President's diary - May 2025 

 
It’s my final couple of weeks as President of Baptists Together and so, even though there are only really a couple of weeks to report on, this will be a slightly longer piece than usual because I will include some thoughts on the year as a whole.
 

Preaching

Back in ancient history while I was a postgraduate student, I worked part time for the Baptist Union in the old Mission Department as a Social Action Adviser. As a result, I got to know one or two people who worked in the offices and was invited to speak a couple of times at Didcot Baptist Church. That was about 30 years ago.

It was interesting to be invited back. There was a wonderful lunch after the service with a choice of food from some of the different parts of the world represented in the congregation. It was lovely to see the church doing so well.
 

Speaking engagements

I had a couple of opportunities to speak in the week before our assembly in West Bromwich. The first was the annual lunch for retired ministers in the Webnet area. I was asked to speak on my year as President and my reflections were an extended version of the things I said at assembly and that are summarised towards the end of this month’s diary. I wasn’t the youngest person present because lots of the association staff team were present but there were several people who are rather older than me, some of whom have been advisors and mentors in the past.
 
The next day I travelled to Worcester where I was quite definitely the oldest person in the room when the church interns gathered from all over the country. They had kindly asked me to say something about a biblical understanding of calling.

I said something about the call to discipleship which is for all of us. This is more important than anything else. Whatever we do, we are to do as those who are following Jesus.

I also reminded them of the range of stories, diversity of people, and different ages of those who experienced God’s call in the Bible. Calling is important. The one who calls is God. But the way he calls varies as does the sort of people he summons to particular tasks. The calling is down to God. Our task is to follow Jesus and be open to the possibility that God might be calling us to a specific vocation.
 

Prayer video

A number of people who are active in the life of our Union have been asked to produce a one-minute prayer video as a contribution to our shared commitment to praying together. My turn came this month, and the outcome is available on the Baptists Together website.

Mine is about the possibility that the tide has turned and our churches are being blessed with growth. I was reasonably happy with the content but when I looked again, I saw that throughout the video my eyes are flicking back and forth between the camera and my script making me look highly agitated – to put it politely. I’m clearly not cut out for a life on screen.
 
 
Research students

This month, I met with three of the students I am helping to supervise. In one case it was to discuss the limited corrections his examiners required. In another it was to consider the way forward for the project after the unsuccessful examination I recently reported. And the third involved a concluding conversation about one of René Girard’s books and its significance for a thesis on international security.
 

Outings

The Bath Literary Festival took place this month and Becca wanted to go and hear the actor Martin Clunes talk about his recent book on animals. My wife loves to watch his show Doc Martin with its gentle humour, range of eccentric characters, and Cornish seaside setting. I’m afraid to say that I much preferred Men Behaving Badly, but that probably tells you way more about me than you want to know. It’s too late for you to do anything about it now; my year as President is over.
 
Long ago, when I lived in London, and there were old-style terraces and the capacity approached 100,000, I sometimes used to go to the old Wembley Stadium to see England football internationals. These days, I watch the games on the TV, and I’ve never managed to get to the new Wembley.

However, having hung around the first seven or eight clubs in League Two for most of the season, AFC Wimbledon finished in the play-off places. They won their semi-final, and I was pleased to get a couple of tickets for the final at Wembley. My son-in-law joined me, and we watched the Dons win by a goal to nil meaning that next year we will reach the dizzy heights of the third tier of English football. Joy was unconfined and only one song seemed to match my mood; Remember You’re a Womble.


 

Politics

This month an invitation arrived from Christian CND asking for a comment from the President of the Baptist Union for inclusion on their website. Back in the day, this was a movement close to my heart. A group of us at my home church had a banner which we took on marches. It read ‘Battersea Baptists Against the Bomb’.

