and self-propagating local church to the glory of God!

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