A Reason to Stay in the PCA — American Ministers and American Donors
Kyle Hackmann is one of my best friends. He is also an American who took an assistant pastor job at a PCA Church in Toronto more than a dozen years ago. I won’t entirely speak for him, but I do know that he came to Toronto because he knew that he could work in a PCA Church. If it wasn’t PCA, he wouldn’t have come.
Franky Garcia is a dear friend, a coworker and the planter of our daughter church in Gatineau, QC. He is an American as well. But he fell in love with a girl from Quebec and when considering ministry, he and his wife went looking for a PCA Church as close to Quebec as possible. He ended up as my intern because we were a PCA Church.
Luke Bert is an American PCA minister who came to Quebec to teach at a reformed Baptist seminary but loved the PCA and wanted to remain a PCA minister. The fact that the PCA existed in Canada as a home for him while he worked “out-of-bounds” with our Baptist brothers and sisters was essential for him.
I could go on.
Though I am born and raised in Canada and I planted a church with zero American funding (because I didn’t really know any Americans), I can see how important the USA is for supplying ministers and funding for church plants. The history of our presbytery demonstrates it.
The USA has a wealth of reformed seminaries that produce good quality ministers. Canada has very few seminaries, and nothing that quite fits the PCA. Most of our ministers have come through non-traditional channels like campus ministry (IVCF and Power to Change/Cru), second careers and transfers from other reformed denominations. We didn’t and don’t produce enough ministers to meet our own needs if we are going to continue planting churches.
Could a Canadian PCA sustain itself with ministers and funding without the pipeline from the USA? Probably not at this time.
I know we could work as sister denominations inside of NAPARC and that ministers and money could cross denominational lines but realistically, it wouldn’t be the same. A Canadian PCA is still a different denomination.
This past general assembly, at one of the social events, I was waiting for a drink at the end of a long bar. It was a long wait. A fellow minister was waiting beside me and we struck up a conversation. As it turns out, he was an assistant minister giving some thought to his future. He was considering calls in the USA, but also a number of MTW projects. I asked if he would consider Canada, and he said he would.
Nothing concrete, nothing permanent, but do these kinds of conversations happen if Canada breaks away from the larger PCA?
And as for the money, I asked a few of my friends planting churches in Canada for a rough estimate of what percent of their funding comes from south of the border.
Their replies? 55%, 5%, at least 50%.
That’s significant. Could we plant churches without American dollars? Probably. But the existence of MNA accounts that easily collect American funds from American donors makes a big difference.
A big reason for Canadian churches to stay with the PCA is because of the steady stream of American ministers and American donors.
