Regenerate 2010 Video

Our theme going forward is Regenerate: Plant. Water. Grow. We are trusting God for growth in the EFCC as a movement. And we’re casting forward our imagination for a new harvest in 2020.

We encourage you to play this clip for your church or small group. Trust God with us for His will to be done, and more souls to find freedom and power in His truth and love.

You can download your own copies of this clip using the following links:

Regenerate2010.mp4 (~16MB)
Regenerate2010.wmv (~8MB)

The EFCCM is Here (Video)

We’ve started a new promotion campaign here at the EFCCM. This one needs your participation!

The EFCCM is Here. Wherever you go, you take the EFCCM with you.  It could be on a dusty road in a distant village. Or in the bustling core of a foreign metropolis. Or in a Canadian church as you pray on the EFCCM’s behalf. Your curiosity, your passion, your action are all elements of what God is doing with and through the EFCCM.

We are assembling a gallery of pictures with people wearing t-shirts, holding up signs in places all around the world. We will be using these in a variety of presentations to make it clear to our churches and the world:

The EFCCM is Here!

You can download a pdf, and print it out for your own bulletin board, bulletin, or even your own t-shirts:
theEFCCMisHere.pdf (approx. 10KB)

You can also download a copy of the above video clip (which is just over 1 minute) for use in your church, or small group or whatever (simply right click and select ‘save as…’):
EFCCMisHere.wmv (approx. 8MB)
EFCCMisHere.mp4 (approx. 10MB)

We are excited to get this concept to as broad a group of participants and supporters as possible. If you have ideas for how that could happen at your church, your missions committee, or perhaps even with your short-term team, please get in touch!

Leadership Summit 2010

Our Home Office staff is looking forward to Global Leadership Summit 2010 which is put on by Willow Creek. This is an inspiring time of hearing from a wide variety of leaders in a variety of contexts, with a variety of priorities, but who are united in their faith. We were impressed by last year’s, and some of the concepts shared there are still percolating in our conversations now. This is highly recommended for you, your pastor(s), your board and any other leader in your church or organisation.

On August 5 & 6 we encourage you to participate with us wherever you are.

Click here to see the line-up of contributors, and other details.

Click here to see if there are locations near you hosting the event.

I have discovered that the venue we will be attending has wireless internet; I’m hoping that I will be able to live blog the event! I will let you know where that will be happening (it could be on this site, but might work better on an external one). Hopefully we will be able to continue the discussion well after the Summit has passed.

Site is Back Up!

This morning I heard from one of our churches that our site was down. I don’t know for how long — it seems to have worked smoothly until at least yesterday. There was a change that needed to be made behind the scenes, and our hosting company fixed it in about 10 minutes. So everything is back on track and running fine again.

Time to Check Your Pulse!

We’re pleased to announce the latest Pulse has been posted to the website.

Click here to see the online version. (You can also download your own copy from that link.)

I’m particularly proud of the cover — I think it connects perfectly with our theme and our treatment of it. But I hope you see the humour in it, and aren’t inspired to literally duke it out with those of a different opinion. That would be somewhat awkward…

There’s lots of good content to peruse in this edition. In here we address the different perspectives that inform the debate between Emergent vs Resurgent perspectives. That’s pretty hot-button stuff right now.

We are grateful to Ian and Marvin who took up the challenge of writing this piece. We hope you will enjoy their well-reasoned perspectives, and their back and forth. We are curious to hear your response to this. After you read the Pulse, please return to this post: Comments are open below!

New Features You Should See

The scope of this website is becoming larger all the time. Some of the new additions and improvements don’t instantly appear on the front page, and we want to make sure you’re aware of them.

This post is just to alert you to a few of them.

1. The Church Resource Manual
You can download our Church Resource Manual and print it off for your own reference. This is crammed full of practical information on the details of running a local church. Find it by clicking here.

2. Welcome to the Family
Welcome to the Family is our membership manual for Evangelical Free Churches. You can find it by clicking here.

