O Canada!

Who knew? Well, I guess someone did, but I just found out! Can you believe that there is a 4 hour by 2 hour stretch of land in Southern Ontario, Canada that does not have a Southern Baptist church anywhere?! AND hardly an evangelical presence at all?! AND there are around 1 million people living in this area?!? WOW! I was (and still am) blown away that there is a place in North America within driving distance of my home that does not have enough churches to go around.

London, ON almost 450,000
80,000 university students

Sarnia, ON around 88,000

Chatham-Kent, ON 108,000

Not to mention the hundreds of towns in between!

Toronta, ON to Detroit, MI - no SBC churches!

You can find out more here: Canadian National Baptist Convention, Encounter Canada

Read this: Pushing Back the Darkness
These quotes are talking about the Greater Toronto Area. Other parts of Southern Ontario are worse off than Toronto.

"The GTA includes communities that are completely unengaged and unreached, meaning there is no evangelical presence at all."

Challenges in Canada
Canada has a “complete absence of a Christian subculture,” Blackaby said.

“On a typical work day, conversation about church, let alone Christ, you would not hear it. You would not expect to hear it. There’s not a natural predisposition within the general population that church is even a good thing.”

Blackaby said that in many areas witnessing and church planting begins not just with “breaking up the ground” but removing rocks, or those preconceived ideas about God and church, from under the ground. “You’re starting at a much earlier stage than you probably would in North Carolina.”

Many people in the targeted partnership area are two, even three, generations removed from any kind of real Christian experience.

They have no connection with the Bible, even the most familiar Bible stories, and are “disillusioned and disenfranchised,” Collison said. They have walked away completely from Christianity and the church. The gospel “needs to be lived out for them before it can be communicated verbally. It can be a fairly slow process of building relationships of trust and relationships of confidence,” Collison said.

We are very excited about our partnership with Canada at Clear Creek Association, and we are very hopeful that we can help! Roger and I have always had a special tenderness for Canada, and we can't wait to get started! Please pray for this area in Ontario- that Jesus name will be known!