Church Catalyst Director David Giles has been crunching the numbers and is really happy at the results he’s seeing for church plants and baptisms in the division’s fields last year.

“We estimated that we would plant 59 churches in 2011,” said David, “but I just got the numbers from Kenya so I have the total – 80 church plants in 2011 in CC fields!”

Highlights worth noting:

• There were 13 church plants and 1,026 baptisms in the Turkana, Kenya, churches in 2011.
• The Community Christian Church of Kenya planted 38 new churches in the Maasai and Turkana areas.
• The Maasai churches added 661 new members in 2011.
• Ten churches were planted in England through the Church Planting Task Force; three of the Great Britain field team members work with this partnership.
• Eighteen churches were planted in Ethiopia – 13 among the Oromo people and 5 among the Gumuz. There were also 200 baptisms in the Gumuz area in the last six months of 2011.

Other Church Catalyst fields such as Tanzania (5 new churches, 300 baptisms), Ivory Coast (1 new church) and Ukraine (8 new churches) also experienced significant growth in 2011.

“I’m thrilled with these reports,” said David. “These are the results of the Holy Spirit working through CMF missionaries, national church leaders and effective field partnerships.”

Park Pastors, a new program initiated by CMF missionary Aaron Lincoln and a ministry colleague in Rugby, England, is getting a lot of positive attention from the media, including an article in the online BBC News. The program is believed to be the first of its kind in England.

The Park Pastors program grew from the local involvement that Aaron, pastor Matt Caldicott and other Christians have had in the weekend Street Pastors ministry in Rugby, where volunteers patrol the streets to help people stay out of trouble on a night out. The town’s borough council has expressed support for the Park Pastors project and offered the group free use of an unused café in Caldecott Park, which is located right in the center of the town. The park is the most visited destination in Rugby, with about 650,000 visitors each year.

Rugby Councillor Mark Williams is excited about the plan. “Having safe, experienced volunteers on hand to help out will make the park an even more attractive place to visit,” he said.

Aaron, Matt and their ministry team plan to engage people through a regular Dads & Kids ministry, with organized games and activities for families and refreshments in the cafe.

“We especially want to connect with dads who bring their children to the park,” said pastor Matt Caldicott.  “There are lots of gathering places for mums and kids, but not so many for fathers.”

About a dozen students and staff from the Globalscope Canvas campus ministry in Birmingham, England, are making plans for a short-term trip in June to the Missions of Hope International (MoHI) ministries to poor children and their families in the slums of Nairobi, Kenya.

Canvas staffer Jason Tatum pitched the idea after visiting MoHI last year, and recruited through sheer enthusiasm, he said.

“For the most part, the trip sells itself,” he said. “I told a lot of stories about my experience there and showed a lot of photos from my trip. Students in the UK are very ‘justice-minded’ so it isn’t difficult to get them excited about something like this. We’ll get to see the incredible things MoHI is doing in the community and people’s lives throughout the area.”

Most of the students will pay for the trip themselves, and the team will try to raise 100% percent of the funds they’ll need for the work project they’ll do in Nairobi. They plan to do either a construction project or sports clinic, depending on MoHI’s needs at the time of their visit.

The Globalscope team’s goals for the trip are targeted in a couple of directions, said Jason, because the students are such a varied group.

“Canvas is a community that wants to model values of our faith to the non-Christians that often attend and participate in our community,” he said. “The students who are going are at all points of the spectrum in their respective faith journeys: an atheist, an agnostic, two professed Christians, another who is very near to making a decision about Jesus and another who is somewhere in the middle.”

The team members are preparing for the trip by meeting together with Jason and two other Canvas staffers – Kalyn Reeves and Caleb Mallard, who are also going on the trip – to discuss the culture, history, and religion of Kenya, as well as reading books such as “Toxic Charity” and “When Helping Hurts.”

“Our hope is that all of the students will get a new vantage point of what it means to follow Jesus, and a new understanding of how big and loving our God is,” said Jason. “It could be that for some of them, this will be the first time they have ever seen that connection. I really do believe that this experience could be transformational in their faith journeys.”

If Larry and Debbie Kineman (Worcester, England) want to check in with their teenage daughter, Kirsten, on Tuesday nights, all they have to do is turn on their radio or computer to hear her broadcasting live from 8-9 p.m. on popular local youth radio station Youthcomm.

Kirsten’s show is called The Lighthouse and is aimed at teens. She plays Christian music – her top favorites are Switchfoot, Sanctus Real, Needtobreathe and Tobymac – and talks about her life and friends from a studio located on the top floor of a youth center in Worcester. The whole show is her responsibility, from beginning to end.

“I pick the music, write out the links and decide on features,” Kirsten says. “Then when I get on the air it’s just a matter of reading what I have written and playing the songs! Nothing much to it!”

“The show is aimed at a youth audience,” she adds. “I try and make it seem upbeat and lively and get as much new Christian music as I can.”

The show began about five years ago when a lady from the Kinemans’ church, Manor Park in Worcester, decided to start a Christian radio show on Youthcomm. Kirsten went on the show about three years ago to see what it was like, and ended up helping out every week. When Laura, the original host, moved away about a year and a half ago, Kirsten took over.

