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Welcome back to the unSeminary podcast. We’re talking with Rick and Patti Love, founders of the organizations Love New Canadians and Love New Internationals. These ministries equip churches to serve new immigrants, refugees, and international students in their neighborhoods. Since 2014 Rick and Patti Love have worked with more than 700 churches and ministries in 20 countries around the world, helping churches develop pathways to Jesus for immigrants in their neighborhood.

Is your church eager to make a meaningful impact in your community, but you’re unsure where to start? Have you considered reaching out to the immigrants living right in your neighborhood? Tune in to learn how your church can be more intentional and welcoming to this often-overlooked group of people.

• Do the research and know your community. // Many churches either fail to recognize the growing immigrant population in their community or feel overwhelmed about where to start. Others may be hesitant to reach out to immigrants due to cultural differences or fear of unintentionally offending newcomers. Do the research and get to know the community around you. Intentionally engage with immigrants by offering structured programs rather than relying solely on casual personal connections.
• Start with friendship. // Rick and Patti developed a three-stage model which helps churches create structured pathways through which they can connect with and serve immigrants. Stage one focuses on friendship and helping immigrants settle into their new communities through social programs with little to no spiritual content. It might include offering programs such as ESL classes, employment classes, citizenship classes, cultural celebrations and field trips. Consider the skills and hobbies of your church members and how they could be used in classes or events. The key is to create environments where immigrants feel welcomed and supported.
• Use the life and teachings of Jesus. // Stage three focuses on more spiritual elements like church worship service, Alpha, small groups, and ESL bible studies. But bridging stage one and stage three is stage two, a class for the spiritually curious. Stage two is a weekly pre-evangelistic class in which immigrants study something about culture, read a gospel text, do a vocabulary lesson based on words read from that text, and then participate in discussion questions. The class uses the life and teachings of Jesus to help us understand the immigrants by asking them about their lives and how it connects with what they are reading in the gospel text.
• ESL and hobbies. // Churches can get creative about how they want to connect with immigrants. Aside from focusing on needs such as citizenship or employment, consider hobbies and common interests that could also be used in conjunction with ESL, such as baking, music, gardening, weddings and more.
• Leading an effective immigrant ministry. // The need for ministries serving immigrants will continue to grow and churches can play a vital role in making their communities more welcoming and supportive. Remove barriers such as complicated registration processes. Don’t turn people away because a program is full or because of how they look or dress. Be respectful of different cultural backgrounds and language proficiency levels. Small-group discussions, rather than large lectures, foster friendships and create opportunities for the students to talk and interact. Many of the best volunteers are immigrants themselves, offering empathy and firsthand experience.

Visit Love New Internationals or Love New Canadians for help ministering to immigrants at your church. Plus, download the Intercultural Ministries Pathway Diagram which Rick talks about.

EXTRA CREDIT // Get the Welcoming Checklist for Newcomers!

Is your church truly welcoming to newcomers, especially those from immigrant communities? To help you put insights from Rick and Patti’s podcast into action, we’ve created the Welcoming Checklist for Newcomers—a practical guide designed to help church leaders evaluate, plan, and implement best practices that foster a welcoming and inclusive environment.

• Equip your team with cultural awareness & hospitality training
• Make first visits meaningful with translation services & newcomer connection points
• Foster deeper community through mentorship, small groups & outreach events
• Extend hospitality beyond Sunday by partnering with local organizations
• Create lasting change with feedback loops & ongoing learning

Welcoming isn’t just a moment—it’s a mindset and a ministry. This checklist will help your church reflect the Kingdom of God and embrace the diverse people He brings into your congregation.

Click here to join unSeminary’s Extra Credit and get instant access to this resource!

Thank You for Tuning In!

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Episode Transcript

Rich Birch — Hey friends, welcome to the unSeminary podcast. So glad that you’ve decided to tune in. Really looking forward to today’s conversation. Today’s topic is one of those things, it’s literally in the news, it might be every day of the week. Like if it’s not every day of the week, it’s it’s four out of five days of the week. And today we’re talking with some incredible experts that are going to help us think about how our churches can lean in on a real issue that is facing in our communities in a way that we can lean in and ultimately point people towards ah Jesus. Excited to have Rick and Patti Love with us. ah They lead an organization called Love New Canadians.

