What is Scouting?

Here is the article describing what scouting is. It's an excellent article. For those of you familiar with scouting and Dwight Huffman, it's a good reminder and for those of you not familiar with the concept of scouting, this is a great introduction.

Arcticle was in SBC Life Journal in Feb. 2005.

Missionary Scout
Exploring Western Canada to Plant New Churches
by Joe Westbury

Dwight Huffman climbs up a hill and looks down on the town below. The cool Canadian breeze ruffles his hair as he surveys the environment, a vast wooded area untouched by development — until now.

What had been pristine wilderness is now slowly being transformed into the town of Chestermere, a rapidly growing community fifteen kilometers from Calgary. With the trained eye of a seasoned pro, Huffman makes a mental note of the community of about 5,000 and asks himself the best way to bring Christ to its residents.

"Chestermere is representative of many towns springing up around the province of Alberta. Some of these towns have no evangelical witness, but that's why we are here as Canadian Baptists. We want to discover the needs of the community and meet those needs in the name of Christ," he says.

Huffman and his wife, Judy, are among nearly 5,200 missionaries in the United States and Canada supported by the Annie Armstrong Easter Offering for North American Missions. They are featured during the March 6-13 Week of Prayer and North American Mission Study, which this year focuses on the theme, "Answer His Call."

Huffman is no stranger to church planting. While earning his degree from Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary, he started two churches and served as pastor of a third before he was called to work with the Canadian Convention of Southern Baptists.

Today Huffman is less of a planter and more of a scout in the vein of the old fur trappers who first trudged through the rugged terrain of Western Canada. The only difference is they were traveling by foot and looking for beavers and bears, and Huffman drives by car and visually maps the terrain for others to follow, sharing Christ.

Huffman is gone from his family a lot. Judy and their daughter Ashley, who is in grade 12, understand his calling and patiently await his return. Another daughter, Amber, is a third-year student at Union University in Jackson, Tennessee, Huffman's alma mater.

Judy teaches sixth-grade students at Bearspaw Christian School in addition to being the vice principal of the school. She also leads a care group in their home once a week. It is a couple's care group, but more often than not, Judy is leading it without Dwight, as he is on the road, frequently for a week or two at a time.

As the strategy coordinator for Western Canada, which is made up of British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, the Yukon, and the Northwest Territories (NWT), Huffman travels about 60,000 kilometers a year in his car. His area is approximately the equivalent of the Continental United States, but has less than 140 Canadian Southern Baptist churches and missions.

"I'm responsible to see the day when every Canadian in Western Canada hears the gospel from someone they trust, and for every community to have a Canadian Southern Baptist church that is equipping believers to walk with God and hang around lost people."

With such a vast area to cover and so few laborers to help, Huffman has pioneered a strategy that is gaining acceptance across the convention.

"We have developed a three-stage strategy of scouting, pioneering, and settling. The point is to multiply the number of people involved in reaching new people and new communities for Christ."

At the core of Huffman's approach are the scouts. They are people who go into a town or neighborhood in advance of a church planter to engage in simple exploring.

"The uniqueness and genius of this strategy plan is that it requires almost no church-planting skills that we've historically identified.

"Anyone can go to any neighborhood, walk and talk with God, hang around that neighborhood, and do a casual interview with some of the people they meet."

Scouting can be done anywhere — in a restaurant, at a gas station, or in a foursome of strangers playing golf.

"For example," he says as he walks down from the hill, "in one case it turns out that the scouts were golfing with the mayor and a high school principal. In that context, they built trust and were invited to come to that city and conduct a sports clinic and a variety of other ministries."

Huffman's inspiration came from reading about the coureur de bois — runner of the woods — sent out by the Hudson Bay Company to explore new lands in search of Aboriginals willing to barter their furs.

"You had these runners who would initially identify these communities and build trust. Then they would set up a little trading post and pioneer a little group there. But eventually, more people would come and settle and that group would grow into a community."

Critical to a successful scouting assignment, Huffman said, is finding "a Lydia" (Acts 16:14-15) who will open up her (or his) home as a safe place to build relationships and start a Bible study. Only when that core group shows potential for becoming a church is a church planter enlisted.

But to reach the goal of having an evangelical church in each community, Huffman needs more scouts. And for that, he's counting on help from Baptist churches throughout North America to share his vision and partner with him.

"We are organizing our churches so they all see their role as scouts. We want to prayerwalk every city and every neighborhood in Western Canada. A lot of my tasks are related to scouting new areas and sharing that information with others. We'll get pastors from the United States to come up and bring teams from their churches."

As Huffman settles into his car to begin the drive to the next community, he paints a picture of the vastness of his work and the need for others to walk alongside him.

"About a three-day drive north of us is Yellowknife, NWT. When I came to my current position there was no Southern Baptist work in the Northwest Territories. It would be similar to there being no work between Jacksonville, Florida, and New York City.

"Yellowknife sits on the eighth largest lake in the world and is the capital of the Northwest Territories, but there is no CCSB church there. In March 2001, a friend and I took a prayer drive to Yellowknife and discovered many Inuit and First Nation settlements that could only be reached by crossing ice bridges. In Fort Providence we prayed that God would send laborers to fall in love with this field.

"God answered that prayer through the person of David Hahn, who was studying a map one day tracking his son who was on a trip home from Alaska. As he looked at that map, God put Fort Providence on his heart. He got in touch with me, and he and two friends drove up here from Louisville. After they saw the need, they returned with members of their church and began scouting the area.

"They have now made five trips to partner with us as scouts in the Northwest Territories. We recently traveled the territory all the way down the McKenzie — that's like driving from Atlanta to Los Angeles — and we found villages that we are relatively sure have never heard the gospel. The value of these scouts is immeasurable in the work we do," he said.

Many times he and Judy are lonely not being able to spend more time together due to his travel schedule, but the rewards keep them both going. They are both passionate about their call to Canada.

"One of the joys of my life is seeing the Heavenly Father send someone to a community without any solicitation or marketing. He just sends someone here to work in His field. Sometimes I think God is just waiting to hear the prayers of His people so He can respond."

Huffman says he feels Canada is a forgotten country to many Southern Baptists. There are more Southern Baptists in Brazil than in the country to America's north. And as much as God loves Brazilians, those who come to Canada don't have to learn a second language, he says.

"Canada is a place where an English-speaking person can come and walk with God, and hang around lost people, and see a movement of God."

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The Big Picture

Canadian Southern Baptists are aware of the challenges in front of them as they seek to win the nation to Christ. Yet, they are still joining together to work toward a spiritual harvest in the next few years.

The convention is praying for 1,000 healthy, reproducing, cooperating churches by 2020. That would be an increase of 800 from the 200 churches listed at the end of 2003.

If Canada is to be won for Christ, it needs for its churches to be able to start new congregations. It is praying that 50 percent of its congregations will be involved in a church starting process in the coming years.

With 200 Southern Baptist churches in Canada, NAMB is seeking to take the gospel to more than 30 million residents of that massive nation. There are more Christians in China than there are in Canada.

According to the Canadian Convention of Southern Baptists, there are thirty-one cities in Canada with 10,000 people or more that have no evangelical witness at all.

For more information on church planting in Canada, visit www.ccsb.ca/cp/.