Team Detail

Email Tim: welcht@bristol-baptist.ac.uk

Tim joined the college in September 2016 following twenty-five years of pastoral leadership, serving Baptist churches in Richmond-upon-Thames, Shrewsbury, Jersey and most recently Cambray in Cheltenham.

Before that, Tim was a secondary school teacher and developed an interdenominational Christian team working in schools in a London Borough. Then in 1990 (following a 7.7 earthquake in the Philippines!), Tim sensed God’s call to pastoral-teaching ministry. Amazingly, within a year the door of opportunity opened to join the team at Duke Street Baptist, Richmond.

Alongside church life, Tim has pursued research at the University of Birmingham culminating with his PhD in 2009. This explored Baptist roots in the emergence of Pentecostalism and the Azusa Street revival, with a particular focus on the life and ministry of a British Baptist pastor called Joseph Smale. Tim’s interest in revival and pneumatological themes continues to shape his work with church leaders and churches.

Tim is married to Rachel and they live in Cheltenham where Tim helps lead Hesters Way Baptist Church.

Research Interests:

Pneumatology, Baptist History, Practical Theology.

Publications

‘The Radical Road One Baptist Took’: The Practical Theology of James Wm. McClendon Jr. in H. Paynter & P. Hatton (eds.), Attending to the Margins: Essays in Honour of Stephen Finamore (Regent’s Park College, Oxford: 2022) 337-365

Joseph Smale: God’s ‘Moses’ for Pentecostalism, Studies in Evangelical History and Thought (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2013)

‘Dynamics versus Mechanics: Baptists and the Welsh and Lowestoft Revivals’, in P.J. Lalleman, P.J. Morden and Anthony R. Cross (eds.), Grounded in Grace: Essays to Honour Ian M. Randall (London: Spurgeon’s College and the Baptist Historical Society, 2013), pp. 147-163

‘God’s “Moses” for Pentecostalism: A Study of Baptist Pastor, Joseph Smale (1867-1926)’, in John H.Y. Briggs and Anthony R. Cross (eds.), Baptists and the World: Renewing the Vision (Oxford: Regent’s Park College, Oxford, 2011), pp. 152-165