Rich Birch — Now wait, Americans, do not turn off. Stay tuned. Because you’re going to want to learn listen ah in. It’s a ministry that equips local churches to serve new immigrants, new Canadians in their neighborhoods ah to be more intentionally welcoming with immigrants, refugees and international students. ah Rick and Patti are just incredible folks and excited to have them on the call today. Welcome. So glad you’re here.

Rick and Patti Love — Thanks for having us. Great to be here. Yeah.

Rich Birch — Now, before we get rolling, again, I said, I joked there about our American friends. So friends, if you’re listening in, you know, this, this organization, Love New Canadians, obviously is focused on helping Canadians. But I think it’s important, obviously, not just as a Canadian, but as a leader who served for a long time in the States. It’s important that we learn from other leaders in Canada. Frankly, in some ways, it’s like Canada is a few steps ahead on issues like this. And I think Love New Canadians is the kind of thing that ah that you should be listening to and learning from Rick and Patti. ah So so don’t don’t, I know I made that joke, but please don’t, don’t you need to tune in and be here for the day. So Rick, why don’t we start by kind of telling us about the organization, tell us what you do, give us a bit of the history, that sort of thing.

Rick Love — Sure. Well, my wife started at our church, this ministry, 18 years ago.

Rich Birch — Love it.

Rick Love — And she was she was just trying to connect with immigrants in the neighborhood. And she has training as an ESL teacher. So that’s where she started. And our first class, we had five volunteers and two students every week.

Rick Love — We weren’t sure if anyone was going to show up.

Rich Birch — Love it. That’s a good ratio.

Rick Love — So we just kept working on making those connections because we always want to have a conversation with immigrants in the neighborhood we never met before. And over the time the ministry is growing. It’s grown phenomenally well in our church. Last last Last fall we had an average of 480 students and volunteers coming to our ESL classes each week.

Rich Birch — Wow. Wow.

Rick Love — 10 years ago, we started Love New Canadians to help other churches develop pathways to Jesus for immigrants who were right in their neighbourhood. So we we have we focus on coaching, curriculum and seminars, webinars, ah using the resources we’ve developed ah through this ministry in the last 18 years.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s so good. Patti, you know, I know one of the things just kind of being, you know, checking out your website, being around you a little bit, you mentioned that churches kind of have this heart or church leaders might have this heart to try to reach and connect with immigrants in their neighborhood, but they frankly just don’t know where to start. It’s like, and I think there’s a lot of people that are listening in that see that, right?

Patti Love — Right.

Rich Birch — It’s like you’re, you know, you’re at the gas station, you’re you know in the grocery store, and you’re like, man, there are lots of folks here that I would love to connect with, but we just don’t know. Can can you share what what why what’s the kind of common challenges that that churches face when they attempt to try to engage with immigrant communities for the first time?

Patti Love — Some some churches don’t see the number of immigrants in their community. They just think, oh, we’re historically, you know, a Euro-Canadian community. And then if you look up the statistics, there’ll be like 30% of the people in their community were not born in Canada. That doesn’t mean they’re all recent immigrants. So that can be one, just doing a bit of research.

Patti Love — Another one would be a lot of people are overwhelmed and they don’t know where to start. It’s just like they’re the opposite. Oh, there’s so many new Canadians. I don’t even know what to do, right?

Rich Birch — Right.

Patti Love — And and we can help with that. And then thirdly, I think that a lot of Christians can be intimidated or a little nervous or worried about interacting with people from another culture. They don’t want to offend them. Or maybe they think they can understand their accent, you know, and there’s those kind of hindrances too. Can you think of anything else?

Rick Love — Well, I know that often what we’ve been told is just make friends with your neighbors, which is great.

Rich Birch — Right.

Rick Love — But there’s so much more we can do when we work together as teams. So when we’re in the local church, we can use our various skills to have like an ESL class or an employment class or a citizenship class. Or we do parties, banquets, sports, field trips. We just try to figure out ways that we can invite some new person in the neighborhood who we haven’t met yet.

Patti Love — And that really helps with both the people who are overwhelmed by numbers, but also the people who are nervous to do it because they’re working in a team with other friendly Christians in their church.

Rich Birch — Right.

Patti Love — Yeah.

Rich Birch — Right. Yeah, that’s cool. Yeah. What what does this look like? Like in a, you know, there’s in a church that you work with, you feel like, okay, they’re, they’re kind of doing the thing. They’re they’re they’ve got kind of ah a great, robust model. Um, maybe Rick, why don’t you talk us through that? What does that kind of look like? What’s the, and and we may never actually see a church achieve that, you know, but it’s like, this is what, you know, this is what kind of the ideal is, or or the kind of, what you’ve seen is is super helpful in this and situation?

