First Baptist Church, Spring Valley, California, hosted a conference for the church planters that First Baptist supports.
The church planting conference coincided with First Baptist’s missions trip to the Philippines June 23–25. More than 40 people went on that trip. While they were in the Philippines, church planters from India, St. Lucia, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Canada, and the US met at First Baptist to connect, network, pray together, and encourage each other to be faithful in the mission of church planting.
“The church planters needed this gathering,” says RJ Cabugwas, pastor of First Baptist.
Speaking at the conference was Clare Jewell, director of Generate. He capped off the conference by sharing how the church planters can connect with each other to build healthy, disciple-making churches. He also arranged for Generate to provide two books—Small Church Essentials and The Nuts and Bolts of Church Planting—for each church planter. Those books are “great tools that [the church planters] needed,” RJ says.
Joel Agüero, a church planter in the Dominican Republic, says, “The church planters conference was a great blessing to me and was edifying to my life. Each sermon and workshop I attended taught me so much. It was a blessing for me being able to connect with different church planters from different parts of the world and being able to learn about what God is doing through them in different parts of the world.”
Members of First Baptist had given so generously toward the conference that the church was able to help provide hotel rooms, food, and plane tickets for the church planters.
“The Lord is so good among God’s people here,” RJ says.
