CBWC Foundation is Hiring!
Could you be the next President? Learn more at cbwc.ca/careers.

Assembly 2025 Workshops
Coming together at Assembly gives delegates, visitors, and pastors a unique opportunity to easily access resources by browsing the many ministry information tables onsite, as well as by attending a workshop. This year, two workshop sessions will be offered featuring a selection of four topics.
Workshop Registration will open online on April 18 for all registered delegates and visitors.
For general information on Assembly 2025, click HERE.
New Minister’s Orientation
Thank you for praying for our New Minister’s Orientation that took place March 10-12. We had a wonderful time getting to know one another over the three days, as we worshipped with, prayed for, and learned together what it means to be part of this family of Baptist churches. Thank you for making the trip to Calgary. What a fantastic class of participants!

Is Discipleship Your Church’s Core Mission?
By CBWC Director of Church Planting Shannon Youell

This year I am reading the New Testament with an eye towards answering this question: What does Jesus teach us about disciplemaking? Even more so, keeping the final command of Jesus to His followers at the forefront of this question—What does Jesus teach us about the core mission of His church, and what can we learn from how Jesus made disciplemakers who would carry on this core mission?
The Big Picture
Most of us who read the story of Jesus in the gospels can note that Jesus’ public ministry began with His “reveal” (baptism, announcing God’s kingdom is now present), followed immediately with His calling disciples to Himself, very much in the tradition of a Rabbi in His day. And the majority of what happens wherever Jesus finds Himself is with those disciples learning, observing, experiencing, interpreting, and engaging in whatever Jesus was teaching and doing.
Nearing the day of His arrest and death, Jesus spends a significant amount of time pouring into those disciples. and after His resurrection He spends all His time with them, right up to “graduation” when He commissions them to repeat what He has done: to make disciples, teaching them to obey all the teachings of God as taught to them by Jesus.
Translators and Bible editors have long labelled that passage “The Great Commission” of Jesus to the Church, meaning that it is of the utmost importance in vision and task; it is the core mission of the Church. Core implies that everything we do is to fulfill and flourish the value; the mission. According to Jesus’ example, that mission was to make disciples.
How Do We Execute and Measure Disciplemaking?
Of course Jesus’ disciples were not to make just any kind of disciples. They were to make disciples based on Jesus’ teaching and demonstration about how the presence of the kingdom of God produces His Shalom, and how, then, to live into it. Furthermore, they were to make disciples who would do likewise. This was the expansion plan of the kingdom of God permeating every person, place, and culture in the world.
None of this is news to us. The gathered church, as we know it, generally recognizes discipleship as “something we are to do” and disciples as “something we are to make.”
Our challenge is that most churches today struggle with how to both execute and measure disciplemaking. I’ve heard some pastors say that their pathway to disciplemaking is by osmosis; in other words, if the pastor teaches on it enough and encourages people to spend time together, then disciples will be made. Others have fantastic learning programs designed to draw people deeper into understanding God’s Word, solidifying belief, with behavioral modifying implications of living a life as Christ’s image-bearers here on earth.
These same pastors tell me they are discouraged that they haven’t seen real deep fruit and transformation happen in a way that extends the reach of God’s kingdom into the world in which His kingdom exists. Mainly, our discipleship efforts are focused on spiritual formation practices such as Bible studies, preaching, prayer, worship, service in the programs of the church—such as Alpha, men’s and women’s groups, youth and children’s ministries. Pretty much every church I’ve ever been in practices these in various ways. The church community is formed around them. I’d refer to that as the “gathered church” —practices we do when we are together, mostly in a particular location. Most of these practices and activities occur primarily on a weekend or weeknight service- type environment. When these practices are intentional, they have historically been quite good at forming church attenders around belief and some commonality of those beliefs, resulting in volunteers who serve the programs and activities of the gathered church. These practices are beautiful, comforting, encouraging, and an important part of what the Church does.
