On Sunday, April 28, 2024 Grace Bible Fellowship Church in Harrisburg, PA commissioned Pastor Steve DelDuco and the Core Group Launch Team to go out and plant a church in the West Shore of Harrisburg. This is not the first time that Harrisburg has commissioned a launch team.
In 2004 Grace Bible Fellowship Church in Harrisburg, PA faced the pleasant dilemma of what to do about the growth they were experiencing: do we build, do we go to multiple services or do we plant a daughter church and send our people out? Pastor Carl Spackman, the Pastor at Harrisburg and member of the Board of Church Extension at the time, heard all the positive arguments about being a multiplication church and how daughter church planting was a biblical model and the effective model to build the Kingdom. He passed this fervor for church planting on to his assistant at the time, Pastor Mark Barninger, and the two of them along with the elders spearheaded a daughter church plant from the church. In 2009, the church commissioned some forty of their best led by Pastor Mark. Today Dauphin Bible Fellowship Church (Freedom BFC) is a growing well established church in the town of Dauphin, PA.
The Harrisburg Church is now ready to do it again. For the past several years Pastor Steve DelDuco and Pastor Josh Miller have been leading discussions with their elders about how to again accommodate the growth that has been taking place since the last daughter church plant was launched. Again, the conclusion was to plant another daughter church in the West Shore area of Harrisburg.
Pastor Steve gathered a Church Planting Resource Team (CPRT) and began meetings to go through the steps of investigating a daughter church plant. Several months ago the work of the CPRT was completed with the designation of the West Shore as the planting site. Steve then gathered a Core Group Launch Team (CGLT) to train and prepare for a launch on the West Shore which they named Living Hope BFC. Steve and the Core Group have been meeting at a facility in the target site to get things started; however, they have already maxed out their location. Pray for the provision of where to meet next.
If you’d like to find out more about Living Hope Bible Fellowship Church, contact the Church Extension Ministries office at CEMoffice@bfc.org.
