Artizo’s annual Meet the Apprentices gathering spotlights our apprentices and their ministry training, highlights the role of training in gospel mission, and invites our supporters to partner with us in the work of training. We are grateful for the vibrant community that gathers around this event – alumni, trainers, board members and supporters, new and old.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
This is from pastor and theologian, John Stott, and he’ll call us to attention this evening. He says:
“Ambitions for God if they are to be worthy can never be modest. Once we are clear that God is king, then we long to see him crowned with glory and honor and accorded his true place, which is the supreme place. We become ambitious for the spread of his kingdom and righteousness everywhere.”
So, ambition. There’s nothing uglier than naked ambition. And there’s nothing lovelier than gospel ambition. Naked ambition makes an idol of our goals and a god of our ego. Gospel ambition recognizes and proclaims the beauty of Jesus Christ. Gospel ambition is not content until we make ourselves low in order that he would be high, until his story is shared everywhere – on our lips and our lives. Because beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news.
So, in Meet the Apprentices, we always share how we train and what we’re doing in training. But we also need to remember why we train, and why we train is because we have gospel ambition. This is our vision statement:
Artizo aims to fill Canada with the sound of God’s word. We do this by equipping future ministers to faithfully preach and teach God’s word and entrust it to others.
So that’s not a small vision, to fill Canada with the sound of God’s word. Canada is large, you know this. But when we consider the news that we carry and the king that we serve, we can’t afford to think small. Furthermore, we’ve noticed in the last few years that the Lord has been blessing our work way beyond our expectations.
He’s answered our prayers by sending us fantastic apprentices, people to train. And he’s answered our prayers in terms of sending us support – the money that we need to do the work. And so, we’re confident to keep pushing forward, and our aim is to fill Canada with the sound of God’s word. And for that to happen, we need to train teachers and preachers. And for that to happen, we need to make training possible within local churches.
Before John Stott, if you can imagine such a thing, was the Apostle Paul. He had gospel ambition as well. So here’s what he says in Romans chapter 15 speaking of his ministry. He said,
“…from Jerusalem and all the way around to Illyricum I have fulfilled the ministry of the gospel of Christ; and thus I make it my ambition to preach the gospel, not where Christ has already been named, lest I build on someone else’s foundation, but as it is written,
“Those who have never been told of him will see,
and those who have never heard will understand.””
So Paul sums up ten years of preaching and imprisonment and letter writing and church planting and apostolic ministry in one verse by saying, “I fulfilled the ministry of the gospel from Jerusalem to Illyricum.” If you’re wondering where that is, this is from modern day Israel all the way to Albania. From all the way across Asia Minor to the Adriatic Sea, Paul has preached and planted churches.
And we know this story. Perhaps we haven’t thought of it quite this way though, which is that over the course of three grinding missionary journeys, Paul constantly sought out new frontiers for the gospel. So every time he went out, he ranged further and further and further, because his ambition was to preach the gospel – but not just preach the gospel, but where Christ was not yet named. He doesn’t want to build on another person’s foundation. That is, he doesn’t want to go where there are already churches. Ministry succession is vital. Of course, we need pastors to take over other churches. It’s just not Paul’s mission. Paul’s mission is speaking the name of Jesus where it’s never been heard before. And he goes on to explain that this ambition, this mission, is part of why he’s written the book of Romans. I wish my fundraising letters were this good!
Of course, he wants to explain to the Romans the majesty of God in Christ. He wants to build up their faith, all of that. But in terms of outcomes, he writes asking the Roman church to consider sending him further west, yes, to Spain. He says, can you help me out on my journey? I’m going to carry the gospel to the ends of the earth – in this case, all the way to Spain, which to them was the ends of the earth.
Paul is ambitious for the gospel. Artizo is also ambitious for the gospel.
So I’ll draw a parallel. It’s a little bit presumptuous, maybe. I’ll try to be careful. But like Paul, there are already many ways that Artizo has fulfilled the gospel of Christ in our ministry. It’s very encouraging: 150 graduates in 25 years, and now we’re working in six training churches. We have nine apprentices and Artizo graduates are out there serving in all kinds of places, doing amazing things, making us all very proud. We love to brag about them. And increasingly they’re doing the work of training as well.
Like Paul, we’re aware that there are places we aren’t training as well, so we’re pining for Spain a little bit. And I know what you’re thinking, Ben wants a vacation in Spain, which is true, but it’s more than that.
Our ambition is to be training in more places, in further places. We want to go to churches where nobody has ever been trained up and sent out before. We want more feet to be called beautiful as they carry the gospel places, as they carry good preaching and faithful teaching into more pulpits and other places that we haven’t dreamed of. And like Paul, we’ll pursue it by partnership with like-minded Christians.
