New England Pastors Encounter the Spiritual Realities of Church Planting and Ministry in Europe
(Left to right) Tim Vamosi, Judson Adams, Ademi Mirabal, Kevin Fortier, Rick Harrington, Stephen Woodard, Matt and Molly Vandeleest, Scott Kearney.
In February 2024, Matt Vandeleest, Lead Pastor of Faith Baptist Church, Warwick, RI, traveled for the first time outside the United States.
Rather than visit the scenic and tourist-focused sites that may be found in the United Kingdom around nearly every corner, he chose instead to attend an annual meeting and learn from Andy and Rachel Millar, evangelists and church planters at Calvary Church in Claremorris, County Mayo, in the West of Ireland. He met the Millars when they attended the Baptist Churches of New England annual meeting and visited churches in November 2023.
Rhode Island Pastor Considered London’s Christian Heritage
Less than a year after his first visit, Vandeleest and his wife, Molly, returned to Europe, this time as one of ten New England Baptist pastors who participated in a mission-focused “vision tour” November 10-18, 2024. With Sam Taylor, BCNE’s Global Partnerships Missions Mobilizer, as their leader, the New England pastors met and considered partnerships with some of their counterparts in London, England; Glasgow, Scotland; and Dublin and Claremorris, Ireland.
Matt Vandeleest speaks at a gathering of Irish church planters and leaders in February 2024
Their tour began in London when, as Vandeleest said, they got “to really see the state of the church.” With an “historical street evangelist,” Ben Virgo, as their tour guide, the New Englanders heard stories of William Wilberforce, Charles Spurgeon, George Whitefield, John Wycliffe, John Wesley, and others; Virgo’s web site says these historical church leaders were “caught up by God’s grace in this city, and have invested themselves for his glory here.”
Virgo, who is Director of Christian Heritage London and pastor of Victoria Park Baptist Church, “took us around and showed us so many places where Christianity used to be the staple in London, and the culture, and the fabric of the city.” They also observed that, “They’re just old buildings now, which really helped us understand just how needy for the gospel London itself is. I know that translates out to the rest of the country as well.”
Looking at the current state of the churches in the UK, “The reality is that no church lasts forever. What is the legacy in regard to how effective was that church in making disciples?” he asked. Touring those London churches, he realized that many of the pastors who started the churches “were remarkable at making disciples but the men who came after them slowly lost that ability, and the churches, as a result, ceased to exist as gospel centers.”
BCNE pastors met with Paudge Mulvihill, Founder and Director of Calvary Mission, Ireland, a church planting network in the West of Ireland.
A “homegrown Wisconsin boy” from West Salem, Vandeleest describes his former self as a “very rebellious teenager who spent a good deal of my time participating in drugs and alcohol and all that goes with that.”
On his nineteenth birthday, at about midnight, he was sitting on the edge of a bed when “God just spoke! I don’t know how else to put it, but he spoke, and . . . I was immediately sober, immediately clear-headed, and just utterly stunned by what had just happened.” He returned home and immediately started reading a Bible for the first time.
Vandeleest said his conversion was not unlike Saul’s on the Damascus Road.
Following study at a Bible college in Minnesota and Boyce College at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, he graduated from the University of Northwestern, St. Paul, MN, and afterward served churches in Wisconsin before moving in April 2022 to Rhode Island.
When asked about what he most enjoys about the pastorate, he replied, “I think the primary mission that God has given me, and where my my heart really is in the place it should be, is helping churches that are broken heal and become healthy. I really get a great joy out of that. It’s difficult but I get a great joy out of it.”
New Hampshire Pastor Came to Understand Spiritual Darkness
Three weeks after Kevin and Lisa Fortier returned from their twelve-day “trip of a lifetime” to Scotland, he accepted an invitation to join Taylor, Vandeleest, and the other pastors on the recent vision tour of Europe.
“I went there with my eyes open, but I don’t think I realized what I was going to see. I came to understand the darkness that is pervasive in the British Isles,” said Fortier, pastor of Emmaus Church, Manchester, NH, a storefront congregation that he planted on the city’s West side in 2015.
New Hampshire pastors Scott Kearney (left) and Kevin Fortier (right) listen to a Scottish pastor tell about the challenges he faces while doing ministry in the highly secularized Scottish culture.
“I'm in New Hampshire. New Hampshire and Vermont vie every year for the ignominious title of the ‘least churched state in the nation,’ I’m not surprised by darkness, by rocky ground. I know what that looks like—but I didn’t realize that it could be worse somewhere else,” he commented, comparing the spiritual condition he saw in the United Kingdom with what he finds in New England.
Fortier thought of European Christians “as being kind of just like us.” Describing the vision trip, he said, “It was absolutely beautiful because we got to meet brothers in Christ, and a couple of families of those pastors, who are on the front lines of what is definitely spiritual warfare.”
The term Fortier uses for New England is “post-Christian,” but Europeans are “pre-Christian.” “It’s almost as if they’ve been given a blank slate, and these folks are in the trenches battling against, for lack of better term, false teaching. They are battling against secularism and humanism, and yet their hearts for the Lord, have not wavered.”
A former Roman Catholic from Brockton, MA, Fortier is a “trivocational” pastor. In addition to serving an urban church, he is a chaplain at Rockingham County Nursing Home, Brentwood, NH, and a chaplain-coach with Marketplace Chaplains, Manchester.
Fortier committed his life to Jesus Christ in 1999 while sitting under a palm tree in Costa Mesa, CA. He was reading one of the bestselling premillennial, eschatological Left Behind novels and carefully checking everything he read against the Bible. The Bible made the difference.
The Importance of the Great Commission
Sam Taylor discussed the European partnership, highlighting visits to London, Glasgow, and a network of church planters in the West of Ireland. He emphasized the importance of the Great Commission for church growth and noted that European churches, despite their historical, evangelical presence, now face significant spiritual lostness.
BCNE pastors having dinner with International Mission Board missionary and former Boston church planter T J Odom and his wife, Deena, in Glasgow, Scotland.
He mentioned the success of church planting in Ireland among immigrants but noted the indigenous population’s resistance.
“It benefits every church to be obedient to our Lord’s Great Commission. Every church is benefited when it takes the Great Commission seriously and gets in step with that,” commented Taylor, who was a pastor in Nashua, NH; the BCNE director in Metro Boston; and a missionary to Ukraine.
Taylor spends his days connecting churches in New England and Europe and elsewhere, and encouraging them to create meaningful, two-way partnerships for mutual benefit.
Churches “will always inevitably experience a greater measure of God’s blessing and life provision and his favor on their own congregation when they are looking beyond themselves to the nations, because that’s where the heart of God is. You cannot expect to thrive as a congregation without a robust commitment to the Great Commission,” he added, with reference to Jesus Christ’s command in Matt 28:18-20.
“If we use the Acts1:8 model,” he commented, the churches that the New England pastors toured in Europe “are missionary churches on the mission field, much like New England churches. They are working in very, very unevangelized, post-Christian contexts and the level of spiritual lostness that surrounds them is far greater even than what we have in New England.”
Despite the significance of Christian history in Europe, Taylor concluded, “Today it is a spiritual desert well beyond what we are experiencing in New England, and so, those guys are doing first-generation work in a new area.”
“Compared to the churches in Scotland and in the West of Ireland,,” he noted, “New England could be considered the Bible Belt.”