As you would expect, I consulted the Specialist Teams before making any formal statement. There is always a great deal of sensitivity in saying anything political because we recognise that none of us has the right or authority to speak on behalf all the churches in the union, and even if there is a statement agreed by assembly or council, churches have the liberty to disagree with it.

After little bit of to and fro, we agreed the following wording: Please join me in urging our government to put greater efforts into working internationally to implement a ban on the possession of nuclear weapons and to commission a fresh review of whether the possession of nuclear weapons is an affordable, efficient, and ethical way of securing the defence of our nation.
 
There were not many other opportunities in the course of the year for me to broach political issues. These things tend to be handled by the Specialist Teams and by the Joint Public Issues Team. The one significant thing I did was to put my name to a piece drafted last summer in response to the riots.
 
 
Baptist Assembly

I’ve been a regular attender of Assembly since the mid-90s. I’m not their biggest fan, if I’m honest. My favourite bit is the opportunity to catch up with people I know. I always feel that we could be more deliberative, there could be more theological content, and that the worship could be more varied.

Having said that, I recognise the astonishing amount of work that goes into organising each assembly, that there are huge constraints on time and space, and that the things I find helpful would probably seem very dull to many others.
 
Having said all that, I found this year’s assembly to be very helpful. I thought BMS found a helpful way to communicate the great things it is doing, that the emphasis on evangelism was refreshing, and that many of the speakers had intriguing things to say.
 
It was good to be given a few minutes to report back on my year as President. There’s an account of my words in The Baptist Times.


 

Reflections on the Year

The title President is a grand one. It implies that you preside over something and suggests that you get to spend your time sitting in a grand office, signing executive orders and imposing tariffs on the Methodists.

In fact, though the President is a member of Council and attends the Core Leadership Team meetings, these days the presidency sits outside most of our main committees and decision-making processes. Please don’t see that as a negative comment. It means that there is a voice among us who has permission to speak into our structures without being wholly a part of them. In more able hands, the role has the potential to be a prophetic one.
 
The President is invited to bring a theme and, being congenitally incapable of being decisive, I chose to have two. The first concerned the place of the Bible in our churches and in our shared life. This gave me an opportunity to remind us of the place the Scriptures had in the emergence of our movement and allowed me to suggest that they should be foregrounded in our decision-making processes. I’m aware that we may disagree from time to time about how we should interpret the Scriptures, but they nevertheless remain the primary source of theological authority among us for they reveal Messiah Jesus.
 
I remain convinced that renewal often comes from a reconsideration of our beginnings. If we are committed to the renewal of our Baptist movement then the place of the Bible is something we ought to take seriously.
 
The second theme was younger leaders. I believe we all need to be doing more to identify, encourage, resource and equip the next generation of ministers and that we should be actively doing this. I know that these days nearly everyone is younger than me, but without wanting to limit this, I suppose I’m especially thinking of those in their late teens up to those in their early 30s, say 18 – 35.
 
If God chooses to renew us, then we will need ministers. We will need pastors, pioneers, church planters, evangelists, teachers and prophets. It would be good to start looking for them now.
 
A long time ago, Becca and I worked in Peru. In those days the evangelical churches (pretty much all the Protestant churches there classify themselves as evangelical) in the country were mostly small – perhaps two or three extended families – and uninfluential. The churches were marginal to Peruvian society as a whole. However, all or nearly all of them belonged to a national coordinating body which enabled them to speak with one voice.
 
Soon after we left, this situation changed. Starting, I think, with a mission event in Lima, lots of the Peruvian middle classes started attending evangelical churches. Very quickly, there were a number of larger congregations, and they started to have a national impact. In the years after I came home, I was returning to Peru fairly regularly with Tearfund or to give classes in the seminaries. I noticed the number of church buildings growing, an increased confidence among evangelicals, and some pastors becoming well-known and influential.
 