3. Church Directory
As noticed by a few, the Church Directory was put up and then suddenly removed. We needed to do some major updating of the info on there, and we have changed the format to make it much easier for us to modify. Arranged by district, you can get that by clicking here.

The Pulse for April 2010

It’s done! It’s up! And it’s available now!

Following our new debate model for the Pulse, this time our big question is

Money or Missionaries: Which should we send?

The latest edition of the Pulse is available by clicking here (this is the second in this online format — the first is available here).

We invite you to read the authors’ perspectives, and then you’re welcome to share your own thoughts here in the comments (please give us a little context for which article or thought you’re addressing). The invitation to comment applies to the whole site — each post offers a place to comment. As usual, the Pulse also contains news and updates from many of our ministries across Canada and around the world.

You can even download a pdf version of the Pulse, to print and keep for yourself.

See all of the Pulse-related content on this blog, including PulseTV, by clicking here.

Website Improvements Onstream

Finally! As we’ve been promising on this site since we first put it up, the ability to donate online is now live! We’ve worked with a very capable web developer to rebuild the functionality of the e-commerce, and it comes with several key improvements in how it works, and how secure it is. It will allow you to donate to either a national or a national ministry at one spot. That’s pretty cool!

We’ve also launched registration for EFCC Conference 2010 (the theme is Regenerate: Plant. Water. Grow.). Again, this is going to provide us with the ability to handle registration with a far greater efficiency, it will give us much greater capacity to make edits, and will enable us to plan with much more accurate focus. If you got caught up in the glitches last time, you’ll appreciate this! (We’re not promising perfection here, just improvement. It’s still a pretty complex process!)

To visit the donation page, look for donate.efccm.ca.

To register for Conference click on register.efccm.ca.

2 Steps to Go

1.) All of the domains we own are going to point to this site, including efccm.org and efcc.ca — that is in process. (Currently those domains are broken from their old locations, so the servers’ processes have started.)

2. ) We are implementing a robust e-mail subscription system. If you’d like to keep up with news from the EFCC and the EFCCM, submit your e-mail address on this page. It is a way of reminding you to keep coming back to participate in the good things that are happening on the site.

Well that’s it for now — we now return to our regularly (un)scheduled ministry updates.

Conference Intros: Part 2

Here is Part 2 in our line-up of engaging speakers for EFCC Conference 2010 (click here to see Part 1).

Randy Friesen was the director of Youth Mission International (YMI) from 1989 to 2002. Through YMI Randy gave leadership to the development and growth of mission programs for teens, college-age and early career participants. From 2002 to 2004 Randy was the Director of Short Term Ministries for MBMS International, which included YMI and other intergenerational mission programs such as Disciple Making International (DMI) and Global Action Partners (GAP). Since 2004 Randy has served as the General Director of MBMS International, the global mission agency of the Mennonite Brethren churches of North America. When not travelling to mission projects around the world, Randy speaks to audiences across North America calling this generation to a life of risk and sacrifice in an eternal direction.

Randy has a BA in International Politics, a Masters in Theology from Tyndale Seminary in Toronto and a DTH in Missiology from the University of South Africa.

Randy and his wife Marjorie live in Abbotsford, BC with their two children Joshua and Olivia.

EFCC Conference 2010: Regenerate

Please plan to attend EFCC Conference 2010! This year our theme is Regenerate: Plant. Water. Grow.

We are really excited about this Conference. For starters it will be held in the picturesque Sun Peaks Resort. This gives opportunities for bike-riding, hiking, swimming or just enjoying the scenery.

We are planning some excellent plenary sessions and seminar topics. But we’re also leaving lots of time open for connecting and sharing with other leaders and members of the EFCC community.

We hope you will take advantage of what we’re offering at EFCC Conference 2010. We’re looking forward to seeing you all there!

Registration is now open!

Finally, you can download a high-quality print of this invite by clicking here. Share it with your church family. Everyone who attends will be blessed, and will be a blessing!

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