Rick Love — Well. Historically, churches focus on evangelism and discipleship. That’s what churches are good at. But we found most of our neighbors, they’re not at a place where they’re ready to move in that direction. So we encourage churches to experiment with a three-stage model. It’s the model that we’ve developed our local church.

Rick Love — So the stage one is about friendship. It’s like little or no spiritual content. It’s like ah it’s like the classes I mentioned. It’s it’s ways that it’s appeals to people’s self-interest. What could they benefit from?

Rich Birch — Right.

Rick Love — And it really just depends on the creativity of each church and the the skills and hobbies of of the volunteers that you connect with. And then stage three, for us, it’s like yeah ESL Bible studies, church worship service, small groups. But we found how do you go from like, you know, a ping pong club or an employment class…

Rich Birch — Right.

Rick Love — …and end up at an ESL Bible study or Alpha?

Rich Birch — Yeah, yeah.

Rick Love — Well, it’s not an easy connection. So in the mercy of God, we started what we call stage two. It’s a class for the spiritually curious.

Rich Birch — Okay. Yeah.

Rick Love — It’s really a pre-evangelistic class where we study something about culture each week. And then we read a gospel text. And then we do a vocabulary lesson based on words ah from the the text we just read. It looks and feels like an ESL class because it is. And then we do discussion questions.

Rick Love — And what’s different about this class is, you know, you most Bible studies, the goal is to understand the Bible, which obviously that’s a great goal. But in this class, we use the life and teaching of Jesus to understand our new immigrant friends. So we ask questions like, you know, questions about, you know, if Jesus is by a lake, we ask them questions about a lake in their birth country.

Rick Love — Jesus is feeding ah the 5,000. We ask questions of what would you like to eat with bread? What do you like to eat with fish? It’s like, it’s just very gentle, easy questions, but we’ll do one gentle spiritual question each week. Like when you’re talking about forgiveness, Jesus says, forgive your brother 77 times. We’ll say something like, tell us about a time when you forgave someone or someone forgave you.

Rick Love — And the goal is just to have honest conversations. And what happens is, I’ve asked those kind of spiritual questions before and it’s like, you know, the tumbleweeds are going across the mesa. Nobody says anything.

Rich Birch — Right.

Rick Love Patti Love — But they keep coming week after week, month after month. And and our students will say things like, you know, I’m not a Christian, but…, or if I was a Christian….

Rich Birch — Right.

Rick Love — Or they’d say something about God or prayer, and we just know that the Holy Spirit of God is speaking to them, and we trust that that that ah spiritual interest will develop.

Rick Love — Most of the people who come to the Stage 2 class come from countries where they couldn’t even ask questions about the Bible or Christianity or Jesus or the Church.

Rick Love — So they come, and then and then some of those move on ah to the stage three. We found that ah when things are working well, for every 10 who come to stage one, about four will move on to stage two, and about half of those, or two will move on to stage three. So 10, 4, and [inaudible].

Rich Birch — Oh, that’s good. That’s yeah, that’s interesting, kind of like it. So ah so Patti, fill that out from like a stage one. That’s a really good helpful rubric there, even if you can picture, OK, so we we need to be doing kind of social-oriented, kind of fun stuff, get people connected. And and frankly I can see that. As a person I moved from Canada to the States obviously not the kind of immigration we’re talking about here you know if I’m moving from you know somewhere on the other side of the world obviously there’s a lot of difference a lot of similarities in the cultures. But frankly as an immigrant when I moved in that in environment there was stuff where like just having people locally that I could talk to and ask questions was a huge value.

Patti Love — Right, right. Yes.

Rich Birch — Like that was a massive thing. And I, and I didn’t have a language barrier and didn’t, felt like I know lots, but I still, talk us through what does some of that stage one stuff look like? How would, you know, what, what is that when it’s done well, how does that look?

Patti Love — Yes. So we call it settlement programming because we’re helping our immigrant friends settle into the neighborhood…

Rich Birch — Yep.

Patti Love — …or into the country.

Rich Birch — Yep.

Patti Love — And we have a lot of things like ah like English language classes. And over the years we’ve developed you know beginner, intermediate, advanced, technical classes like pronunciation, grammar. But lots of conversation classes. And our students love that. Some of them are actually enrolled in language schools, but they said, we don’t ah get a chance to actually practice our English skills…

Rich Birch — Right.

