A PDF of this letter is available here.
To whom it may concern:
Dear friend,
My wife, Celeste, and I were members of Grace Evangelical
Church in Carlisle from early 2019 to 2024. We had previously lived and worked
in Portugal – Celeste all her life and I since 1977 when we married. Amongst
different areas of our involvement in Christian ministry I was from 1991 to
2012 pastor of a
Baptist Church (belonging to the
theologically conservative Portuguese Baptist Convention), Celeste was for a
short time Vice-President of the same Convention, and I was for 25 years
teacher in the Baptist Seminary.
Our church suffered from serious
crises during two different periods. On both occasions a considerable number of
members left, having rejected aspects of my teaching, and believed false
rumours about our financial honesty. By God’s grace we were enabled to continue
in the ministry and saw encouraging signs, including the opening of new larger
premises. All doubts about our honesty were later cleared up and the church
experienced some growth during the rest of our ministry and much greater growth
during the ministry of our successor.
Almost from the start of our
ministry, Baptist Convention leadership saw us as resource-people who could be
called on at times of crises in the churches.
Two principles we established from the start we believe may
have been the reason why we were quite often called on:
(1) A church should not be free to dismiss its pastor if his
doctrinal convictions and example are not in doubt. He is God’s servant and may
at times have to deliver less popular messages. (We might add here if the
pastor’s mental health is not in serious doubt).
(2) Members should not be allowed to think that they can force the
pastor or other leaders to do what they want them to on the basis of threats:
“unless you change x or y we will leave the church”. They should be encouraged
to ask questions, make constructive criticisms and, on certain issues, beg
respectfully to differ. Pastors and other leaders who submit to this kind of
pressure subject themselves more and more to being manipulated as time goes on.
In our experience those who disagreed with the leadership, when they were able to carry out their plan and dismiss the pastor or force his resignation, sometimes suffered terrible and even tragic consequences in their families or fellowships afterwards. I can’t remember any church- situation in which there was long-term gain from the fact of them having done so. God does defend those whom He has called and equipped to be His servant-leaders.
You will by now have received
Pastor Andrew Rowell’s extended account of the events that led up to his
resignation. In Grace church, Carlisle, we felt so much at home that the
pastor, the elders and other members were like family to us. Our resignation was
like a time of grieving for us because of the distance it created between us
and people we considered our family in Christ.
Our settled conviction, regarding
the astonishing change in church-life here over the past six months, is that
both the above-stated principles were clearly disrespected. No-one could
honestly cast doubt on the doctrine or ethical example of Pastor Andrew and his
family and yet they forced him into a situation where he had little choice but
to resign. They tried to suggest problems of mental health as the reason for
their dissatisfaction but without any factual basis – and against what we
obviously know to be true.
Far too much space was given to
influential people, some of them members and others collaborators who are not
members, who threatened to leave the church if he didn’t go back to a style of
preaching they felt more comfortable with.
While Pastor Andrew was giving testimony to a deeper,
enriching experience of Jesus which, with his study of apologetics, gave him a
new energy, conviction, and contemporary relevance in his preaching, some were
saying more and more emphatically that he needed to go back to preaching as he
had been before. Celeste and I were being positively blessed by the change as
at first were the elders John Crosby and John Tredgett. At that time we had a
number of younger visitors, mostly Nigerian, who were obviously listening with
great attention. But the elders, under the influence of the critics, changed
their own point of view and spread stories about there being serious problems
with Andrew’s preaching. The result was and is an extremely messy process:
involving dishonesty, backbiting,
and what Andrew describes as “gas-lighting”. Undue authority is also being
exercised by the new leadership, and with little sensitivity, especially seen
in the way he approached Linda and Maree Rowell on two separate issues (see
Andrew’s declaration). John Tredgett obviously considers himself to be the
pastor now, alongside the retired former pastor and now elder, Dr. John Crosby,
without having gone through any credible process of ordination: previously, in
2018, the church named him “elder” under Andrew’s pastoral leadership.
We have known Pastor Andrew
Rowell for over five years. Our relationship is close, and we feel free to
offer constructive criticism when we differ from him. We are aware that he
sometimes suffers from the mood-swings suffered by people of a particularly sensitive
temperament and indeed by any seriously committed pastor in the 21st
century. He shows no signs of mental disturbance and he, like his wife and
daughters walk closely with the Lord. They are calm at times when we would
expect them to be anxious and frustrated and have a cheerful positive attitude
to life – because of their firm doctrinal convictions and because of the future
hope that encourages all true Christians. Andrew believes firmly in the
inerrancy of scripture and fully accepts the 1689 Baptist Declaration of Faith.
Here his critics have not been able to fault him.
One of the big issues at stake here is that of the role of apologetics. I enclose a file, attached to my email, which is a copy of the foreword of “Escape from Reason” by Francis Schaeffer, an older book which to us expresses the heart of the issue which has been so seriously misunderstood here.
The Foreword is accessible here.
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