So Paul wrote to the Roman church because he longed to partner with them. He spends 14 chapters on all of these things that we share together in Christ. And then he gets to chapter 15 and he says, what are we going to do about it? Do you want to send me to Spain?
Partnership or koinonia in the bible is about how we share money and vision and invest together for the gospel ambitions that we have. And fellowship is way more exciting than drinking coffee, although it looks like it’s pretty good out there, eating squares together. Koinonia is about linking arms together in Christ for the ambitions that we have. Partnership is how Artizo plans to grow. So I’m going to talk about four different ways that we’re going to partner, and then we’ll move on to the really exciting stuff.
First, we’ve continued to strengthen our partnership with the Anglican Diocese of Canada. So it’s critical that we train within the church, not without the church, because that means that we’re training within a structure of accountability and a structure that has doctrinal clarity. So it’s very important to us that we’re within a church.
And it’s also amazing to us that for the first time in 25 years that we’ve been doing this work, the diocese has given us a really significant financial gift, telling us what you’re doing matters for what we’re doing in Canada. And when Leslie and I were able to sit down with Bishop Dan a few weeks ago, we shared our ambitions. We told him we’re ready to train more widely – the Lower Mainland is cooking, we’ve got to go to Spain. Dan was supportive, so we’ll be in conversation. So we’re looking forward to building a tighter partnership with our diocese, and they really want that as well. So that’s good news.
Second, we’ve been strengthening our partnership with theological institutions – Regent College and now Packer College. And we’re very grateful for Regent, and Regent has over the last couple of years started to express that they’re also grateful for us, which is really gratifying.
We have a recent alum of ours now, Jacob Vandiver, he’s been named as the chaplain, the Anglican studies chaplain at Regent. And that’s fantastic. And so I’ve been working closely with him. We want at Regent to have the gold standard of training: theological excellence, spiritual formation, and practical ministry. And it looks like it’s going to happen. We’re working for it together, and that’s part of what Artizo does is that practical formation part.
As far as Packer goes, we have our first apprentice this year who’s a student at Packer College. Bishop Dan has said, you’ve got to get connected with Packer, so that’s on our list this year, to build our partnership with them as well. What’s key about Packer is they’re going to be training people asynchronously. They have intensives in different ways, so that people that are spread all across Canada can train in this way, which is really important.
Third, we’re going to strengthen our partnership with training churches. You’ll hear from many of the different trainers tonight, and our vision has been training trainers.
So we realized a couple of years ago that I had become a bottleneck because I had been thinking of Artizo as a ministry where I trained people. And then we realized no, Artizo is a ministry where we train trainers. We’re trying to have an effect where we multiply the work of training across Canada. And so now we have six other trainers that are working with me, and they have cared for, and built up, and equipped our apprentices. They’ve put them to work and they’re doing a fantastic job. You’ll recognize that as soon as you hear from them.
Six trainers can do a lot. They can’t fill Canada with the sound of God’s word, not just six of them. And so this means we need to adapt our curriculum and our methods to work anywhere. And this is part of why we’ve hired Phil Pearson, part-time within Artizo itself.
Phil is a minister at St. Peter’s. He’s been training apprentices there for three years now, and now he’s a partner with us who will help us to expand beyond the Lower Mainland. He’ll be up here in a minute to tell you more about that. I have no idea what he’s going to say. It’s going to be great.
Our ultimate goal is to have lots of different cohorts of students in strategic hotspots. So the idea is that what we have in the Lower Mainland we would be able to have other places in Canada as well – in Alberta, we think maybe in Ontario, there’s a couple of places where there are clusters of Anglican churches, and we would love to see cohorts building there.
But we’ve already sent a guy named Will Gray. He’s an Artizo alumni, and we’ve sent him to Winnipeg to plant a church. And he made me promise before he went that we would figure out how to share Artizo with a church plant in Winnipeg. So that was the challenge.
The reality is we have a lot of churches like that spread across Canada. They’re geographically separate from other churches. And so in the next year, we’re hoping to develop an online cohort of apprentices. We have such a lovely cohort here, but we’re wondering if maybe we can locate some of these people that are scattered abroad and bring them together through the power of Zoom. I know how we all love Zoom.
Fourthly and finally, we want to continue partnering with you. So in this room are so many people that have given and prayed and served and helped in the training effort in so many different ways. So faithfully for years, some of the people here for 25 years, for the whole time Artizo has existed, they’ve been supporting us. What an amazing thing that is. And I would say in Paul’s words, that you’ve fulfilled the ministry of the Gospel of Christ by partnering with Artizo in this way.
But, there’s more to do. The message is too good. Our Lord is too lovely. And Spain awaits.
Amen?