Patti Love — …with a friendly Canadian, right?

Rich Birch — Right.

Patti Love — We do…

Rich Birch — Well, and there’s something about a volunteer, right? There’s something about volunteers who are saying, Hey, I want to do this. I want to help.

Rick Love Patti Love — Yes. Yeah.

Rich Birch — That’s like, it has a different texture to it.

Patti Love — Yeah.

Rich Birch — And like the conversation has a different texture to it. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting.

Patti Love — Yes. And what we try to do is um have all of our classes or most of our classes formatted in small groups. So it might be opened up, led for 10 minutes by a lead teacher, and then everybody breaks into small groups. Every group has a volunteer. They have the material right in front of them. We we write material that’s really volunteer-friendly. ah You don’t have to be a grammar teacher or anything to volunteer.

Patti Love — And when we got really serious about changing our formatting from a large group to small groups, that year our attendance doubled…

Rich Birch — Wow.

Patti Love — …because students were making friends with volunteers, right?

Rich Birch — Right.

Patti Love — We also do interesting ESL classes in module form, like ESL for baking, ESL for gardening, ESL for weddings or music or art.

Rich Birch — Oh, interesting.

Rick Love Patti Love — Whatever our volunteers have a hobby for, we go, hey, let’s develop that into a five-week course instead of a whole semester.

Rich Birch — Right.

Patti Love — And a lot of those have turned into semester classes like ah studying for the citizenship test, employment classes. We do a public speaking class for people who are learning English. and we’d call it project confidence. And from the beginning to the end, you can see confidence is growing and they’re using more of their English skills.

Rick Love— Yeah, so the students project confidence. It’s basically Toastmasters for ESL.

Patti Love — Yeah, yeah.

Rich Birch — Yeah. Wow, that’s cool. Yeah. It’s it’s interesting you say that because I in my own personal experience, I was I was talking to an immigrant. now this was in the last couple of years and they were reflecting on their own English and they were they didn’t feel confident in their English. They were like, oh, um I’m so sorry. And I was like, Your English is amazing. Like it’s incredible.

Rich Birch — Like, I don’t, I don’t know what to say. Like, uh, it’s in, you know, you should feel confident. You, you know, ah and they were like, Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know. And so I can see how even having, you know, some regular feedback and people helping to build that confidence would be, would be amazing.

Patti Love — Yes, yes, yes.

Rich Birch — Yeah. yeah

Rick Love — And little short-sightedly, we assumed that our volunteers would all be Euro-Canadians. But we found some of our best volunteers are immigrants themselves.

Rich Birch — Sure. Yes.

Rick Love — They empathize with the the people, what they’re going through. And and the thing the fact of the matter is, wherever you are, you’re going to be teaching speaking with people with accents.

Rich Birch — Yes.

Rick Love — So it’s good to have some of our volunteers with accents. Our students develop that skill as well.

Patti Love — Yeah, that’s that’s our country, right?

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Patti Love — That’s normal.

Rich Birch — Yes. Yes.

Patti Love — That’s our country.

Rich Birch — Yeah. Yeah. Interesting.

Patti Love — We supplement a lot of the classes with things like, um, Rick was mentioning parties and field trips and lessons and banquets. And we have a lot of fun teaching culture through some of those monthly social events, like curling.

Rick Love — Thanksgiving, Christmas. Yeah.

Patti Love — Yeah. And Easter egg hunt and curling lesson. And the area we’re from is fairly cowboy. We do a line dancing lessons, that kind of thing.

Rick Love — Yeah.

Patti Love — And that is an opportunity for our friends to bring their family more into the realm of friendship with friendly Canadians.

Rich Birch — How does the church, if if they were saying, okay, I, this sounds interesting. I, you know, I can see this as the kind of thing would be interested in, um, you know, maybe Rick, how how would they get the ball rolling? What would, what would you suggest are some of those initial steps that move beyond… Maybe maybe you’ve got a leader who has, who has immigrant friends who has like some heart for this, but they’re like, I’m not sure how to go from that to like what you’re talking about. Cause this sounds like a lot, you know, what’s that look like?

Rick Love — Sure.

Patti Love — It just grew grew slowly over the years. We’ve been doing this for 18 years, yeah.

Rich Birch — Right. Yeah. Right.