All this struck me as great, but a couple of developments gave me cause for concern. One was that the growth of the churches outpaced their ability to provide a solid theological education for their pastors. In some churches, some eccentric ideas started to take hold. The emphases seemed to be misplaced. Those responsible seemed to preach the latest things they had heard on satellite tv programmes rather than the truths of Scripture within an agreed theological framework.
 
Secondly, the unity of the evangelical churches didn’t endure. The leadership of the movement became a greater prize because of its greater wealth and influence. The character of some of the leaders was not up to the task and the result was that there was competition and division.
 
My conclusion from having observed this is that when God brings renewal, leadership is vital. That leadership needs to be theologically competent and needs to have its character tested and formed.
 
This brings me to the news of growth within our network of churches. I visited lots of churches while I was Vice-President and even more as President. I was pleased to find that we are mostly in good heart and feeling encouraged. In lots of places, I heard stories of growth, tales of baptisms, reports of younger people becoming part of the congregation, and suggestions that people were simply turning up at church asking to learn about the faith.

I was hesitant to say much about this because all my evidence was anecdotal. However, the annual returns from Baptist churches (which formed the basis of much of our General Secretary’s message to assembly) and the Bible Society report, The Quiet Revival, now provide some solid evidence that something is happening.
 
Where I live in Burnham-on-Sea in west Somerset, the main symbol of our town is the lower lighthouse that stands on the beach. It watches over the tides that can come up very high on the seawall and which can go so far into the distance that you wonder how the town got the on-Sea bit of its name. It’s one of the longest tidal ranges in the world.
 
Matthew Arnold’s poem Dover Beach spoke of a ‘Sea of Faith’ withdrawing like the tide, and this image has been used to speak of the decline in church attendance in the UK. A book was published called The Tide is Running Out.
 
Among Baptists the high tide of church membership came, I think, at the beginning of the 20th century when our numbers reached just over a million, without counting all the children, young people and non-members who were part of our churches. We are now about a tenth of that number. Most of us who have served our churches in this period, even when we have been blessed by growth, have known it only in the context of an overall numerical decline.
 
It is at least possible that the tide has turned at last and that our churches are starting to grow. The next generation of ministers may have the joy of serving in the context of increasing numbers. While this is something that makes me rejoice, I am also conscious of at least some of the challenges it will bring. I’m aware of these from my experiences in Peru, of times of growth in churches I’ve been part of, and in the experience of students who have seen their churches grow under their ministry.
 
In these circumstances, it is even more important that we identify the next generation of ministers and that we ensure that their characters are shaped to enable them to minister with integrity, and that they are theologically competent to shape the world view of those who will be joining our churches without any prior understanding of the faith.
 
I believe the themes I have promoted this year have been timely and it remains my hope that they will be even more actively taken up within our shared life.
 
I’m grateful that I’m still receiving invitations to visit churches and groups. My diary is full for the rest of this year and into next. I’m looking forward to continue to meet people in our churches and to hearing what God is doing among them.
 

Conclusions

While my year as President is over, but there’s some afterburn. Lots of churches and one or two other groups have asked me to speak to them during the rest of this year and into next. I’m looking forward to meeting them all. In addition, BMS World Mission has invited me to visit some of their mission partners in India this autumn. I’m grateful for this opportunity and I’m looking forward to the adventure.
 
It seems appropriate to end with expressions of thanks.
 
I’m very grateful to Becca for being understanding and supportive as I’ve spent time away from home attending meetings, addressing gatherings and visiting churches in different parts of the country.
 
Next, I’m thankful to the colleges, associations and churches that have invited me to participate in the events they have organised. I’ve rejoiced in the great variety that exists within our union.
 
Then, I’d like to thank Webnet for nominating me and the whole of Baptists Together for the opportunity to serve as President. I think I’ve said before that the churches of our union have given me a home and a sense of purpose and so I feel tremendously honoured to have been asked to serve in this way.
 
Finally, I’m grateful to God who called me to be a servant of the gospel and has allowed me to approach the end of my years of active ministry with a role of this kind.