Wes Mills leads that Apostolic Churches Of Pentecost denomination in Canada. Many of the churches are under 250, with a large portion of those churches under 100. Wes shares from his own experience, gathering advice that is well worth noting.
“Well, I did grow up in the Regina Apostolic Church, that was my home church as a boy growing up. And God gave me a love for the church in that context. And I felt the call to ministry at a young age. And so serve that church as a lay youth pastor for several years, and then went off to Eston College. After graduation from there, went to Edmonton and became part of a church called the Seventh Avenue Apostolic Church. And I was just reflecting that it was 40 years ago, this May, that I began vocational ministry as a youth pastor there. . . .
“So 40 years ago, started off in youth ministry, and then moving into an associate role and then eventually became a pastor. . . Part of that pastoral role involved, leading that church to replant itself from a downtown kind of core into a suburban area. So that was a unique opportunity. And God blessed that opportunity and had great memories from that. . .that season of transition where we saw a lot of people getting saved and a lot of people being baptized and I dedicated more children that I can remember just in that season.”
“From there, I came to the ACOP international offices, director of Administration and Finance and did that for I think it was six years. And then when the previous moderator, we call it president now, retired, I was elected to serve in the role of President – that was 2004. 17 years in this role.”
“Our denomination, [Apostolic Church Of Pentecost – ACOP] we trace our roots back to the Azusa Street Revival in 1906, where our founder went down there. Franklin Small was impacted greatly by the Holy Spirit and came back to Winnipeg, Canada – began to see the same kind of spiritual phenomena that was happening in Azusa Street began to happen in Winnipeg. So a great season of revival where many people came to faith in Christ and hundreds of people were healed and empowered by the Spirit and just a real sense of outpouring of the Spirit. And then people went from there out to other places and planted churches and established ministries, went as missionaries globally. It kind of all traces its roots back to what we call Zion Apostolic Church. This is actually our 100th anniversary. We’ve morphed a little bit, we amalgamated with another group in 1954, called the Evangelical Churches of Pentecost. So two groups that were kind of like minded and about the same size came together to the denomination that exists today.”
“We’re almost exclusively Canadian. A lot of movements began in the US and then came into Canada, ours is a little different. Our founder was Canadian, and the movement started here. . . So we’re a bit unique in that way that we are predominantly Canadian.”
“I think about 50% or 60% of our churches would probably be under 100. And then we’d probably have another group of 25% to 30% churches that would be from the 100 of the 250. And then probably another 10% over 250. Our largest church would be the Regina Apostolic Church, and I think they consider around 1200 people part of that assembly, but we’re predominantly smaller churches.”
“I think of small churches that make up our fellowship, many of them are in smaller communities across the western part of Canada, Saskatchewan and Alberta. And one of the things that’s happened in some of those communities is that the communities themselves are either shrinking or disappearing just because of the way life and business and farming has evolved over the years. So those small communities are often disadvantaged.”
“We also recognize that smaller churches are almost like an extended family, sometimes they’re literally a family where there’s two or three families that are that are related and have have a strong influence in the church. So that creates dynamics that are a little different than what you’d see in other churches that are larger. . . Working with smaller churches, we find that they are not looking for us to tell them what to do, they’ve got a pretty good sense of that. But they do look to us for support on technical things, you know, how do we relate to the government? How do we fill up the T3010? Our role is to be supportive, to be a resource and to be a place where pastors and churches can turn to when they need advice. Our role has always been to influence the relationship and not to be directive necessarily, and how those churches should function.”
“I think COVID has brought out the best and the worst in churches. Some of the worst are the conspiracy theories that get shared around.. . . What I’ve discovered is that a lot of our smaller churches have said, ‘we’re going to church on Zoom so we can see each other’s faces’. So it’s not so much about the production quality, as it is about the opportunity to connect, at least virtually, in some way.”
“It’s helped our churches connect with one another because they’re able to go on and see whoever it is that’s preaching in New Brunswick . . . there’s just an engagement, you know, across the country that would never have happened had it not been for COVID. . . . One of the things we did early on in COVID, was we did a global prayer meeting and invited all of our partners around the world to join us. And that was a really neat experience. We wouldn’t have thought of doing that had it not been for COVID.”
“We think that churches need to be healthy. And that’s not determined by size, or location that’s determined by a number of other factors . . . They’re not staff driven, they’re volunteer driven. So they might have a full time pastor, they might not even have a full time pastor, the pastor might be co-vocational even. [In] a small church, everybody knows everybody. So there’s a sense of familiarity there. That is helpful.”
“I think that engagement with the community is critically important for small churches. If you’re just the church at the end of the block, and nobody knows you, that’s not going to be very effective. But if your church members are encouraged to engage with their community, than the church gets to know everyone in the community.”
[What advice would you give to someone who is considering going into small church ministry?] “Well, I would encourage them in the first year of their assignment, spend a lot of time drinking coffee with people from the church and people from the community and begin to understand the community. I think that it’s easy for someone to take an assignment and go to a small church and think they’ve got all the answers in their toolbox. But what they really need to do is go and listen and learn, understand the context that they’re ministering in and get get to know people. I think to try to understand why a church does things in certain ways would be a really big step, as opposed to just coming in saying, we’re going to change this.”
We were thrilled to see this, we came across this by accident. It was good to learn about of the work of the Lord in ways we knew little about. Most of all we were glad to see our son leading in this way, good work Wes.