Rick Love — So obviously, churches can just dive in and try and do things to connect with the neighborhood. We’d love to have a conversation with any church leaders who would like to talk. Usually, we we have an introductory session where we talk about who are the immigrants in your neighborhood? What are the ways that your church is connecting? What are the who are the immigrants that are attending your local church? What what’s something that you might do to begin? We do a lot of coaching because we have pretty much made every mistake there is to make, so we can help churches avoid other mistakes.

Patti Love — Yeah, that’s true. Yeah.

Rick Love — And we work for churches as small as 25, as large as 5,000 plus, everything in between.

Rich Birch — Wow. Yep.

Rick Love — And we found that three-stage model works in any size of congregation. Obviously, the smaller churches will start with one class. But some of the larger churches are able to start with two or three classes and start with a good volunteer team right right from the beginning.

Rich Birch — What would be some of those, like, maybe non-obvious mistakes that we can make, ways we can stub our toe? Maybe even before we get into this, you know, Patti, that makes our church kind of less friendly to to the immigrant community around us? Are there common things you see churches do that you’re like, ah, I can’t believe they did that. You know, it’s and a lot of times it comes out of a good heart.

Patti Love — Yes. Yes.

Rich Birch — It’s not like we’re but it just is like we do dumb stuff sometimes.

Rick Love Patti Love — Right.

Rich Birch — I know that’s the case with me. What would that be, Patti? What would be some of those things?

Patti Love — Well, we were making some stupid mistakes, ah just assuming certain things and ah not being intentional about welcoming people. In a couple of years into our ministry, the volunteers and I got together to work out our values in our intercultural ministry. The programming and the people, we decided, we want them to be welcoming. So that’s like not making it hard to register, not limiting a class size.

Rich Birch — Right.

Patti Love — Oh, sorry, we already have our 20 students – try next semester. It’s like, why would you turn away, you know, an immigrant from the neighborhood? Those kinds of things. So being welcoming.

Patti Love — Secondly, being respectful and that’s not making people feel uncomfortable if they’re dressed differently. Or if um if they have a strong accent.

Patti Love — You know, we we have volunteers who love working with people who are very beginning English speakers. We started writing material for both beginner and intermediate. And that was a huge step in being respectful and welcoming of Canadians who are more at the beginner level. We hate saying no to anybody.

Rich Birch — Right.

Patti Love —It’s like we have a place for you that you can, you know, feel welcome and make friends and settle into Canada.

Patti Love — Our third value is being interactive. And an example of that is the the small group formatting that we changed to fairly quickly in our experience at the church where students get way more opportunity to talk in a small group.

Patti Love — At first our class, we made the mistake of making our classes with a teacher at the front and all the chairs in the room are full. And the teachers doing 80% of the talking, and right?

Rick Love — Which has [inaudible] validity because that’s what most of our immigrant friends experienced when they were learning English in their birth country…

Rich Birch — Right, right.

Rick Love — …but it’s just not the most effective way to learn it…

Rich Birch — Right, right.

Patti Love — …and certainly not a great way to make friends. You know, there’s one person at the front.

Rich Birch — Right.

Patti Love — And when our volunteers can work in teams like that, like their class has regularly 30 students and they have six or seven volunteers, there’s one volunteer and four or five students. And we say, as a volunteer, if there’s five of you around your table, you should not speak more than 20% of the time.

Rich Birch — Right.

Patti Love — Like this is respectful of the students.

Rich Birch — Yes.

Patti Love — Let them talk, make it interactive, you know, our values, yeah.

Rich Birch — Yes. let the Let the silence hang in the air for a little bit and give space for people to talk and you know all that.

Patti Love — Yes, yes.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s good. That’s good. You know, I one of the things I know in my own life, like I have ah you know I’ve lots of times where I feel like I’ve stubbed my toe on this this particular issue, but I remember a couple of years ago, this was um yeah a couple of years ago. I was I was doing some work with a summer camp, a kid’s summer camp, and had a friend who was a professor at a local college who ran this like big ah big data class. And he reached out and he said, well, you probably have like lots of registration data over all these years. Would you mind having a group of students run a project on your actual data?

Rich Birch — And, and I was like, well, that sounds interesting. That would be great. And, and so we met and it was all over Zoom. We were meeting over Zoom and, and we met probably every other week for a number of weeks. And, um, actually it wasn’t over Zoom. It was just, it was a, um, uh, like a, what do you call those? Like a, you know, like a conference call kind of thing.

Patti Love — Sure, sure.

