Previous Post – House Famous Community

Little Flower Community is the first church plant I have pastored, so I am by no means an expert.  I have (and continue to) benefit for the wisdom and experience of church planters and pastors I can only hope to emulate in the years of pastoring that are ahead of me.  That being said, I wanted to share some thoughts on how Little Flowers emerged as a new congregation.  While it isn’t a formula and won’t be as applicable to every context, I hope it is encouraging and challenging to some of you.

When we started our ministry with YWAM in our community we had no intention of planting a church.  In fact, in YWAM culture, it isn’t something that generally happened.  However, we were also approaching the formation of our ministry in a way that was fairly unique to the organization.  Rather than primarily training Christians to do mission elsewhere, we wanted to be a missional presence in our neighbourhood.  This included making it our home, which we did with the help of our friend, the late Rev. Harry Lehotsky.  Any training or outreach programs would be out of existing relationships drawn from being in the neighbourhood.

After several years, even though we had integrated in the community, we were still struggling with meaningfully connecting to many of our neighbours.  This was due to a number of factors, including the long, harsh winters that kept people indoors, the privacy cultures of both the inner city and Canada in general, and having an amazing team that was made up of introverts (which is not a liability, just a factor to be addressed).  It was around this time that we started exploring the idea of missional third places.  Thus was born The Dusty Cover.

With 5 years of mission in the community, establishing a public commitment and identity as neighbours, the bookstore provided a safe, neutral place to connect with people from the West End.  While I was aware of the possibility that a church would be born out of this approach, it seemed a distant and often vague possibility.  However, something happened that I could not have been prepared for.  Many of the people who we had begin to share life and faith with through the bookstore and our presence in the community approached us, asking us to be their church.  After prayer and dialogue with Mennonite Church Manitoba, we decided to begin Little Flowers Community.

One of the things I love about our church is that it is almost completely made up of people from the neighbourhood, with a few exceptions.  While several people face the challenges of addiction, mental health issues, poverty, developmental disabilities and disillusionment with the faith, they are also passionately longing for meaningful relationship with God, genuine community and a missional purpose in their neighbourhood and the world.  That we could build the kinds of relationships that would lead them to wanting a church is something that gives me great joy.

In many ways, we had become a church before we knew to call ourselves such.