Most of Kirsten’s friends think her unusual hobby is pretty cool, she says. “They listen when they can and text me to give them shout-outs on the air, which is fun to do.”

Kirsten is currently in the British equivalent of her senior year in high school. Is there a serious radio career in her future? Like most kids her age, the talented teen is keeping her options open.

“I haven’t really decided what I want to do after high school yet,” she says, “but radio is definitely a possibility! I have lots of other things I’m thinking about as well, like animation or graphic design.”

Meanwhile, Kirsten keeps playing the music she loves and talking about life.

“I know the station is pretty popular, but I have no idea who’s actually out there listening,” she laughs, “except my Grandma in America! She listens every week on her Internet radio.”

Caleb Mallard is a rarity in his culture: a native Englishman who is also an evangelical Christian. He knows from first-hand experience how few people in England are Christians, or even see the relevance of the Church in our secular world.

Caleb earned a theology degree from Birmingham Christian College and has served as the pastor of Dickens Heath Village Church for the past seven years, while also working with Canvas, the Globalscope team in Birmingham that works with students at the University there. He’s currently moving into a full-time ministry with Canvas because, in his experience, “there are no ministries in the UK that are engaging with non-Christians and atheist students as well as Canvas.”

After living in Birmingham for the past 10 years, Caleb has a real passion for the university students. That, coupled with his experience working in a local church, has convinced him that the British church has to develop “a completely missional mindset,” he says. “That is one of our (the Church’s) greatest challenges. God has put it on my heart to engage with those who are missed by the Church.”

Caleb is always pleasantly surprised at how well the Canvas team members engage with atheist students, and how willing the students are to talk about Jesus. “It just doesn’t happen here in the UK, and without God in it, Canvas wouldn’t be able to operate the way it does,” he says.

Recently, the Canvas team has been able to connect many of it’s non-Christian students into a leadership group that looks for ways to better serve and reach out to people who aren’t part of the community. “These are students who don’t know Jesus yet, but they’re committed to what Canvas is, and that blows my mind!” he says. “God is at work in their lives and they don’t even realize it!”

Larry Kineman, CMF missionary in Worcester, England, had two opportunities recently to participate in BBC radio broadcast discussions about the recent rioting and looting in major cities in Great Britain.

Larry is a member of a group called Street Pastors, who go out into the streets of Worcester on weekend nights to engage in meaningful conversations with young “clubbers” who are out on the town. As a result of that connection and his experiences, he was asked to join a Sunday morning panel discussion on the local BBC Hereford and Worcester radio station on the topic: “Have our morals deteriorated in the UK and what can be done about this?”

“Our input was limited since there were three of us on the panel,” writes Larry, “but I shared the missional essence of Street Pastors, which is a response by the church to urban problems by going into communities, listening, caring, and dialoguing with people as a practical way of demonstrating the love of Jesus.”

Following that interview, Larry received another invitation to a different BBC radio talk show, and in that interview he was able to address the underlying problems that have led to the community unrest.

“A primary issue to address is how to strengthen the basic block of society, the family,” he said in the interview. “The newspapers have been reporting that youth are in court facing sentencing without parents present because they can’t be bothered to show up and support their children. Young mothers are afraid to confront their sons who show up with stolen goods in the home. Strengthening families will require a focused effort over a longer period of time.”

The earthquake and tsunami in Japan prompted some teens that David and Teresa Fittro work with in Nottingham, England, into action.

The Fittros, members of CMF’s Great Britain Field Team, have been working with young people in the Trentside Youth Club and teaching religious education classes in a local school. Many of these students have begun attending the Monday night youth group, “The Point,” that the Fittros lead. The group of about 25 teens was anxious to help raise funds for the relief effort and asked the Fittros to help them organize the event.

“In five days, we had musicians ready to play, people baking cookies, a mom putting together games, and a place in the center of town to host it,” writes David. “More than 25 teens gathered on a Saturday afternoon and promoted the need. So far, we have raised about $900, and donations are still coming in.”

Not only did the group raise a substantial amount of money, but also the joint effort served to connect the Trentside and “The Point” groups.

“It is a very exciting time,” David added. “Your prayers are windows through which God’s heart is being touched. We are on the verge of a youth movement in this community!”

Larry Kineman, a member of CMF’s Great Britain field team based in Worcester, was profiled in the Nov. 12 edition of the “Worcester News” newspaper for his work with a volunteer street pastors program.

Larry and other pastors from across the city patrol the streets on the weekends in the hours from 10 p.m. to 4 a.m. to offer late-night revelers the hand of friendship, along with water bottles, blankets, flip flops and other practical helps.

Writer Alicia Kelly was very complimentary of the pastors’ work and of Larry. She writes: “Mr. Kineman seems great fun and is clearly no fuddy duddy – which will no doubt come as a relief to the clubbers not looking for a spiritual encounter on a Saturday night.” To read the whole article, which includes some of Larry’s amusing stories about his late-night encounters, click here.