Rich Birch — And we were a couple weeks in, and I I was like, I don’t I’m I’m having a hard time. The folks in this class, and they don’t think they understand what a summer camp is. Like they they and so then as I talked with, I I was debriefing with the prof, he was like, oh yeah, like in your work group, there’s six people in your work group, five of the six are from India, probably have no sense of what you’re even talking about.

And I was like, okay, well let’s take a back, let’s take a back up and you come, how about we have people come to camp for a day, come and see what we’re doing.

Patti Love — Yes.

Rich Birch — And it was like, it all made sense then, right?

Rick Love — Yeah.

Rich Birch — And it was like, okay, we got to slow down. And actually I thought this when you said the respect thing, we did a bunch of activities around camp. And um one guy had a great turban on and we were going on the high ropes course and which requires a helmet. And I knew enough that uh you know we’re just gonna let him go without, you know he’s gonna have his turban on that’s fine. And we’re not gonna make it put on a helmet. And it was interesting because that did create this like this internal tension with the people running the program. And I was like, I just, I had to have this quick sidebar conversation. And I was like, we’re just moving on, friends. Like it’s going to be fine. You know, we’re creating space for this guy. We’re glad he’s here. Um, you know, we don’t want to go out of our way to, you know, create any offense here. So it’s interesting stuff.

Patti Love — Yeah.

Rich Birch — But, you know, Rick, as you’re thinking, unfortunately, um this might be like the elephant in the room for some people who are listening to this. Unfortunately, this area has become like really politicized. And that to me seems like a change in the last X number of years, that this is like become a thing that both and on both sides of the border went from like, hey, like this is a positive thing to like, now there are segments of our culture that just are not interested in the immigration stuff at all.

Rich Birch — Not talking about the fast but think about the past, but thinking about the future. How do you see the needs of immigrants and refugees and international students evolving in the coming years? You’ve obviously got your pulse, hand on the pulse of this. And how can we prepare for that as we kind of think to the future?

Rick Love — Sure, so thanks for not asking me to speak on on the politics of it all.

Rich Birch — No, no, not asking to do that.

Rick Love — Each local community has to figure that out. But in terms of the future needs, it’s like it seems to be recurring needs, which is when people come to our country, they need to learn English and they need to get a job. And many are quite desperate to do that. In our country, um most immigrants do not qualify for federal or provincial education ESL classes.

Rich Birch — I didn’t know that.

Rick Love — And the ones who do, most of them are on a waiting list.

Rich Birch — Really?

Rick Love — So what are they supposed to do? Our vision is for our country to become the most the best place for immigrants to come because no matter where they go to, across the country, there’ll be a local church that’s trying to figure out how to help them, welcome them to our neighborhood, and for those with spiritual interests, spiritual curiosity, move along a pathway to Jesus.

Rick Love — It’s regular, we regularly find that when people come, they start learning English. If they get a job, it’s very likely they’ll stop coming to the ESL class. That’s okay.

Rich Birch — Yeah, yeah.

Patti Love — Hey, that’s real life. Yeah.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s normal.

Rick Love — But we we keep offering the ministry. And what happens is you keep building credibility. And over the years, something’s going to happen in their life and they’re going to come back because they know this is a friendly place.

Rich Birch — Right. That makes sense.

Rick Love — This is a place where people smile. This is a place where people will listen.

Rich Birch — Right.

Rick Love — And that that’s what we do is we we keep becoming that place where are our new immigrant friends can and that find safety. And then As things develop, it’s like we trust the Spirit of God to draw them to Himself. And thanks be to God, that happens often. We know, like I gave that number 10-4-2…

Rich Birch — Yes.

Rick Love — …that means out of every 10 immigrants we connect with, 6 will not move any further along the spiritual pathway, at least at least at this time.

Rich Birch — Yep.

Rick Love — We don’t know the future, right? And we do find that so many who do move along a pathway to Jesus, they’ve had some kind of connection with God or church or Christian sometime in the past.

Rick Love Patti Love — You know, some it’s like a grandma. My grandma was praying me. I’m an atheist, but my grandma was always praying for me. And then they start meeting.

Patti Love — Years later, they come to faith. Yeah.

Rich Birch — Which is, that’s normal in, like, in everyone’s life, right?

Rick Love — Yes, absolutely.

Rich Birch — Like, that’s the story, right? That we’re, you know, they we’re immigrant or not, people have their, have all different experiences. And, you know, Jesus, I think, you know, this is like a New Testament kind of some people water, some people, you know…

Patti Love — Yes.

