Pastor’s Thoughts – Summer 2024

Dear friends,

One of Raymond Chandler’s most famous novels was The Long Goodbye – I suppose that this is the start of that for me! What an immense privilege it has been to serve you as pastor for all these years, and how quickly our life passes.

Having celebrated another birthday recently, it caused me to reflect on the difference between birthdays when I was a child and now. When you are 6, a year is a long time, it’s a sixth of your life. When you are 66, it’s only a sixty-sixth of your life.

My conclusion for that is that we must follow Jesus’ advice about the priorities of our lives:

But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.

Matthew 6:33–34

This has been a difficult but inevitable decision that I have been praying about and considering ever since I turned 60. Several people have congratulated me on my retirement, which is very kind. I’m not sure exactly what you are congratulating me for though!

I am so grateful to God for all that He has done here at BSBC. Many people have said kind things about my tenure here, but the truth is that every bit of glory is owed to God, and most of the hard work has been done by you. No doubt we will have time for reflection on the past at some time in the next year, so I’m not going to get into that now. I would like to look ahead.

A large part of my prayer and thinking, when I began to consider what would happen when I retired, was about succession planning. This has never been a strong suit in Baptist thinking. We’ve tended to be reactive rather than proactive. Someone leaves and then the church gets together to think about what will happen next. Profiles are written and considered, Regional Ministers provide some names, meetings happen. Before you know it, three years have passed, and the church has lost most of its momentum. I never believed that was the Lord’s plan for BSBC. It seemed right to me that we should be looking for a successor before I left and finding some way to have an overlap between our appointments. As I shared that idea, others saw the rightness of it but six years ago we had no idea how things would be for us today, and so I had no idea how the Lord would make such a succession plan possible.

I could not be more delighted with the decision that the Church has reached in calling Gustavo to be my successor. As I reflect on that decision, I wonder again at the sovereignty of God. He knew what none of us did when we first met Gustavo and Marcela, that He had already chosen the one who would make this plan possible.

I have great faith in what the Lord will do through Gustavo. He has a brilliant mind, is incredibly hard-working, has a pastoral heart and a deep desire to see people grow as disciples of the Lord our God. Most of all he has a desire that he, himself, would grow as a disciple. He will have every bit of my support moving forward and my assurance of my prayers for him, his family, and for you all.

This next year will be a long goodbye, but it will not be a long, drawn-out valediction. Instead it will be transition in which I promise to continue giving everything I can to building the Kingdom here. I would very much value your prayers for where Steph and I will move to. The same sovereign God has a plan for us from 2025 onwards and we want to discern what that is.

Thank you for your prayers and good wishes. May the Lord bless you all richly as we move forward together into the future that He has for us.

John