While there are certainly important and necessary aspects of disciplemaking incorporated, (information through teaching, experience through singing and praying together, fellowship and care of others within our community), having our primary focus on the gathered programming moves the core mission away from disciplemaking, towards creating and maintaining a worship service and activities. In other words, it expands the gathered practices of disciples but rarely makes it out the door into the community spaces we all live, work, and play in—the space where not-yet-believers are most often found.
While some will read this and say it’s semantics, I will argue that it usually only takes a subtle shift in priorities or direction to take the call of Jesus to the Church to a focus that inadvertently misses the core mission He calls her to, while still engaging in elements of what a gathered church does together. We have been quite successful in the past in moving people from outside the church to inside the church, but we’ve too often left them there.
When Jesus called those first groups of disciples, He walked, lived, ate, partied, and ministered with them outside the synagogue. These were the practices Jesus incorporated in disciple-making that occurred outside the more formal aspects of His teaching in synagogues, on mountains, and beside lakes.
These practices were often spontaneous as He and His disciples encountered the spaces and places inhabited not necessarily by good church-attenders, but by those who were outside the church for various reasons.
They took the belief they were growing in understanding to into how they lived, worked, and played in a way that demonstrated the love, compassion, and care of Jesus right into an organic way of relationships. While we’ve often referred to this aspect of embodying Jesus and disciplemaking as the latter of the terminology of gathered and scattered, we are finding that a better term for scattered is sent.
Scattered can be interpreted to mean random, unintentional, and un-cohesive, while sent has the implications of being purpose- driven with an intentionality to engage, as a whole, the world outside the more formal practices that occur in the church building itself. Sent is also the common term missiologists use for moving belief into embodiment; from knowledge into behaviors lived outside of our worship services and into everyday life, encounters, experiences, and relationships.
Refocusing the Mission
With the practices of both our gathered community and our sent communities, we must always be alert to mission-drift. We can just as easily become too outward focused on going out into the world as we can become too inward focused on formational practices and experiences in our weekly services and church activities.
Disciple-making that produces the fruit of making disciples who can do likewise requires, as Matt Lake describes in his book Crossing the Discipleship Chasm, a healthy tension between gathered and sent.
To put it in simpler terms: if the majority of our time, talent, money, energy and activities are primarily focused around our Sunday gatherings—or, if the majority of our time, talent, money, energy and activities are primarily focused on serving the outside community on matters of injustice and outreach—then we have drifted from the core mission of disciple-making that Jesus calls the Church to.
Healthy, reproduceable disciplemaking requires both/and. Healthy, reproduceable disciplemaking requires a healthy culture of disciplemaking that is not an optional course, activity, or mission of the Church, but is actually what the Church does to fulfill the job -description, the mission, that Jesus gave the Church.
As Matt Lake states, “Commitment to discipleship means a congregation-wide intentionality and alignment.” This type of disciplemaking journey is for communities of believers and unbelievers; of deep spiritual formational practices individually and corporately; of hearts of compassion and hospitality to all peoples; of both belief and behavior aligning with being Christ’s image bearers wherever we are. Healthy churches that thrive and continue to thrive, have cultures of healthy disciple-making as their core mission.
The rest is what God can and will do in that kind of environment.
We’ve been wrestling through these questions over the past months in our Making Disciplemakers Cohort. Follow along on our blog: cbwc.ca/church-planting or contact my Assistant Cailey Morgan at cmorgan@cbwc.ca to find out how to join the conversation. Lake, Matt. Crossing the Discipleship Chasm: How To Turn Crowds Into People Who Follow Jesus (Invite Press, 2024): 67.
Over the next 6 months we will be journeying through these reflections on the Lord’s Prayer, used with permission, by Carolyn Arends. If you missed the introduction, you can find it in the past two issues of Making Connections.
The Lord’s Prayer will be the theme of our Assembly in May, and we invite you to use these monthly reflections in preparation. For more info and to register for Assembly, click here).
The universe in 57 Words–Part THREE

