28 months ago, Adrian Watts left Oak Hill Theological College. He moved to Bradford and started a church plant with his fellow-pastor, Tom Swinney. Over the next couple of days, The Good Book Blog talks to Adrian about why he chose to plant in Bradford and how things are going ...
Why plant a church rather than go on staff at an existing one?
The most obvious route out of Bible college is to become an Assistant Pastor to gain experience. However, within the independent sector there are very few vacancies to be an Assistant Pastor, particularly in West Yorkshire. The churches are generally small with few resources and they cannot afford assistants. This lead to two possibilities: we could either work in another part of the country or begin a new work in Bradford. Since the purpose was to work in West Yorkshire. We planted a new church.
Why Bradford rather than sticking around in SW London where you've got lots of mates?
Bradford is one of the top ten biggest cities in the UK with a population of over half a million people. Like most places in the UK, there is a need for many more churches to be planted if it is to be reached with the gospel. In a recent interview, Justin Mote said; “Yorkshire, in terms of evangelical church attendance, is less evangelical than Japan. Yorkshire is a more needy area than Japan yet we think of Japan as a mission field.”
Although Tom had first-hand experience of Bradford during his time at the University and as a secondary school teacher in the city, I found it easy to underestimate the spiritual needs of the city. Having lived in London for many years, it was easy to assume that other cities were pretty much the same. But this is not the case. For example, a strength of the Christians in Bradford is their desire for social action. The weakness is the social action replaces the gospel instead of complementing it. So we do need to rethink how we do social action without compromising gospel.
Partnering with our sending churches and friends at college are invaluable and catching up at conferences are great ways of staying in touch. But the decision to plant in Bradford hasn’t really centred around ‘where you’ve got lots of mates’ but where can I best serve.
Adrian Watts is one of the pastors at Trinity Church, Bradford
