During the summer of 2006 my family and I moved to central Indiana where I taught at a university. We were ARP’s, and I was a student under care at the time, but in God’s providence we found ourselves in a state with no ARP churches, so friends recommended that we visit a Reformed Presbyterian congregation (RPCNA) in Kokomo. Warmly welcomed, we soon found ourselves at home in this vibrant congregation (attendance around 100), begun as a church plant years earlier. A year later we found ourselves deeply engaged in the life of the church, as the session asked if I was interested in interning under their pastor, Barry York. This was arranged in conjunction with my ARP Presbytery and our home congregation; our initial visit turned into two years of valuable hands-on ministry internship.
Category Archives: Church Planting
Discipleship and Planting Churches
Several months ago I was privileged to take part in a discussion on church planting and discipleship with Barry York (senior pastor, Sycamore Reformed Presbyterian Church of Kokomo, Indiana) and Dale VanDyke and Francis VanDelden (senior and associate pastors, Harvest Church) who minister at a growing OPC here in Grand Rapids. We talked about the Reformed Presbyterian Churches (RPCNA) in Indiana as a case study of church planting: beginning with one small congregation in Bloomington in the late 1960′s, there are now eleven across the state.
Over at Reformation 21, the online magazine of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, I summarize some of the valuable points of this discussion.
