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Would you accept a call to pastor a church of six or seven people?

That is what David Wilson did back in 2015. High Road Baptist Church in Finchley had reached a low ebb and, when David was inducted in February 2016, his mission was to ‘re-establish’ the church.

Thamesmead was the brainchild of the Greater London Council’s city planners: a new town on the south bank of the Thames estuary. Building on marshland east of Woolwich, developers initially experimented in the new urban architecture of the 1960s before returning to more conventional Barrett housing in the 1980s.

When phase two was built, Titmuss Avenue Baptist Church was planted, with a new building overlooked by high-rise homes and aerial walkways. The initial team under Michael Toogood established a small fellowship that then received wonderful pastoral care through the ministries of Derek French in the later 1980s and Robin Dowling in the 1990s. In the 2000s the church struggled for direction as Sunday attendance (paradoxically) increased.

St John’s Wood is west of Regent’s Park in London, a neighbourhood made famous by Lords Cricket Ground. The Edgware Road is also a centre for London’s Arab population.

At the heart of this community is St John’s Wood Road Baptist Church, a Grace Baptist church that has served this area for well over a century. In 2005 it had fallen on hard times, but Chris and Helen Hawthorne came to revitalise it, gathering a growing community around God’s word. During their time they sent a member to church-plant in Bordeaux, and another returned to serve in Assam, India. Finally, in 2018 the church sent Chris and Helen through GBM to head up Proclamation Institute Zambia, leaving Scott Little as the new pastor.