BCNE Starts Multiplication Center to Cultivate a New Generation of Pastors and Leaders
Participants gather for the first seminar of the newly founded Multiplication Center
A missiological initiative that started inauspiciously with a dream, will likely have a profound impact on the Baptist Churches of New England (BCNE) for years to come, according to Hal Haller, the Associate Executive Director, who was awakened in the middle of the night by a divinely inspired idea to multiply existing training options to cultivate a new generation of pastors and leaders.
On February 7 Haller led the first seminars of the BCNE Multiplication Center. The Center plans to “equip and encourage church leaders to engage in missionary activity in New England by facilitating and resourcing churches to multiply disciples in their specific ministry context,” according to the online purpose statement. A small group from the United States and Brazil, with whom the BCNE has a partnership, participated in the first two seminars and discussed the issues of contextualization and cooperation. In March Lierte Soares Jr, the center director and the BCNE president, will train participants on the topics of leadership and missiology.
Future topics, Haller notes, will include prayer, spiritual conversations, understanding one’s sphere of influence, aspects of self-leadership, and strategies for leading others towards their unique area of ministry service. All the seminars will feature practical exercises in a local church or in the community where God is calling the participant to serve.
Some seminars will ask the learners to discover or foster their understanding of what the associate executive director calls “a missiological foundation” for life choices of service in the “domains of society that God might be calling someone to,” sectors that include technology, entertainment, government, and religion.
The dream that caused Haller to wake up in the middle of the night and scribble notes before the thoughts faded away, was about a fresh approach that goes beyond present strategies of church strengthening and revitalization.
His ideas focused on the urgent need for training leaders because, he says, “Within the next eight years, many BCNE pastors will be at retirement age or older. We’re going to have a serious leadership vacuum.”
“Our BCNE pastors tend to be a bit younger on average than in other regions due to the high number of church planters serving in our network. When looking at our established churches that are ten years old or more, we have many seasoned pastors moving towards retirement,” BCNE Executive Director Terry W. Dorsett commented. “Instead of waiting for it to become a full-blown crisis, the BCNE is engaging churches and their leaders to help them prepare for a healthy succession,” he added.
“It’s not only important to raise up leaders to meet the need of what the demand will be in a few years,” Haller observes, “but we must address the ‘high lostness’ that we have in New England and train the leaders that are needed to start more churches that reach people with the gospel.”
His term “high lostness” refers to the significant percentage of non-evangelical Protestant New Englanders “who have not yet found eternal life in Christ,” according to an online explanation by the Got Questions Ministry. The BCNE offers a “culture of evangelism” for churches and trains leaders in “evangelism as a lifestyle rather than an occasional program.”
The International Mission Board is offering anyone interested a free eighteen-month prayer calendar that will help Baptists more effectively pray for lost persons. Their “Impacting Lostness Through Prayer” print calendar will be mailed to those who request a copy by completing a simple online form.
The BCNE engages in planting churches and amplifying the efficacy of leaders of all ages for both faithful living and life-transforming ministry through regional and special-interest networks that encourage fellowship, accountability, and sustainability. Conferences are held in person and online. In fact, a Vitality Conference will be held April 27 at City United Church in Lunenberg, MA, for “a day of equipping and networking around the topics of church revitalization” and the annual CrossWalk summer camp for New England youth will be held July 15-20 at Nichols College in Dudley, MA.
All sorts of leadership training strategies have been tried before, but new approaches must be recreated for each generation. From 1988 for about a decade, Kenneth Lyle, then the BCNE Executive Director, and Baptist directors from New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland-Delaware, and Washington, DC, led the Northeastern Baptist School of Ministry to provide seminary and practical training locally for future pastors and leaders. Seminary classes and practical training were held at the BCNE office building and its Rice Lodge.
