RPC ministry partnerships extend across the border.

What started as a series of speaking engagements in Monterrey, Mexico is yielding cross-cultural fruit for Redeemer this year, as a relationship between RPC, the Centro para la Plantación de Iglesias (CPI) church planting network and City to City Latin America grows.

In 2018 and 2019, RPC Senior Pastor Tom Gibbs and Associate Pastor Victor Martinez traveled to Monterrey multiple times to provide training in leadership and church planting to CPI planters. CPI is a longstanding church planting network associated with the National Presbyterian Church of Mexico and City to City Latin America, an arm of the the global church planting movement City to City.

Pastor Martinez was first invited to speak at a retreat offered for CPI’s church planters several years ago. While in Monterrey, he recognized a need for training that goes beyond the theological and dives into the messy realities of building a church.  A lack of emotional health, the challenges of navigating conflict in the church and the stressors on families and marriages in ministry often take church planters by surprise and can contribute to the failure of a church if planters receive no mentoring or guidance. All these are concepts that Pastor Gibbs has emphasized in Redeemer’s philosophy of ministry and instills into the church’s leadership training process.

“This is the stuff they don’t teach you in seminary,” Martinez says. “You’re trained to preach and know theology.”

On the most recent trip, Pastor Gibbs and Pastor Martinez offered leadership training to planters while Tara Gibbs and Jeannie Martinez trained the church planters’ wives, who are often building the women’s ministry in their church and discipling other women while navigating the challenges of church planting in their families. Victor and Jeannie translated for the Gibbs. 

“We talked about a lot of the same things we talk about at Redeemer, and they loved it,” Gibbs says. “It was neat to see that these same things were connecting in a cross-cultural context.  There are different struggles (in Northern Mexico) — poverty and drug violence are there. But there are also points of connection in the sense that pastors and their families experience stresses that are oftentimes hard for the lay person to understand. There can be a fishbowl effect where everyone is watching your kids, everyone is watching your marriage.”

Next, Latin America will come a bit closer to San Antonio. In the summer of 2020, Redeemer plans to welcome a church planter from City to City Latin America to the Redeemer staff in a newly-created role — the Latin American Pastoral Fellowship. The position will make it possible for a Latin American pastor and his family to spend two years at Redeemer being developed as leaders, learning best practices for ministry and helping Redeemer pursue deeper connections in the Latino community here.

“This will be an incubator of sorts,” says Gibbs. “They’re going to be watching, observing, participating in our ministry system so that they can carry that back to their home city. And our desire is that we would then fill that position with someone else so that we always have someone rotating in and out.”

As Redeemer begins to attract more families who speak Spanish as a first language, Redeemer hopes the staff position will help with the development of new offerings like Spanish language Bible studies, Christian Education classes, and translation of courses like Introduction to Redeemer. More details about the fellowship will be announced in the coming months.

The collaboration also provides Redeemer with an opportunity to deepen its cultural competency. Redeemer is currently leading the launch of Reach South Texas, a new church planting network backed by churches in the South Texas Presbytery. Many of the planned churches will be planted in border towns and other places that are heavily influenced by Latin American culture.

“There is a constant learning process associated with discerning what are those elements of the Gospel that God intends to speak to every culture in every time and every place, and what are those elements of the Gospel that can and need to be contextualized,” Gibbs says. “Those are small, subtle things, but they are important things.”

Pastor Gibbs and Pastor Martinez will travel back to Monterrey in September of 2020 to speak at the City to City Latin America conference. Pastor Gibbs is a lead speaker alongside Paul David Tripp and Justin Burkholder.

As Redeemer’s partnerships with CPI and City to City deepen, Gibbs says the increasing opportunities for ministry collaborations reaching back and forth across borders open up exciting possibilities for the next decades of Redeemer’s ministry.

“Redeemer is now both a laboratory and a research institute,” he says. “We’ve experimented for almost 20 years now on these ideas and developed some understanding and maturity and we’ve seen these ideas get translated in our own city and also in Ukraine in church plants. And now we can have that same conversation in Monterrey and across northern Mexico.”