PETITION ONE
Hallowed be thy name . . . in earth, as it is in heaven.
A man I met on a plane told me a story. He and his wife, a piano major at a local university, went piano shopping. The saleswoman led them straight to the entry-level models. “She had us pegged exactly right,” the man told me. “We were going to have to borrow the money to get the cheapest instrument there.”
Everything changed, however, when the name of the prospective buyer’s mentor—a world-renowned master teaching at the university—came up in their conversation.
The saleswoman was panic-stricken. “Not these pianos!” she exclaimed, herding the couple away from the economy section and into a private showroom of gleaming Steinways. “I’m so sorry,” she kept repeating, horrified at the thought of the teacher finding out she’d shown one of his students an inferior instrument. Try as they might, they couldn’t persuade her to take them back to the pianos they could afford. Once the master’s name came up, only the best would do.
When I think about the reverence that flustered saleswoman had for a teacher’s name, Jesus’ first petition begins to come to focus.
REVERENCE . . . AND REVELATION
What does it mean to “hallow” God’s name? Maybe you, like me, were raised to flinch whenever someone uses God’s name as a mindless exclamation or curse. Perhaps you’ve heard about the extreme care taken in some branches of Judaism: Pages containing Yahweh, the covenantal name of the Lord, are never thoughtlessly discarded, but rather buried or ritually burned. When we pray this first petition, we’re invited to cultivate reverence for God’s name— especially while living in a world prone to profane it.
But as important as it is to use God’s name with care, if we live inside this first petition for long we’ll begin to see that Jesus is inviting us not only to cultivate reverence, but to pray for revelation.
Names are a big deal in the Bible. From Abraham (“Father of Many”) to Jacob (“Heel-grasper”) to Peter (“Rock”), monikers don’t merely identify—they reveal. Moses understood this. So he asked God (whom he knew by the generic deity designation Elo him) for his personal name. “Yahweh,” God told him, offering Moses the kind of intimacy that only comes on a first-name basis— and revealing his covenant with his people in the process.
As we learned from the invocation, every name we have for God is a revelation of his character. So, when Jesus teaches us to pray for the hallowing of God’s name, he’s really teaching us to pray that God’s character will be revealed here on earth, just the way it is in heaven.
Throughout Jesus’ earthly ministry, he is constantly encountering people who have distorted pictures of his Father. If we pay much attention at all to his teaching in the Gospel accounts, we’ll notice that more than anything he wants us to be able to see God for who God really is.
Jesus seems convinced that the coming of God’s kingdom hinges on the hallowing of God’s name—the revealing of God’s character. He knows that we become like the God we worship, and if our God-picture is distorted, then the more religious we be 16 come, the worse off we will be. So the first, foundational thing Jesus teaches us to pray for is a clear revelation of God’s character. Tom Smith helpfully translates hallowed be thy name as “help us draw healing pictures of You.”
ONLY GOD CAN DO IT
None of the six petitions Jesus teaches us are things we can obtain on our own. In fact, the verbs in two of the first three petitions are imperative, but passive. This means that this first request is not so much “Let us hallow your name” as it is “Father, do what we can’t— make your name holy throughout the earth.”
Only God can reveal himself to the world. But if we pray as he taught us, our reverence and care for his name will grow, right alongside our capacity to behold God’s goodness and beauty. Which gets me thinking about that piano saleswoman again. Because the more we see the glory of God’s love, the more we’ll begin to exchange our cheap instruments of self-interest and power for the costly cross of Christ—the only instrument worthy of our master’s name.
Suggested song: “All Hail the Power of Jesus’ Name”
To download the full resource: https://renovare.org/books/the-universe-in-57-words
Excerpts used with permission from a book entitled
the universe
in 57 words
SEVEN DAYS INSIDE THE LORD’S PRAYER
By Carolyn Arends
This resource has been influenced by more authors, preachers, teachers, and fellow pray-ers than I can credit or even remember. But I am particularly indebted to the following works: Fifty-Seven Words That Change the World, by Darrell Johnson; The Lord and His Prayer, by N. T. Wright; The Divine Conspiracy, by Dallas Willard; Prayer, by Richard Foster; and Eugene Peterson’s “Jesus and Prayer” lectures for SPIR 604 at Regent College.
Emmanuel Baptist’s Award-winning Documentary

