Church Planting Featured Story
by Edwin Tsang
Richmond Capstan Alliance Church has been established as an independent church in January of 2010. I guess it is the first new born baby of the Alliance family of this year.
It all started with a vision! Richmond has been very well known for its high density and high growing rate of Asian population in the last five years. Two years ago, Rev. Titus Yu, the senior pastor of North Richmond Alliance Church (at the corner of Richmond Granville and Heather Street) invited Rev. Edwin Tsang (voluntary pastor of the church) to take up the task of doing a feasibility study of a new church being planted in a new location. There were two reasons behind it: 1) NRAC was fully packed with no room for further development nor enough parking space. 2) to expand the Kingdom of God through evangelism and community involvement of a new church.
Realizing the new city planning development of Richmond, the site of our Education Building, at the corner of Sexsmith and Capstan Road, has been a prime choice for the location of the new church (the Education Building site had been purchased seven years ago and was used for English Worship and Sunday School/Fellowship purposes).
A core group was formed on March 3, 2008. The Wednesday prayer meeting had been the driving force of the Church Planting Campaign with the regular attendance of 20 people. After months of prayer, a proposal was presented to the congregation at the Annual General Meeting on October 26, 2008. Praise the Lord! Over 77% of the attending members gave a 'GO' signal, with the criteria that Rev. Edwin Tsang had to gather 100 people from NRAC (60% members and 40% non-members) before the end of August 2009. The task was challenging. If it did not get accomplished, the whole project would collapse.
The vision of the Church Planting Project started to pick up, God continued to give us brothers and sisters with convictions. We continued to pray hard for this project. At the end of July 2009 we had a total of 50 people committed.
Since we started from day 1, we launched a 'Prayer Walk' campaign once every month. At the Prayer Walk, we divided committed brothers and sisters into small groups, we walked around the area and prayed for our neighbours and shopping plazas nearby. It was so successful that a lot of participants were motivated with a passion for evangelism, especially the group who visited the casino area.
With much prayer, we could really see God's guidance and miracles. We had collected a total of 99 people on the 26th of August (5 days from the deadline), but this number had stayed unchanged since then. On August 29, while I was preaching in a Summer Camp in Abbotsford for another church, the total number was still unchanged. I prayed to God: "Oh God, if this is Your will, give me these people. My number is not 100, I wish we could have more than that since Your grace is abundant!" I knew this was almost impossible because at that time, I got stuck at the Summer Camp in Abbotsford. I was not able to call anyone on the cell phone because the reception was so poor. I could only rely on intenet and I ran out of people to contact (over the five previous months - I had made hundreds of calls to invite brothers and sisters to consider joining the new church - of course, with permission from the senior pastor of my 'mother' church).
Two more days to go, I was still short of one name in order to fulfill the requirements. On the 30th of August, a Sunday morning, while I was ready to preach at the Summer Camp, I checked my email and there was a short message: "TWO MORE NEW AMES ADDED! TOTAL 101"
Praise the Lord, the number had been reached!
On the last day of the month - the deadline, another eight new names joined in, making the total of 109. The miracle was that, the TWO MORE NEW NAMES were from a couple who had refused to join the new church when we first approached them. But that Sunday morning while they going to church for Sunday worship, they both had a very strong feeling that they had to make up their mind. So without hesitation, they put their names in!
We praise the Lord for His Blessings!
