Dear Church Family,

At each quarterly congregational meeting, ministerial staff members bring brief reports to provide an overview of their ministry activity over the previous quarter. On Sunday January 29, 2023, I presented the following thematic report to offer encouragement and to offer the theme I hope for all of us for 2023. If you were not at the meeting, I hope this is meaningful and encouraging!

Pastor’s Summary Report — Theme for 2023: THRIVE . . .

Thank you for the blessing of serving alongside you as your pastor here at Huguenot Road Baptist Church. Recently, one of our youth whose family is new to HRBC shared a testimony in worship. He told of how you all supported his food drive to help those who experience food deprivation and food insecurity. In his testimony at the 8:30 service, this teenager stood up front and talked about your support. Then he paid one of the highest compliments a church might ever receive. He said, “Thank you for welcoming me and for supporting my food drive. You all are nice to me.” His testimony at 11:00 was very similar. I will never forget a teenager who has been made to so valued and supported. Please keep this up!

This is part of the DNA of HRBC. We must continue to embolden ourselves with a spirit of love and mission as we seek to thrive in the years to come. We are in our 59th year and will celebrate our 60th year in June 2024. These past several years have been extraordinarily difficult. Leading the church into and out of the global pandemic has been the most difficult thing that I have ever had to do as a pastor. It was more difficult than leading my former church through a relocation process which involved selling the former campus, worshiping in a school for two years, working in an office warehouse and purchasing land and building three times in seven years. It is difficult for some people to understand because we were mostly apart from one another, and many things were below the radar.

While in the middle of the pandemic, I sensed that we needed to treat it like a wilderness experience with a mentality, “Do not waste a crisis.” We had a choice: We could linger in the wilderness and just revert back to the same things that we did before and hope for the best. Or we could seek God’s will for our future and allow God to transform us into a people who are ready for the future that God is preparing for us. (Jeremiah 29:11) I choose the latter. The former just yields more of the same results. I would rather try something new and have a new set of problems than do nothing and have the same old problems.

I am excited about our future! I trust that the five pillars of worship, discipleship, fellowship, outreach and missions are true to scripture. I trust that we are following a path of obedience to seek God’s will for our church as we face the future. I trust that God will provide and show us the way in which we are to go. (Proverbs 3:5-6) God will never ask us to do something and not provide the vision and the means. If we make mistakes, I trust that we will learn from them and not repeat them.

There is much work to be done, but we have come so far. We are restructuring our organization so that we will be more nimble and able to be better stewards of our capital, human, and financial resources. Our five implementation groups along with our infrastructure group, key leaders and capable and gifted staff will all work together toward the hopeful future that God is planning for us.We have a choice as we face the future. We can adhere to a survival mindset and just hope for the best. Or we can embrace a thrive mindset and soar into the future. I choose Thrive. It is the word that God has given me for this year. I pray that you and I will trust God to thrive in faith and in mission in 2023 and beyond. I hope that my report which is in your [meeting] packets will provide some of the ways I have served alongside you this past year. I am grateful for your prayers and appreciate who you are and all you do.

In Christ’s care and service, Pastor Bob Lee