Pastoral Leadership

Pas­tor Rebecca Paavola:

In July 2010, my hus­band and I moved to Gaspe, Que­bec to become the new senior pas­tor of Gaspe Chris­t­ian Assem­bly. Despite my young age, I feel I have a lot of expe­ri­ence relat­ing to min­istry which has been passed down from work­ing within a vari­ety of min­istry con­texts: From work­ing along­side my Father, to being involved in var­i­ous church plant­ing set­tings work­ing with youth and young adults. I have gained expe­ri­ence in both tra­di­tional and more con­tem­po­rary churches and learned to share great respect for both these expres­sions of worship.

I have always had a pas­sion for mis­sions. I spent three months in Ethiopia a few years ago and trav­eled to the Czech Repub­lic and the Domini­can Repub­lic for short term mis­sion trips. I also love to wor­ship and sit down at the piano or with my gui­tar to sing my heart out to God.

As a leader, I long to see a church where authen­tic­ity and trans­parency are pas­sion­ately sought after and encour­aged both in rela­tion to God and to each other. My great­est desire is to see an authen­tic move of the Holy Spirit com­ing out of the strong foun­da­tion of true Bib­li­cal teach­ing. I believe that the church should be a true rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the redemp­tive work of Christ to the world as it grows in a com­mu­nity of love and for­give­ness where all are wel­comed and needed.

I part­ner in min­istry with my hus­band, Jeremy, who has played a vital role in the devel­op­ment of my phi­los­o­phy of min­istry for the last few years. We met dur­ing our first years at Bible Col­lege and have been best friends ever since. We have just recently got­ten mar­ried on May 29^th 2010. Jeremy is a philo­soph­i­cally and the­o­log­i­cally minded man cur­rently study­ing reli­gious stud­ies with Lau­rent­ian Uni­ver­sity. He also stud­ied in Eng­land for a few months. A lot of his time is spent writ­ing for his blog.