More recently, the Northeastern Baptist College in Bennington, VT, opened its doors in 2013 to teach students how to have “the Mind of a Scholar, the Heart of a Shepherd, and the Perseverance of a Soldier.” President Mark H. Ballard is leading the college to become “the premier Baptist college in the Northeast, training ministerial and non-ministerial students both academically and practically, while impacting the Northeast throughout the training process.” He says, “At NEBC we are training men and women to IMPACT the world . . . for the glory of God.”
If a “church [has] fallen into a rut” and is “not sure how to move forward,” BCNE staff members consult with the pastor one-one-one, train small groups on how to overcome their specific struggles, and just listen empathetically.
The Multiplication Center, however, is something different. It exists for the benefit of future New England Baptist pastors and leaders, including some who are still in high school. The Center’s seminars are planned, Haller notes, to “retain the talent we have here, and help [participants of all ages] be effective for the gospel right here without them having to leave” for seminary elsewhere, to give participants “a practical ministry experience here in New England,” and to “help them [grow] in the mission God has called them to do.”
Haller, who joined the BCNE staff in 2020 after working as the church planting director for the Baptist Convention of New York in Syracuse, emphasizes that the Center is not planned just for academic learning, and, he adds, “We do not want to be a Bible college or a seminary. That’s not our niche. We help the average person live a life on mission.”
Haller observes that the Center also exists to communicate “the global idea of the Great Commission,” in which Jesus instructs his followers to “make disciples of all nations . . . teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you” (Matt 28:18-20).
HOW TO GET INVOLVED IN THE MULTIPLICATION CENTER
Go online to bcne.net /multiplication-center
Contact the center’s director, Lierte Soares Jr., who is the BCNE president, and pastor of Family Church, Framingham, MA; and New Life Community Church, Georgetown, MA or,
Contact the center’s provost, Rick Harrington, Pastor for Preaching and Vision at First Baptist Church, Haverhill, MA, and
Give a gift to help train the next generation of New England Christian leaders.
Making disciples and teaching the practical lessons of Christian faith are the twin pillars of the Multiplication Center, which is one response to the second of three key “impact goals” that the BCNE established in 2022.
BCNE will offer a certificate for those who complete the training regimen but will not grant academic credit. The practical training will “not require a lot of money,” he states, “just collaboration and cooperation—utilizing the talents and resources we already have” in 380-plus churches. “We want [participants] to understand how to live their lives so they can be more effective for the kingdom of God.”
The Center aims to meet the needs of pastors and others already doing ministry while also juggling busy non-church employment duties and, in many cases, demanding family responsibilities. Bivocational ministry, a biblical ministry practiced by Paul, is close to the heart of Dorsett, who was a pastor, church planter, and associational executive in Vermont, and is the author of Developing Leadership Teams in the Bivocational Church (2010).
The Center offers hybrid instruction, both online and in person, a teaching method that became popular during the COVID-19 pandemic. Seminars in person are held at the BCNE office in Northborough, MA, and in the future will be held in other New England locations. Details and registration links will be posted online.
The Center provides participants in its new One-Year Certificate Program, which began in January, with various tools to assist in sharing the gospel. Those who join a seminar will “learn from local and national ministry leaders to develop the skills and knowledge needed to succeed in New England ministry,” according to the Center’s website. The challenges and benefits of ministry in New England are quite different from those of churches in the southern Bible-belt states.
Participants will attend four online classes and six in-person seminars; and they will develop a personalized ministry project. Those who enroll in the Center’s “Venture Missions” program, a ten-day “immersive experience in New England Missions” this summer, will “engage the culture and context of New England, learn from effective New England ministry leaders and pastors, tour the places where spiritual awakening occurred in New England, and connect with other like-minded students desiring to make a difference” for the God’s kingdom in the region.
The Center’s “Next Gen. Missions” option, a nine-month learning and ministry process, will guide younger participants “to engage and experience ministry in New England and overseas . . . through the lens of the New England context,” the website says.
A Massachusetts native and a New England Baptist since 1970, Dan Nicholas is the BCNE managing editor