Grandparent church:  Antioch Community Church, Waco, TX.  www.antiochcc.net

Although Antioch Community Church (ACC) was established in just 1999, it is part of the realization of a dream born years ago in the hearts of ACC leaders who desired to see the church function as a center for training and sending workers to fulfill the Great Commission as seen in the church in the book of Acts.

In 1987, a year-long intensive discipleship training school called Master's Commission was established at Highland Baptist Church (www.highlandbc.org) by Jimmy Seibert. The curriculum included nine months of Biblical ministry training in Waco and a three-month mission outreach overseas. In 1991-1992, four Master's Commission graduates received additional training in cross-cultural missions and were sent out to start a church in Ulan Ude, Russia. The team began by starting cell groups and a weekly celebration service.

In 1996, the church was successfully planted and turned over to national leadership. Svet Mira, or Light of the World, continues to flourish today and is involved in training and sending its own church planters. In 1993, another wave of church planting teams located in nearby cities, including Irkutsk, Siberia, and Ulan-Bator, Mongolia.

In April of 1995, the church planting arm of Highland, which had incorporated in 1993, was renamed Antioch Ministries International (AMI), and the Master's Commission school changed its name to Antioch Training School (ATS).

While AMI's President, Jimmy Seibert, and the other ministry leaders were gaining valuable ministry experience on staff at Highland Baptist Church, the training and sending process continued to flourish under AMI. In 1999, the Elders at Highland blessed Jimmy and any current church members to join him in planting a church in Waco with a specific ministry vision for reproducing cell-based churches around the world.

In 1998, AMI sent out its first U.S. church planting team to Boston, Massachusetts. Since then, other teams have landed in downtown Dallas, Knoxville, Portland, Seattle, Belton (TX), and Wheaton (IL) with a burning desire to see reproducing churches established in these unreached areas.

ACC has continued to grow both as a local church since 1999 (2500 attendees in 2007-08) and as a worldwide church planting organization since 1992. There are currently 194 adults serving full-time in church planting efforts around the world, almost all having been trained and sent out by ACC/AMI.  

Parent church:  Community of Faith Christian Fellowship, Boston, MA.  www.cfcfboston.org

Sean Richmond, the AMI-trained youth pastor of Highland Baptist Church, moved with his wife Laura and the first two of their eventual four children to the Boston area in January of 1998 to begin seminary training at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary.  They were joined in August by the rest of their AMI-trained team, including Neil Hubacker, who would become The Harbor’s first pastor.  Planting in the Brighton neighborhood of Boston, Community of Faith Christian Fellowship (CFCF) established its first Faithgroups and began monthly and then weekly Sunday celebration services in various community buildings and schools in 1999.  

Modeled after ACC, CFCF began its first discipleship/church planting training school in 2001.  As of 2008, scores of people have gone through one or more of the school’s three training modules and CFCF has sent out ten church planters to Boston’s North Shore, to Europe, to one of AMI’s two North African works, and to our East African endeavor.

In CFCF’s ten-year existence, it has grown to include a Sunday celebration service of 200 in attendance, some twenty small groups, and multiple ministries for families, singles, college students, and youth & children.  With a heart to reach the city of Boston—such a strategic urban center both for the U.S. and for the world—CFCF continues to focus on the basics of loving God passionately, sharing life together deliberately, and proclaiming the life-changing message of Jesus to its neighbors in creative ways.

The Harbor:  A Community of Faith, Beverly, MA.  www.the-harbor.net

In the fall of 2002, a group of Gordon College freshmen, including Anneliese Bjork (Griffin) of Waco, TX, began attending CFCF regularly, making the weekly trek into the city.  In response, CFCF launched a satellite Faithgroup for Gordon students in 2003 on the Wenham campus.

Throughout the course of their tenure at Gordon College, these students—including Sara De Baere and later her brother David, Sarah Fulton, Kim Loper, and Jim Merriam—were actively involved at CFCF and caught ACC’s/CFCF’s vision for evangelism through church-planting as modeled in the book of Acts.

During the 2006-2007 academic year, Pastor Sean of CFCF initiated regular meetings with this core group of Gordon alumni (which now included Jim’s wife, Bonnie), to explore the possibility of planting a new church on Boston’s North Shore.  Persuaded for multiple reasons that such an endeavor was in line with God’s heart and will—reasons that included the overall population of the North Shore/Essex County (800,000 people), its significant college student population, the wide socioeconomic spectrum represented by the region’s residents, and the historical/spiritual significance of the greater Salem area—the team organized several Sunday afternoon worship services in the spring of 2007.  At this time, Megan Pelletier from CFCF joined the core leadership team, having been an effective volunteer leader in the North Shore’s chapter of YoungLife.

In the summer of 2007, Pastor Sean officially handed the reins of core team leadership to Neil Hubacker, an AMI-trained member of the original CFCF church-plant team who had been employed in private industry and as a public high school teacher since his arrival in Boston in 1998.

In August 2007, the new church plant had its ‘soft launch,’ meeting under the name of North Shore Community of Faith on Sunday evenings at the Beverly apartment of some of the core team members.  The hybrid small group/celebration service meetings, at times gathering over thirty young people, focused on worship and a study of the book of Acts.

In January of 2008, following an intensive time of seeking the Lord the previous October, the church plant officially launched its public Sunday morning celebration services at the Cabot St. YMCA in Beverly, under its new name, The Harbor:  A Community of Faith.  

Since then, the Harbor has developed its Faithgroup ministry through extensive one-on-one discipleship with area college students and young adults, strengthened its commitment to prayer, and established its outreach approach to residents of Beverly, particularly in the downtown and Gloucester Crossing areas.