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Over the past 39 years, Rev. Ralph Kee, a church planting missionary and now “animator” of EGC’s Greater Boston Church Planting Collaborative, has been in a position to play a significant role in the planting of many churches in Boston. These churches have had at least two things in common in addition to the centrality of their love for Jesus Christ and their dependence on the Word of God. Each of these churches has been characterized by its robust diversity and its propensity to replicate itself. 

The diversity of people in his churches, Ralph says, has been almost as broad as the human spectrum. “Racially, economically, educationally, generationally, sociologically—homeless people, Harvard graduate students, people who can’t read, Ph.D.s—you name it. At one time I counted up the birth languages of the 70 people we had at that time in that emerging church: there were 23 different birth languages.” 

Ralph has documented the generations of his first church plant, the South End Neighborhood Church of Emmanuel, over the last four decades, carefully recording and graphing the daughter and granddaughter and great-granddaughter churches that grew from that first church plant. The family tree now shows well over 200 churches representing many languages, several denominations, and locations worldwide. 

In May 2000, Rev. Kee started the Greater Boston Church Planting Collaborative as a learning team and a peer mentoring fellowship to encourage and equip church planters in and around Boston. From the start, he emphasized this notion of sequential church planting but has left it up to church planters to consider how to grow that idea. Ralph believes that “church planters currently active in the trenches can themselves, as peers to peers, best inform, instruct, inspire, and energize one another.” Therefore, the role of the GBCPC is not to start something new or just have an organization, but it is to “further animate what is already present,” he says. To do this, Rev. Kee organizes periodic fellowship and training gatherings for church planters. He also spends considerable time mentoring and consulting church planters, mostly one on one.

Describing his one-on-one mentoring, he says, “We might discuss what locations would be the best for a new church, or what unreached populations there are in certain neighborhoods.” By discovering which populations have been reached and which have been overlooked, or examining the success rate of new churches over last five years, Pastor Kee helps new church planters develop a long-term, Kingdom-level view of the churches in the Boston area.

Of the periodic gatherings of church planters, Ralph says, “Church planters are learning from each other and teaching each other while doing it—eyeball to eyeball, heart to heart, frequently enough to make the difference. Those kinds of gatherings are critical if there are to be church planting movements in and growing out of Greater Boston.”

At the June 2010 gathering for example, attended by a dozen church planting enthusiasts, three presenters led the discussion. Rev. Ramesh and Sheba Telore, EGC missionaries to India, explained how New England’s missionaries planted churches in India in the 19th century, and both of them can trace their Christian roots directly to those church plants. Also, Minister Willie Wilkerson, newly appointed pastor of the Quincy Street Missional Church, a man who grew up in the church’s neighborhood, talked about “Jesus as a neighborhood minister.” 

Ralph had a lot to do with the formation and development of Quincy Street. The church was started six years ago, intentionally focused on a mini-neighborhood of just two square blocks in Dorchester. Quincy Street’s intent is that Jesus’ greater presence in the neighborhood will make a discernible, observable difference for the better in the lives of residents who live there.  “Kingdom-presence isn’t just an intellectual concept, a matter of the head,” Ralph says. “True Kingdom-presence will be acknowledged by observing neighbors in their gut as well as in their cranium. The neighbor, observing the congregation of acquaintances and friends that holds its communal worship in the building on the corner, may ‘see’ Kingdom-presence in that church cognitively, yes, but, if that Kingdom-presence in the neighborhood is real rather than theoretical, he will ‘see’ it emotively as well. Genuine Jesus-presence will stir a neighbor’s heart, even if, at first, Christian doctrine strains his mind. And faith will come, as the stirred heart one day says, ‘I do believe.’”

Ralph had both joy and sadness when the time came this year to pass the torch of leadership for Quincy Street. “It is always hard for me to leave the leadership position of a church I have had a major role in starting,” he says. “You—always of course with others—get a church up and going, then turn it over to others, just when you have something you have reason to feel proud of. But that is the job of the missionary. Get something going. Then get out of the way. ‘He must increase. I must decrease.’ John the Baptist knew the score as far as forerunners are concerned.” 

But Ralph also has great joy to see where the church is going. “Minister Willie speaks the language of the neighborhood,” Ralph says. “He has tremendous leadership capabilities and is seen as someone with real authority in the neighborhood. The mission statement the church adopted five or six years ago when we first organized is this: ‘To develop leaders in the Quincy Street community who passionately follow Christ and live out God’s mercy and justice for the poor.’  So we have had a rather remarkable answer to prayer: an indigenous leader who needs no salary.” Willie runs a successful business, and his wife is also employed. 

“I have finished up my role as a missionary serving as pastor of Quincy Street Church, and praise God for a mission accomplished,” Ralph says. And what’s next? Retirement? Apparently not. “So now, even as I move into other new areas of church planting efforts,” he says, “I nonetheless have a little more time to get on with my growing, longtime calling to better understand the etiology of urban-based church planting movements.” Etiology? That is “the study of the causes of something.” Ralph is thinking beyond church planting. He is thinking beyond sequential church planting. He now wants to understand church planting movements. “Church planting movements emanating from cities, including the city of Boston, are basic to fulfilling the Great Commission in the 21st century. Right now we need to learn how to generate and catalyze urban church planting movements,” he says.

GBCPC is a joint program of the Emmanuel Gospel Center and Missions Door.

by Steve Daman

[published in Inside EGC, July-August, 2010]