by Rev. Jason Waeber
Foothills Reformed BP Mission
the Missions Banner, April/May 2026

One of the great benefits of the Reformed tradition broadly is that, in many cases, the people in Reformed churches have been passing down that tradition for generations. We emphasize raising up children in the Lord, and even the fact that we baptize them as infants is a great aid in helping our kids to see themselves as a part of the church from the very beginning. I am the third generation in my family to serve in church leadership – my father, grandfather, and I myself served as elders at a single church. I consider it a deep honor to carry this tradition of faithfulness with me.

On the contrary, one of the greatest difficulties about serving in a church plant situation is that many of the people coming to the church do not already possess this tradition, especially in rural areas. Many of the people in our church, even if they have come to accept Reformed beliefs, did not themselves begin within the Reformed tradition. That means, although we have many faithful, serious Christians, we have relatively few who are familiar with the way that the Presbyterian church operates. The great bulk of the people in our church come from either Methodist or Baptist backgrounds, and this has meant that we have to do a lot of teaching when it comes to the theology behind Reformed thought. It’s gone well, for the most part, but shifting a whole system of thought takes time.

We have made it the key to our image in the area that we are about preaching the word faithfully as a first order issue, and there has been a great response to this. Spurgeon himself said, famously, “Calvinism is the gospel, and nothing else,” and there is a great deal of truth in this phrase. If we are preaching the word and the gospel faithfully, we will be preaching unapologetically about the Lord’s sovereignty over all things. Folks from these different traditions are coming to recognize the beauty and biblical faithfulness of Reformed thought. We have an excellent group of folks who have come together pursuing that end, but we have had real trouble finding the right men to serve as lay elders in the congregation.

Part of this is the diversity of the congregation. We have several very good men from a Baptist background, many of whom have embraced Reformed theology and some of whom have begun moving toward accepting paedobaptism, but they are in transition. We have several very good men who are from a Methodist background and are coming to appreciate a Calvinistic understanding of sovereignty, but who are still struggling through the matter. We have several young men who have energetically embraced a very Westminsterian understanding, but who still need seasoning before they could reasonably serve in the role.

I actually find this diversity deeply encouraging, since a place like Adams County does not have very many pre-packaged Reformed folks in it. I’m fairly sure that I have most of them in the church already, so if our church intends to grow enough to be stable, it needs to know how to speak to and convince folks from these other traditions. It doesn’t, however, make finding leaders an easy business, since those leaders must both 1) be acceptable to the diversity of people in the church, and 2) be acceptable to the standards of the BPC as we have received them. This means that we have to be committed to the slow process of training, waiting, and trusting.

There is a real temptation in a church plant which is growing and showing some momentum (we’re not exploding, but we’re seeing around fifty people on a normal Sunday at the moment, which is a decently sized church for the area) that we just need to pick from what we’ve got and make do. I’m increasingly convinced that this is unwise. Having seen several situations myself, most churches that implode do so because of failures in leadership. This risk of implosion is even more intense in a church planting setting, because there are so many more pressures placed upon the institution than an established church. If a lack of recognized local leadership slows us down some, that’s an acceptable cost to avoid the risk of putting the wrong men in leadership and letting the ship founder. When good men just need time to grow, you give them the time. Harvesting a crop before it’s ripe leaves you hungry over the winter.