On This Small Rock

Last week, my wife and I enjoyed a wonderful five days in Bermuda. We knew next to nothing about the place before we went. We now know only a little bit more, but we highly recommend it. Unbelievably clear, blue-green water, beautiful beaches, delicious food, and very friendly people.

We stayed on the farthest northeastern tip of the Islands, in the historic township of St. George’s, where far earlier the British first set foot on its sand and rock. You could think of St. George’s as more “out in the country.” The capital, Hamilton, is located twenty-five miles or so to the southwest in the middle of Bermuda. It’s more like “the big city.”

One day we rented electric bikes, and headed out down the picturesque main road on the south side of the Islands. It runs nearly the entire length of the country. By the time we finished our trek, we’d pedaled over forty miles. Along the way, we saw many beautiful hills, seascapes, and crystalline coves and beaches.

Walking and bike-riding probably helped us see details of things we wouldn’t have seen by car, and to get some flavor of the communities and neighborhoods we were pedaling through.

One thing we noticed (probably a natural hazard of being in ministry) was the wide variety of churches dotting the landscape: Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Anglican, Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist, Seventh Day Adventist, independent Evangelical and more. Some looked ancient and historical, monuments to perhaps earlier heady days. Others looked modern, vital, and active.

The only one we actually visited was back in St. George’s. It’s named St. Peter’s Church, and still serves as the principal Anglican congregation in town. It also has the distinction of being the oldest church in Bermuda, the oldest Anglican church outside the British Isles, and the oldest Protestant church in continuous use in the New World.

As we explored its sanctuary, we discovered on one wall a decorative wooden plaque featuring names of all the past and present rectors, and when they began their pastoral tenures. The list began in 1611 and continued to 2022.

For a 412 year old list, it wasn’t actually all that long: 34 names. For the sake of comparison, in my almost twenty-seven years now at The National Presbyterian Church, I’ve served under nine pastors.

For the sake of perspective, let’s notice that St. Peter’s Church was established

• Less than a hundred years after Martin Luther publically posted his Ninety-Five Theses, effectively beginning the Protestant Reformation

• Seventy-seven years after Henry VIII broke with the Pope and Rome, effectively beginning the Anglican Church

• Seventy-one years after John Calvin began his final stint teaching and preaching in Geneva, Switzerland, establishing important patterns of Reformed ministry and mission.

So it wasn’t very long after these historically momentous events, that this relatively small congregation in an arguably small, out of the way, “out in the country,” town on the north tip of Bermuda began its witness of word and work for the sake of Christ’s kingdom, a ministry trajectory guided strikingly by only 34 leaders in 412 years.

Except for the availability of their names to be read on that small plaque on the sanctuary wall, these leaders’ earthly lives are now opaque, even essentially lost to us, in the currents of history. Leaders come and go. We come and go. Only their and our work for the sake of the Kingdom of God endures.

A far more prominent and important plaque above the altar in St. Peter’s Church signals this fundamental reality. On it are displayed The Ten Commandments, The Lord’s Prayer, and The Apostles’ Creed: Sentinels, if you will, offering us and four centuries of worshipers there orienting and forming reminders of what C. S. Lewis astutely once said,

“Everything not eternal is eternally out of date.”

Michael Denham