During his lifetime, Clint Clifton — a pastor, church planter and North American Mission Board missionary — asked many individuals to consider planting a church, but his son Noah wasn’t one of them.
“He just focused on being my dad,” said 22-year-old Noah Clifton.
His father providing this space allowed Noah to wrestle through his calling to church planting and yielded the clarity to continue toward church planting even after his father was killed in a tragic aircraft accident in January of 2023.
“There’s a lot of power wrapped up in the fact that this is something that God was calling him to well before and despite the loss of his dad,” said Colby Garman, who pastored Pillar Church of Dumfries, Virginia alongside Clint for more than a decade. “Something like losing your father is a seismic shift in life, but to see Noah know that God had called him to something and to do it with devotion and honesty makes me really hopeful.”
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Now, Garman’s church — the church Clint served as founding pastor — is the sending church for Noah and Send Network planter Alex Chatman as they in turn plant Pillar Church of Crestview, Florida.
The Crestview church plant was one that Clint’s widow, Jennifer, said they had many conversations about. Clint was excited to see Noah embrace his call to church planting.
“When you pair him with Alex Chatman, who is an experienced, Jesus-loving military member,” Jennifer said, “the sky’s the limit for what God can use the two of them together to do.”
According to Jennifer, planting churches in military communities was an idea Clint stumbled upon shortly after planting Pillar Church of Dumfries near Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia.
“Our church is full of military members,” Jennifer said. “And so Clint was like, ‘Instead of me going out and planting a bunch of other churches, let’s train these guys who are going out already when the government changes their duty stations. Let’s train them, disciple them, so we are sending out all these disciple-makers, these missionaries, as they move about.’”
Chatman was one such Marine whom Clint first noticed. Clint asked Chatman to lead the youth ministry at Pillar Church of Dumfries, and then several years later, Clint began asking him when he would plant a church of his own.
Pillar Church of Dumfries planted dozens of churches during Clint’s lifetime, but this particular church plant in Crestview held special significance for him.
“It brings together all of the things I think that were deeply important to Clint,” Garman said. “His love to see the gospel proclaimed and God’s Kingdom advanced, his excitement about church planting in military communities, and then, what I would say is the thing that was most important to him, which was his family and the relationships that they have shared.”
Blending ministry, family
Noah said his father had a strongly developed philosophy of blending ministry with family. They had a family motto: “What we do, we do together.” This gave Noah a front-row seat to the ministry of church planting and left him with a unique breadth of practical wisdom for the task.
“Everything he and my mom did was to expand the Kingdom of God and to make our family a family of men and women who love the gospel and want to see Jesus’ name glorified among the nations,” Noah said.
At the time of his death, Clint was serving as the senior director of resource and research strategy at the North American Mission Board. He authored countless articles, wrote handbooks on practical church planting topics and hosted the New Churches podcast.
“He loved the Send Network family,” Jennifer said. “He always came home so excited to have spent time with them, so excited for the things that they were pushing towards, the vision that was passed down to them from leadership. He loved the direction Send Network was going.”
EDITOR’S NOTE — This story was written and originally published by the Send Network of the North American Mission Board.
