Northern Pursuit

To plow and plant for harvest in Canada

By Adam Miller

In Canada, you can drive a thousand miles without finding an evangelical presence, National Missionary Gary Smith says. Gary and his 11-year-old son, Caleb, were on a 12-hour road trip from Quebec to Prince Edward Island when reality hit the 41-year-old missionary. He started to cry.

“What’s going on, daddy? What’s happening?” asked an alarmed Caleb.

Through the tears, Gary asked his son, “Do you realize that in all of these towns, cities and villages we’re passing there’s no Christian church? No Sunday school classes. There’s nobody telling these people about Jesus.”

Gary stopped the car and he and Caleb prayed together for the towns they’d passed.

These are the realities in a region where the church is cursed by most people.
“In eastern Canada, there’s a spiritual void,” says Gary. “If you’re under 40 and in Quebec you probably don’t know who Jesus Christ is.”

As Montreal and Toronto grow ever more diverse, so expand the obstacles and the opportunities for the gospel.

“It can be a hard place, although it also gives us incredible opportunities,” Gary says. “You can imagine the sweetness of sharing Christ with someone for the very first time. They have no concept of Jesus.”

In Montreal evangelical Christians makeup only half of one percent of the population.

While Montreal is filled with people with wrong ideas about the church or no idea about Christ, Toronto grows into a hustle and bustle of international infusion and of economic boom and Asian descent.

“Toronto could be the most strategic city in Canada,” Gary says. “All the transit flows in and out of Toronto. Most of the corporations are now in Toronto along with the Canada Stock Exchange.
“If you touch the lostness in Toronto,” he adds, “you not only touch Canada you touch the world, because of its ethnic diversity—particularly in the Chinese and the Muslim worlds. The Muslim population is growing here dramatically.”

As a church planting strategist, Gary’s job is to strengthen churches through resourcing, strategy and partnership with other churches in the region—a job particularly important in so widespread an area as eastern Canada.

Church planters are catching a vision for this. Just outside Toronto, Jarret Hamilton and Affinity Baptist Church in Oshawa, Ontario, are reaching the lost in suburbia.

Paul An and Westside Church in Mississauga, Ontario, are reaching Koreans and other people groups.

And Shon Sun is reaching the Mandarin-speaking population of Toronto.

Gary works with all three of these men and many more church planters throughout the region. He knows the spiritual soil in Canada is hard. But he believes that reflecting Jesus’ compassion in any lost place can make the mission field ready to plow and harvest.

“On an airplane recently, I met a social worker from Trois Rivierre, Quebec, one of the most unreached cities per capita in all of North America,” says Gary. “As we talked I found out that she had a caseload of 50 unwed pregnant teenagers.

“I asked if she’d ever heard of Jesus Christ. Her reply was typical: ‘Yes. Jesus is a curse word.’ I told her ‘No. He’s more than that. He loves moms and babies.’”

With the help of some Florida Baptist churches, Gary was able to provide boxes of baby items and clothes. Smith personally delivered the baby items to the social worker and her colleagues.

They were amazed.

“I told them, ‘Jesus Christ provided these things for you today. This is who He is.’ That was their introduction to the gospel.

“The key to reaching lost places is not my strategy or your strategy—it’s the Lord of the harvest’s strategy,” Smith says. “And He told us to ask Him for it. And the Lord of the harvest has given us leaders like Paul An and Shon Sun to get the job done. And through us, we pray He will.” OM

Adam Miller is associate editor of On Mission.

 
Gary Smith – North American Missions Emphasis Worship segment   Download