Greetings from Pastor Joshua at Victoria Emmanuel Baptist Church. I’m excited to share about our documentary, Thanksgiving Emmanuel. The film is a testament to the transformative power of faith and how it has changed the lives of many immigrants in Victoria. This video project aims to celebrate these blessings and inspire the Emmanuel Mandarin Ministries as we move into the post-COVID chapter of our journey. Thanksgiving Emmanuel was selected for the 2024 Great Lakes Christian Film Festival (GLCFF) in New York, held from October 17 to 20. The film reflects on God’s grace in the Emmanuel Mandarin Ministry over the years. Supported by the Paulin Memorial Opportunity Fund, it was nominated and awarded “Most Creative” in the Best Documentary Feature category. To view the film, please see link below.
Emmanuel held its first preaching service on August 8, 1890, under Rev C.W. Townsend, and is now celebrating 135 years of ministry in Victoria.
In 2006, Emmanuel embraced the vision of Pastor Joshua Wang and began a ministry to Mandarin Chinese speakers. After an original partnership with a church from Vancouver, Emmanuel has adopted a multicultural identity. The Mandarin worship service has seen steady growth over the years and this documentary was created to celebrate their 15th anniversary in 2024. The Mandarin and English congregations meet together for Sunday worship once a month.
纪录片《感恩以马内利》见证了信仰的转化力量,以及它如何改变维多利亚以马内利教会中新移民的生命。这个电影旨在庆祝这些祝福,并在我们进入后疫情时代的以马内利国语事工新篇章时,激励大家继续前行。《感恩以马内利》入选了2024年10月17日至20日在纽约举办的大湖区基督教电影节(GLCFF)。这部影片回顾了神在以马内利国语事工中多年来的恩典。在保林纪念基金(Paulin Memorial Opportunity Fund)的支持下,该影片获得了“最佳纪录片长片”类别中“最具创意奖”的提名并最终获奖。
Here is the public bilingual YouTube link to the documentary. Thanksgiving Emmanuel documentary【感恩以马内利】记录片 – YouTube
In Him
Joshua Wang

Partner Spotlight

The Power of Food Security
Food security is more than just having enough to eat. It’s the ability to have reliable access to affordable, nutritious food. Something that is a growing concern for an increasing number of people, both globally and here in Canada.
For many families, food security initiatives can mean the difference between struggle and stability. Two inspiring Kenyan women, Margery and Mary, show us how learning Conservation Agriculture methods from our partner ACC&S, has transformed their lives.
Margery’s Story: From Scarcity to Abundance

Margery Gaturi, a 64-year-old farmer from Karwagi Village, knows the pain of failed harvests. She once leased two acres of land, only to harvest a single maize cob. Years of effort and investment yielded little in return.
With training and support through her local church’s Conservation Agriculture program, Margery tested a small demo plot using sustainable farming techniques. The results? A staggering 54 kg of maize—compared to just 10 kg from her traditional methods.
“I no longer have to till my land. It’s less labour-intensive and more productive,” she shares.
Today, she farms her own land, grows diverse crops, and stores her harvest to sell at the best market prices. With her surplus, she even purchased a goat for additional income and nutrition.
Mary’s Story: A Dairy Goat That Changed Everything

Mary Wambui, a 77-year-old from Riandu Village had always depended on her cow for milk, but despite her efforts, it produced very little.
“I used to spend so much time and energy feeding that cow,” Mary recalls. This situation left Mary struggling to maintain a consistent supply of milk for her household. The cow required a lot of labour, yet the returns were minimal, making it increasingly difficult for her to manage.
Through the ACC&S Embu Food Security Project, Mary was introduced to dairy goats, which require less feed but provide more milk and essential manure for farming. “Now, I drink milk from my goat every day. It’s much healthier for me, especially at my age,” Mary shares.
With her goat thriving and multiplying, Mary no longer buys milk, saving money that she now invests in her Village Savings and Loan Association (VSLA). This simple shift has improved her nutrition, reduced her workload, and increased her financial stability.
Why Food Security Matters
Margery and Mary’s stories highlight the transformative impact of food security projects. When communities have access to sustainable farming techniques and resources, they can move from struggle to stability. As partners, here’s how your generosity is transforming lives:
- Boosting Harvests: Farmers are learning new techniques that produce more food with less labour and lower costs.
- Improving Nutrition: Families now have diverse and nutritious food sources, leading to better health.
- Breaking Dependency: By reducing reliance on costly farming inputs, families and individuals can grow food sustainably and increase their resilience.
- Building Financial Stability: With higher yields and savings programs, participants can invest in their future and support their families.
For more information, please visit: cbmin.org/food.
Copyright © 2025 Canadian Baptists of Western Canada, All rights reserved.
Making Connections is the monthly newsletter of the CBWC.