Papa Dan's Pastoral Days

HIRING A YOUTH PASTOR  Allen & Suzanne Powles, Brem & Donna Frentz, Dan & Leona Goldsmith In February 1982 I went to Regina to interview Brem Frentz as a potential youth pastor.  My meeting with Brem coincided with an internship seminar which was being held at Canadian Bible College.   I sat in on the seminar meetings for the pastors of the churches that would be having an intern that summer.  During one of those meetings, the internship director spoke to me asking if Rockyview Alliance Church would consider having an intern.  That was not my intent when I went to the college in Regina, however the director said that they had more interns than churches for them. I made a quick call to the vice chairman of the Rockyview board of elders asking that he check with some of the board members.  Within a couple of hours, the vice chairman returned my call with the answer that we could have an intern.  I had never had an intern...

HIRING A SECRETARY AND ASSOCIATE PASTOR  Rockyview Alliance Church With the the rapid growth in attendance, my plate was full.  I had to prepare two sermons each week, serve as chairman of the church board, do all the secretarial work which included preparing and printing the bulletin, answering the phone, and all the other paper work, etc. that is part of a church office.  Being in the midst of a building program brought additional work, including frequent building committee meetings, meeting with the architect, etc.  High on my list of priorities was visitation.  Leona and I tried to visit all of the members and the newcomers, which not only meant making visits during the daytime, but also two evenings a week, with at least two calls each of those evenings. Since so many of our congregation were young couples, with both husband and wife working, they were not home during the daytime and evening was the only time that we could find them home. Thankfu...

DEDICATION DAY - OCTOBER 7th, 1979 One of our Sundays, near the end of our meeting in the school, we reached a new record attendance of 239.  Our first Sunday, September 30th, 1979, in our new church facilities, we exceeded that by 40 with a new record attendance of 279.   We were one excited congregation.  We never fell below that attendance of 279 until one summer Sunday a year or so later. To indicate how our attendance continued to climb, let me say that building plans were drawn in early 1978 and the day we moved, in the fall of 1979, our nursery was too small.  Men in the church, immediately put a door in the wall, making, what was designed as a library, the crib room for the nursery. A Sunday morning service at Rockyview Alliance Dedication Day was Sunday, October 7th, our second Sunday in the building.  That was Thanksgiving Sunday and the sixth anniversary to the day, October 7th, 1973, when Rockyview Alliance Church had i...

ROCKYVIEW ALLIANCE CHURCH BUILDING PROGRAM Being the pastor of a church with a building program was a first for me.  In all my years of pastoral ministry, Rockyview Alliance Church was the only church building program that I experienced.  Once we hired a Calgary architect, plans began to move more quickly.  In July 1978 we had a ground breaking service on the five acre property. Most ground breaking ceremonies usually have two or three people with spades in hand, turning a spade full of soil.  I suggested to the board that since we lived in Calgary that we find an old plow.  The elders became the team pulling the plow and I held the handles of the plow.  I even wore a white stetson, which the wind blew off before we were finished.  We had a consulting firm that guided us in our stewardship program.  A kick-off banquet was held launching our building program with the theme "Together We Build."  We raised thousands of dollars, s...

ROCKYVIEW ALLIANCE CHURCH Dan in front of the Douglas Harkness School Our first Sunday at Rockyview Alliance Church in NE Calgary was November 27th, 1977.  Rockyview was a new church plant, meeting in the Douglas Harkness Elementary School, in a new area of Calgary known as The Properties.  The Properties consisted of four square miles and each square mile with its own name.  The school was in Pineridge Property , the SE corner of the foursome. There was a good nucleus of people that made up the Rockyview Alliance Church congregation.  Many of them were young couples and young families.  As best I can remember the Sunday morning attendance was about 100 to 150.  We had the use of the school for Sunday mornings and evenings. The Western Canadian District of the C&MA had purchased a five acre site in Pineridge Property in 1973 as a possible site for a future church.  Rockyview held its first service in The Properties   i...

COMMUNITY BAPTIST BIBLE CHURCH December 30th, 1975 a moving company loaded all of our earthly belongings into their truck and headed for Abbotsford, British Columbia .  Meanwhile, I came down with a touch of the flu.  So, as a family, we spent one more night in the parsonage in Lethbridge, our bed was the floor and my diet was ginger ale. A blizzard blew in on the 31st, but by the late afternoon I figured that I could make it to Calgary where we had been invited to stay with a widow friend, who had been a member of our congregation in Lousana.  So, we bade farewell to Lethbridge and headed to Calgary. The morning of January 1st, 1976 we set off for Abbotsford.  What a treat, having had to detour to get out of Calgary, due to the blizzard of the day before, to arrive in the balmy spring like BC city of Abbotsford. One of the many Sunday School buses Pastor Milton Johnson had invited me to be an assistant pastor at the rapidly growing Community Ba...