Evangelical Free Church Pastor Celestino“Jun” Sabate came to California in 1998 and began his career as a church planter among the Filipinos of Central California. Within twelve years of his arrival and the planting of his first church in Tracy, California, that one small church has become five churches with three others in development in California and Arizona. In addition, several churches have been planted in the Philippines and Japan with the active help, financial support training and coaching by Pastor Jun and others who make up the leadership of the World Harvest Fellowship family of churches in California.
How did this happen? How can a church that has never reached an attendance of 100 people (WHF Tracy) multiply itself so that there are now more than a dozen newly planted churches in its planting network with a growing constituency of hundreds of people in this relatively short period of time?
When Pastor Sabate came to join our effort in the EFCA West district in 1998 he came with a passion to serve Christ, but he had almost no financial support other than the district’s modest church planting subsidy and a small amount of missionary support to sustain him, his wife and three sons. Together, these resources helped pay his meager salary and a few early ministry expenses.
Jun attended EFCA’s intensive church planting training seminars designed for modern linear-thinking Americans. Although he is a seminary graduate with degrees in pastoral ministry and counseling and had served as a pastor and district superintendent in the Philippines, he found the training to be cross-cultural. He repeated the complex training event three times in order to translate the presentation into a form that suited an Asian who thinks cyclically. And he learned the church planting process well.
Jun learned quickly that effective church planting required developing a church “system” that contained multiplication at every level of the ministry. That multiplication thinking included multiplying churches after the pattern of the New Testament (for example, Acts 1:8, Acts 19:10-12, Acts 13, I Thessalonians 1). (Jun and I agree that multiplication should occur in all parts of the church’s ministry. For example, there should be multiplication of believers through congregational involvement in evangelism, multiplication of disciples through relationship-centered growth experiences, multiplication of leaders by discerning potential leaders through relationships and training them, multiplication of ministries as the growing number of leaders are deployed and empowered, and multiplication of churches which comes about as a normal result of becoming effective at all the other levels of multiplication!)
He allowed me to be his coach and mentor during those early years, and that helped him. But what carried him through the challenges and the tough times was his faith in the God of the Bible and his determination to follow God’s Word which he believed taught the true nature of the church and described a magnificent church planting movement—a movement lead by the Apostle Paul, his traveling team of church planters, people Paul trained along the way, and the other Apostles.
Jun trained his people, starting with his elders. He taught them to lead in a way that reflected Jesus’ leadership (Mark 10:45), and to teach, and to preach. He is thrilled to boast in his disciples’ successes, believing that his elders now preach as effectively as he does. When he travels around the USA and in other countries, he is thankful that he leaves his congregation in very capable hands and does not have to bring in outside preachers to take his place.Jun says the delegation of pastoral leadership responsibility is a counter-cultural experience for Filipinos. It is common for them to view the pastor’s role as similar to that of a Roman Catholic priest, who would not give “ecclesiastical responsibilities” to the “laity”.
So, one church has now become twelve or more relatively new churches. (Actually, there are more churches than that involved in the network, because Pastor Jun and I have helped train churches and denominational leaders in the Philippines and Japan to take a very significant role in multiplying church planting networks in their countries. Some of these churches are now part of the WHF network.) Now the vision of the WHF family of churches is to plant at least twenty more over the next decade in the USA, Asia, and potentially other parts of the world.
Can a small church plant churches? My answer to that question is a resounding “Yes!”
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Steve Elliott, with experience as a church planter and as a regional church planting leader for the EFCA, serves as President of Church Assistance Ministry (CAM), a mission agency that specializes in training, coaching and leadership development for church plants, churches, denominations and mission organizations in various parts of the world, including the US.
In addition to his pastoral leadership, Pastor Jun Sabate serves the CAM ministry as International Director.
© Stephen D. Elliott, 2011
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