Rivers Baptist Church - Christ alone - and Him crucified

We had our Board retreat on Saturday, 19 May, at the Gynther’s Shed. We started with breakfast and then Jim Woodrow led us through a devotion looking at Jeremiah 29:11-14, John 8:28, John 5:19 and Romans 14:23. It was clear from these verses that God has a plan for Rivers and our job is to discover what it is, not make up our own. He wants to hear from us and to have us seek him wholeheartedly and not rely just on our experience. Just as Jesus spoke only the words God gave him, and did only the actions God told him to do, we need to do the same.

As we started to verbalise the kind of church God wants Rivers to be, the key words that came through were ‘compassionate’, ‘a family’, ‘a people known for their love of God and their love of each other’, ‘team focused’, ’relationships’, ‘connecting with each other’, ‘church is not just for Sunday’, ‘bringing back the 25–40 age group’ and ‘community minded’. This is to be the framework from which we make decisions and work on a new governance model for leadership. We are all keen to further develop a model that incorporates elders and deacons but we need to do more work on what that might look like before we can present something to the rest of the congregation and look for feedback.

We also talked about the interim pastor and will be looking for both an interim pastor and a youth pastor. This is a step of faith as the budget is particularly tight at the moment. However, when we looked at how God had been blessing us in the area of youth, we realised that we could not wait to start putting more resources behind it. Once we have candidates for these positions, we will hold meetings to talk to the congregation about who they are and also how many hours per week we would like to call them for and what the costs would be.

We came away feeling like a team; as one person put it, ‘No one person dominated the conversation’. We have much to seek God about but we are very excited about what He has in store for us.