Rich Birch — …cultivate and harvest. And yeah, that, that makes sense.

Rich Birch — So, but I, actually, I think that’s helpful, that kind of 10-4-2 thing. It’s helpful for us to think about that, that, hey, this is a part of us serving in our community. There’s this idea, which I think is a noble one that churches should be interested in, which is like we should be considering, we should be um wanting the best for the communities we’re in. We want to serve the communities we’re in. We should be known as a life-giving place. And hey, there’s good things going on there. This is a potential way to do that. Anything, Patti, you’d say about that as we think about kind of the needs in the future?

Patti Love — Yes, it all sounds so positive, but you know our church, which is probably like other churches, has had people attending that kind of resent that the resources maybe that we’re putting towards helping new Canadians, or they’ll say, oh, they’re just using the church to learn English or that kind of thing.

Patti Love — And and our response is, but how many people come to church because they want to find a husband or a wife?

Rich Birch — Right.

Patti Love — Or maybe they want their kids to make friends in Sunday school, right?

Rich Birch — Right.

Patti Love — There’s lots of different reasons why people come to churc.h And the human…

Rich Birch — Yeah. Or, or how, how many people were sitting on the side of that hill that day and when the five loaves and two fishes were, were broken out that were there for the meal.

Patti Love — Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Rich Birch You see that in scripture, right? It’s like, do another, yeah, do another trick, right? They’re like, you’re just here cause you want to see me do some sort of, you know, magic thing. That’s, that’s like, as Jesus, I guess it comes. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting.

Patti Love — Yeah, and we try to be welcoming to everybody. Yeah.

Rick Love — And like we we’ve become convinced, so we focus on ministry with immigrants, but we think this model, the three-stage model…

Rich Birch — Right.

Rick Love — …could be used in any facet of the church, where we have a stage one where our churches are thinking, what can we do so we can keep having new conversations with people in our neighborhood we never met?

Rich Birch — Right.

Rick Love — And then from that, figure out what can we do for those with some sort of spiritual curiosity? And then, or stage three, that’s what churches are good at. They know how to do evangelism and discipleship.

Patti Love — And then our people…

Rich Birch — Well, and the reason the reason why this caught my attention is, ah well, lots I think there’s lots of great about this, and my brother told me so we should talk. But outside of that, when I looked a little closer, I 100% agree with you on that. Most, one of the things in the work I do on you know church growth and helping churches reach more people is, most churches have a front door problem. They have a, if they’re not growing the the issue, we often look at the back door. We’re like, Oh, somebody dropped out of groups. They’re drop off teams. But actually the more systemic problem is there’s not enough people coming in on the front end. There’s no, we’re like not making any impact. And so yeah, I totally agree with you on that for sure.

Rich Birch — Did what did I cut you off there, Patti? I felt like I did.

Patti Love — We often schedule our events and our classes when there’s a lot of other things going on in our building, so that the new Canadians see, oh, lots of people come into church.

Rich Birch — Right.

Patti Love — Or, oh, what are they singing about over there?

Rich Birch — Right.

Patti Love — Or how come there’s a whole bunch of teenagers, you know, being wild, whatever.

Rick Love — It’s amazing how many people who they’ll hear the singing in the church and they’ll attend a worship service just because they’re curious about the music.

Rich Birch — Right. Right. Yeah. Which is wonderful. Yeah. That’s great. Yeah. That’s interesting. Go ahead.

Patti Love — We have like um yeah ESL, baptism classes to prepare people, ESL communion classes, that kind of thing. And then our our volunteers and leaders involved in small groups are very aware of welcoming people into those small groups. We took a survey a while back among our small group leaders and 100% responded, yes, we would love to have somebody ah who was born outside of Canada join our small group. And that really encouraged us.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s good. That starts to see cultural shift and change you know in the in the church as a whole for sure, you know. And and there you know I’ve said this in other contexts that you know every for our American friends, every zip code in the country is more ethnically diverse today than it was 10 years ago and will be more ethnically diverse 10 years from now. That’s just true. That’s a sociological truth. And a part of that is what we’re talking about here today, you know, immigration and we can’t just ignore this issue. This can’t be the kind of thing that we’re like, well, we’re just going to look the other way. That that is ah churches that have done that. It just has not ended up well.

Rich Birch — We’re going to link to ah this pathway diagram that summarizes your ministry model. Rick, why don’t you kind of talk us through this? I think this will be helpful for people to kind of picture it, but why don’t you tell us a little bit about that?

