What is The Great Canadian Adventure?

The Great Canadian Adventure provides an inexpensive, cross-cultural training opportunity for your church. It is a ministry training experience that not only allows for ministry exposure, but also involves training in evangelism, challenge from the Word, powerful worship and prayer, and exposure to testimonies of ordinary people who are now in full-time service. Our program is well organized and allows the maximum time for the leaders to focus on the team that they bring.

How the Great Canadian Adventure came to be

When Team Canada (now Grace Brethren Canada), moved to Mississauga in 1997, we realized that we needed more hands to help us lay the groundwork for the churches we dreamed of starting. How could six people realize the vision of seeing churches planted across Canada? The Great Canadian Adventure began as a stategic initiative in which people from other churches would partner with us to help create the exposure and lay the groundwork of early church planting. As they came, we shared what we were learning about evangelism in the secular, post-modern context in which we found ourselves. The response amazed us; what we shared resonated in ways we hadn’t imagined. In the months following, many told us that they had been challenged to think differently about evangelism in their own areas, and were seeing fruit as a result of changes in their thinking and approach.

Our aim became two-fold: to challenge participants to rethink evangelism in their area, thus revitalizing the work of evangelism in the local church, and to provide an opportunity for hands-on assistance in the groundwork of new church plants.

Rethinking evangelism

The church in North America is in obvious decline; at the core of the problem is the ineffectiveness of church members in evangelism. Statistics show that Christians are paralyzed in sharing their faith, with less than 10% of us ever leading a peer to faith in Christ. This is a trend that must change. Certainly, part of this ineffectiveness is due to disobedience and complacency, but the greater problem is likely one of philosophy. The church continues to assume a biblically literate culture, when in fact it is a secular, post-modern society. Christian sociologist George Barna says, “Today’s Church is incapable of responding to the present moral crisis. It must reinvent itself or face virtual oblivion by mid-21st century.” C.S. Lewis put it this way: “They err who say ‘the world is turning pagan again.’ Would that it were! The truth is that we are falling into a much worse state. ‘Post-Christian man’ is not the same as ‘pre-Christian man.’ He is as far removed as virgin is from widow; there is nothing in common except want of a spouse: but there is a great difference between a spouse-to-come and a spouse lost.” [Letters: C.S.Lewis/Don Giovanni Calabria (17 March 1953), para. 4-7, p.81].

Grace Brethren Canada desires to help the church rethink its strategic plan in reaching a post-modern world, and we take the time to train Great Canadian Adventure participants in fresh evangelistic thinking. We have seen much fruit from the biblical “farming model” of evangelism that we employ in our church planting initiatives. We’ve made some mistakes along the way, but we’ve learned some things as well and are eager to share our discoveries with you. We ask our participants to come ready to learn and to serve in accordance with our philosophy of ministry.

We are convinced that more is accomplished for the Kingdom when we work together. Our prayer is that as your assistance energizes the start of new churches, and the training you receive will mobilize your church to reach your local community for Christ.