Church Planting Family

I grew up in a Christian family.  My dad was a Baptist minister, actually he was a “church planter.”  As the District leader of the Michigan Baptist Conference, he would provide pastoral support to the pastors of various churches throughout the state, but he would also lead the beginnings of a group in a certain town or city that wanted to get a Baptist church started.  This meant that we as a family (5 kids) would travel on Sunday mornings to wherever the church was that he was “planting.”

Sometimes it was a three-hour drive. Mom would pull us out of bed in the wee hours of the morning and situate us in the station Wagen so we could go back to sleep.  And then, approximately 20-30 minutes before we arrived, she would have us get dressed in the car, comb our hair, feed us breakfast, and help us look halfway presentable. 

Once we arrived at the place where the “church” was to be set up (sometimes a school, town hall, YMCA, or someone’s home), all five of us kids had various jobs we had to do to help with the set up.  This involved setting up chairs, passing out hymn books, folding and passing out the bulletins, arranging the pulpit and piano, and setting up the classrooms for Sunday School and the nursery.  We had it down to a science.  I don’t ever remember any of us complaining or griping about this.  We just did it. 

Mom would play the piano and usually do a vocal solo as the special music. As the boys got older, they would often do the special instrumental number on the trumpet and clarinet.  Dad would also pull out his banjo or sweet potato or harmonica.  I kid you not!  It sounds like a family gong show. Since my sister and I were not musical, we always wanted to help in the nursery with the babies. This would get us out of having to sit through dad’s long sermons!

While I do not ever hear of this type of “church planting” happening today, I look back at that “family ministry,” and I am so incredibly thankful it is a part of my story.  It is a family memory that the five of us siblings share, a powerful experience that shaped each of us in different ways to be involved in church or para-church ministry throughout all our adult lives.  It enabled us to experience a type of commitment and passion in our parents call to ministry that filtered down to each of us, giving us each a love for the church and God’s work.

Legacy:  what you leave that continues on, makes a difference.  Yes, the legacy of Wally and Rose Peterson has done just that.