Rick Love — Sure, well you can, so people who have access to this…

Rich Birch — Yeah, we’ll link to it for sure. Yeah.

Rick Love — Very good. So it it really just shows that three-stage model. We call it an intercultural ministries pathway diagram. We really took this model from Isaiah 61 which talks about um make a pathway ah for the nations…

Rich Birch — Oh that’s good.

Rick Love — …so they can [inaudible] to the land, right? And what we think of is we just want to get rid of obstacles, get rid of barriers. And for us, get rid of barriers to Jesus. And the first thing we do is just making, focusing on friendship.

Rick Love — So we just find every way we can think of to have a conversation so we can start making friends. And yeah as you can see on that pathway model, there’s, you’re only limited by your imagination in terms of ways.

Rich Birch — Right.

Patti Love — And some people say, oh, why are you offering that? You know, there’s some place downtown that has a class for that. And we go, that’s great. But, you know, many of our neighborhood friends can’t get down there.

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Patti Love — So someone in our church is qualified to teach that. And then at the end of our course, we’ll say, hey, take it again. If you can, get downtown. Take it again. It’s good for language learning and networking in the city, that kind of thing.

Rick Love — Many will have local libraries that will have classes. So we don’t think of it as either/or. We always think of it as both/and.

Rich Birch — Right.

Patti Love — We’re not trying to reinvent the wheel. We’re just trying to make access to friendly Christians available in every neighborhood of our city.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s cool.

Rick Love — And then so stage two is that general introduction to the gospel. We tried to make the most gentle introduction to the gospel we could. We had friends who were working with a people group in the Philippines. We were in the Philippines for 11 years. And we’re trying to think, what can we do ah for those who Christianity isn’t very far away from them. Their worldview, they don’t think like a Christian. So that’s the goal of this class is for people to learn a little bit about Jesus, laugh, make friends, learn some English, and come back next week.

Rick Love — That’s our only goal, at this stage. And then the stage three is like, like I mentioned, is a bio studies, Alpha, worship, where everything the church does, small groups. Because that’s our goal, of course, is for new friends to become part of the church so that they’re making their decisions, for them and their family, based on the teachings of our Lord Jesus.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s so good. Well, this has been a fantastic conversation. I I hope folks that are listening in will want to track with you. Why don’t we talk a little bit about where, um, you know, we’ve been talking a lot about Canada, but I know you’ve actually worked with a, with a number of American churches as well.

Rick Love — Sure.

Rich Birch — How, where do we want to send people to connect, you know, to kind of get the ball rolling if they’re interested in learning more of that sort of thing?

Rick Love — Yeah, so we focused on Canada. That’s who are we from. We’re Canadians.

Rich Birch — Yes.

Rick Love — So we’ve worked with about 20 churches in the US in about 10 different states. And ah what we did is we started, ah so we have a Love New Canadians website, but we also have a Love New Internationals website, which is more ah American friendly. I lived in the US for six years while we were students in the Chicago area.

Rick Love — So we yeah, so people can connect through lovenewcanadians.ca or lovenewinternationals.com. Connect with us and let’s just have a conversation.

Rich Birch — So good.

That for us, that’s the first step is let’s learn about each other and see if there’s something we can do together.

Rich Birch — Yeah, it’s good. I love, you’ve provided a lot of resources here and I think it’s pretty, it’s well laid out, easy to understand, kind of good first step. I would encourage people. We’ll put links to all of that in the show notes, but, um, really appreciate you being here today.

Rich Birch — You know, final words, since Patti, it started with you, volunteering at the church, what would you say to a church leader that’s maybe on the fence a little bit, thinking like, oh, I wonder if I wonder if we should start thinking about this in a more concrete way here.

Patti Love — Yeah, I would keep it simple. I would say you want to reach the people in your neighborhood and, take a look at, how many people in your neighborhood were not born in your country. And then I’d say if you’re friendly, if you’ve got a nice smile, if you can listen to people instead of doing all the talking, you’re set. You’re set to start this ministry for sure.

Rich Birch — Yeah. It’s great.

Patti Love — It pleases God, pleases God when we treat the immigrant like we treat a citizen. Yeah.

Rich Birch — That’s so good.

Patti Love — You’re on.

Rich Birch — Well that was wonderful. Appreciate you guys being here today. Thank you so much. Thanks for being on today’s podcast.

Patti Love — Thanks for having us.

Rick Love — Thanks, Rich.