Before My Parents Were Born: A letter that reminded me why the local church matters
This week I received an email from a man named Derek.
Derek first attended the church where I now serve as pastor around 1946. He left in 1966. To put that in context: he started attending before my parents were born, and he left the church twenty years before I was born. The people who welcomed him through those doors, ran his Boys Brigade, poured into his faith — none of them had any idea I would one day stand in that same pulpit. But I'm celebrating them today.
Derek wrote to thank every church that had ever played a part in shaping his life. It wasn't a complaint, or a request, or an awkward piece of unfinished business. It was a letter of gratitude — written, I suspect, with the reflective clarity that comes when you've lived long enough to see how the story holds together.
Here is some of what he shared.
He came into the church as a child, grew up through the youth groups that ran at the time. He met his wife at the church in 1964. They married in 1966. In the six decades since, they have moved from London to Winchester to Southampton, on through the New Forest, and eventually to New Zealand. They've since returned to the UK and have made their final move into a retirement community in Wales, where they have just applied for membership at their local evangelical church.
In almost every congregation they attended along the way — Baptist, Methodist, Salvation Army, Presbyterian, Brethren — they served. Derek as treasurer. Carole leading worship, running youth groups, coordinating Alpha courses. Both of them volunteering in food banks. Never spectators. Always contributors.
He closed his letter with this line:
"We have stayed on the right path and have nearly finished the race."
I've been thinking about that sentence ever since.
What nobody tells you about leading a local church
One of the hardest things about church leadership is that most of the fruit you produce is invisible to you.
People arrive, get shaped, and move on. You invest years into families who then relocate. You disciple young people who go off to university and find a church closer to their new home. You pour yourself into community after community, and much of the time, you never find out what happened next.
The metrics we tend to measure — attendance, giving, conversions, programmes — capture almost none of this. They tell you something about what's happening in the building this Sunday. Those metrics are useful, and they serve a purpose, but they tell you almost nothing about what your ministry is actually producing in people's lives over time.
Derek's email is a glimpse behind the curtain.
The unnamed leaders who ran a Boys Brigade in my local church in the late 1940s were not building a brand. They weren't chasing growth targets. They were faithfully investing in the young people in front of them, week after week, in a modest church hall in East London. One of those young people went on to serve the church — quietly, consistently, sacrificially — on two continents, across six decades of marriage and ministry.
They will never know that. But it's true.
The long arc of faithful ministry
I work with church leaders across the UK through my consultancy, DS Ministry Services, and one of the most common struggles I encounter is the pressure to produce visible, measurable, immediate results.
I understand that pressure. Trustees want to see progress. Denominations want reports. Leaders themselves feel the weight of it — the nagging question of whether what they're doing is actually working.
But Derek and Carole's story is a reminder that the most significant work of the local church often operates on a timescale that none of our dashboards can capture.
The seeds planted in one generation bear fruit in the next. The faithfulness of one congregation shapes the character of people who go on to serve in six others. The local church — ordinary, unglamorous, often under-resourced — is quietly producing something that lasts long after the people who planted it have been forgotten.
This is not an argument against accountability or strategic thinking. Both matter, and I'd argue churches need more of both, not less. But strategy without a long view becomes anxiety. Accountability without perspective becomes discouragement.
What I want every church leader to hear
You may not get a letter like Derek's. This is the first I have seen in 15 years of ministry, and I have no way of sharing it with those who had impacted Derek all those years ago. Most of the people whose lives your ministry has shaped will never write to tell you. The young person who found faith in your youth group, the couple whose marriage was steadied through your pastoral care, the leader who was quietly mentored by watching how you handled a difficult meeting — most of them will simply carry what they received and give it to someone else.
That's not a failure of gratitude. That's how the church is supposed to work.
Your job is not to see the full harvest. Your job is to be faithful with the field in front of you.
Derek and Carole have "stayed on the right path and nearly finished the race." Somewhere at the beginning of that path was a church that probably had no idea what it was starting.
Be that church. Lead that church. It matters more than you know.
Dave Simms is a pastor with 15 years of ministry experience and the founder of DS Ministry Services, a consultancy supporting small and medium-sized UK churches to grow sustainably and lead well. If you'd like to explore how DS Ministry Services can support your church, get in touch.
