Not every church is willing to send 50% of its ruling elders to the mission field. But City of Hope Presbyterian Church had only two active ruling elders when one of them sensed the Lord calling his family into global missions.
Being a church that sends its members into missions is a core value for the 100-member congregation in Columbia, Maryland. The church participated in the pilot program of Mission to the World’s Cultivate course, a training that helps churches build both vision and strategy for prioritizing missions.
“Cultivate instilled in us the heart of not just sending anyone, but even some of your best people out into the missions field, and to go and participate in that to an unreached area that is in dire need of access to the gospel,” said John Song, senior pastor at City of Hope.
In June 2024, City of Hope was part of the pilot program for Cultivate along with nearby Columbia Presbyterian Church. The intensive seminar described the biblical foundation for missions as well as the state of missions both domestically and globally.
“We met over the course of a day-long seminar to understand how to formulate a vision for missions for the church and how missions committees can work more effectively in both partnerships and also in mobilizing the congregation for missions,” Song said.
After the training, City of Hope’s missions committee spent several months solidifying its vision, partners, and relationships. For the church’s annual Missions Month, the committee brought that vision to the congregation, particularly a vision for prioritizing people with limited or no access to the gospel.
City of Hope also hosted MTW’s North East regional director and Cultivate designer Greg Hills to speak to the church. Song said having Hills and the Cultivate training available to the church were tangible ways for his church to feel connected to the larger denomination.
“We get to see a real direct impact on our church in a way that really strengthens what Presbyterianism is, and it helps our congregation to be able to see that,” he said.
Hills came on staff with MTW in 2021, and from the outset one of his visions was to develop a trainer-led workshop to engage churches with missions. Hills had previously pastored a missions-minded PCA congregation near Boston.
“I saw what happens when the church gets energized for missions, and I realized if there’s a way to get any church, every church, energized for missions, that would be a big win,” he said.
He worked with MTW Mobilization Specialist Sarah Jones to develop the curriculum along with Louisa Tremann of the MTW learning team.
150 churches have utilized Cultivate so far, and Hills wants another 50 churches to go through the program by the time MTW holds its Global Missions Conference in November 2027.
MTW offers Cultivate as either four weeks of virtual sessions or a one-day live seminar format, combining several churches in the shared training. The training not only helps churches assess their current attitudes toward missions but also to build and solidify a vision and strategy. Often churches struggle not with a lack of desire for missions but with discerning where to focus amid an overwhelming pool of opportunities and needs. MTW’s goal with Cultivate is that every PCA church becomes not just a supporting church, but also a sending church.
“You don’t have to be a megachurch to be a sending church,” Hills said. “We help [missionaries] get overseas, but you disciple them. You raise them up… It’s not about the money. It’s about helping people discern their call.”
MTW’s trained, experienced leaders walk churches through the material and also follow up with churches as they implement the material.
Tom Patton is a Cultivate trainer who has been missions pastor for 29 years. For the past 16 he has served at Oak Mountain Presbyterian Church in Birmingham, Alabama. He also spent eight years ministering in Japan.
When Hills approached him about reviewing the curriculum, Patton says he was blown away by the material.
“There has never been a resource like Cultivate to help churches organize their missions program and focus their missions program,” Patton said. “My experience has been the mission committee members and the members of the churches that are trying to provide leadership, they’re like dry sponges soaking up this material because it’s so helpful. It’s such a valuable resource to them.”
During the training process, Patton met with Hills for several hours and walked through the material.
The first session Patton led was with five churches from his presbytery. He personally enjoyed the experience, and the feedback from participants was overwhelmingly positive.
An added benefit of the course is how it bonds the congregations that take the course together. Some have stayed in touch, forming WhatsApp groups and consulting with one another as issues arise.
“When you get missions committees from four or five churches in the same room and they’re sharing ideas and they’re sharing resources and they’re asking some of the same questions — it’s very empowering, and there’s this energy that happens when there’s that kind of collaboration. It’s really quite beautiful,” Patton said.
Another effect is that churches who become more missions minded on a global level become more attuned to the local missions opportunities around them.
“At the church level, we see global and local [missions] going hand in hand, or they can go hand in hand if done well. Cultivate talks about both — how local and global can be in a symbiotic relationship,” Hills said.
As City of Hope prepares to deploy one of its own families across the globe, God has raised up more ruling elders for the church — an elder who was on sabbatical has re-joined the session — and also strengthened its ministry in and around Columbia.
“It has enabled us to think about…what does it look like to partner with Christian organizations that are doing wonderful relief work right in our backyard, not just merely regional or even national organizations, but those who are literally serving our city and our neighborhoods?” Song said. “That has been a really wonderful byproduct of what Cultivate offers.”
Song hopes that not only churches will consider participating in Cultivate, but that presbyteries will explore what that might look like to bring the training to a region.
“I would encourage any church that is feeling stuck when it comes to missions to really take advantage of our denominational resources because it can really be a catalyst for churches to think about how to be intentional for the Great Commission and ultimately for the lost to know Christ,” Song said.