28 January 2024

Dear Pastor York,

Here on the day of your final sermon and service with us as our Senior Pastor, please allow Debbie and me to once again express our deepest love and gratitude to you for the personal and spiritual ministry you have given to us during these past six-and-one-half years we have been blessed to worship and serve here in our church.

We give thanks to God first ‘from whom all blessings flow,’ but we thank you also for being such a willing, able, and faithful servant of God as He ministered His grace to us through you.

First, we want to thank you for the privilege and joy God has afforded us to call you ‘Pastor,’ and we do so with the greatest depth and degree of respect and affection. We’ve been personal friends and even ministry colleagues for decades, but since our coming here to our church, you’ve been ‘Pastor’ to us. God promised in Jeremiah’s day, “And I will give you shepherds after my own heart, who will feed you with knowledge and understanding.” (Jeremiah 3.15). And so you have.

And not only you, but we have been further blessed for the foreseeable future with the wisdom you have exercised by choosing our other pastors to serve us alongside you. You have cultivated in them the same graces and gifts you model to carry on the work of God and the ministry of the Gospel. For this, we are grateful, hopeful, and full of joy and anticipation for God has yet in store for us.

As you well know, both Debbie and I were born into pastors’ homes. Neither of us has ever had any other pastor besides our fathers. My father was my only pastor until I assumed my first pastorate. Debbie’s Dad was her only pastor until we were married. Then, until we came here, I have been her pastor. All this to say that: I am most personally and affectionately grateful to you for ministering, not only to me, but also to my wife in ways that I was either not gifted or didn’t have the opportunity. I love you for that.

I know that I have expressed these things to you before in personal conversations, but I want to reiterate them here in this testimony. When I resigned my former pastorate, we had not planned either for that departure nor where we would go from there. Buck Run Baptist Church was not on our radar nor horizon. We didn’t have enough knowledge [or presence of mind] to even be considering Buck Run. All I knew about Buck Run Baptist Church was that there was one in Frankfort, and you were the Pastor. But I had never attended a service either at the old campus nor our present one. In fact, I had been in Frankfort only a very few times over those thirty-five years we had ministered in Lexington.

But when I resigned there, Debbie and I prayed and committed to God that we would continue to worship and serve in a local church in whatever opportunities God would be pleased to open for us – we just didn’t know how or where that would be. Then in that first week after my resignation, you and I spoke to one another. Then we attended our first service here. And here we are. As Abraham’s servant said concerning his journey to find a bride for Isaac, “The man bowed his head and worshiped the LORD and said, ‘Blessed be the LORD … who has not forsaken His steadfast love and His faithfulness … As for me, the LORD has led me in the way…’” (Genesis 24.26-27).

Here is what we have found in our church … and I say this, first, to the praise of the glory of God’s grace and also as an expression of our love for our dear brothers and sisters who are our church body – but I say it with thanksgiving to you because I know you have taught, cultivated, and modeled the grace that our church so abundantly ministers:

Our church is our Holy place. It is so because the Presence of God is here. God is pleased to dwell among us and manifest Himself in every service, in every way. Our church is truly to us our ‘Bethel’ – our ‘house of God.’ We constantly experience here what Jacob did when God met him and revealed Himself to him in the ‘ladder dream’: “Surely the LORD is in this place … How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of Heaven!” (Genesis 28.16-17). Except that we all strive to be more awake and engaged in the enjoyment of His Presence than Jacob was while he slept and dreamed!

Our church is our Healthy place. We are consistently and faithfully fed on the rich diet of the Word of God. Every sermon, every lesson, every counsel, every conversation – all of it is committed to the authority, sufficiency, and power of the Word of God to enrich us with the words, will, and ways of God. As you have often taught us: the Word of God is informative, transformative, and performative. To sit under the healthy ministry of our church’s pastors is the first appetizing servings of the age to come when “On this mountain the LORD of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wine, of rich food full of marrow, of aged wine well refined.” (Isaiah 25.6). I only hope that we all recognize and treasure how richly and exceptionally blessed our church has been – and is – to have the caliber and quality of preaching, teaching, and leadership we enjoy on a daily basis. It isn’t so everywhere.

Our church is our Healing place. Our church is a true ‘Grace Place.’ Love is spoken here – with an ‘unconditional’ dialect and inflection. There is healing for the wounded; there is re-setting of the spirits and lives for the broken; there is encouragement for the downcast; there is help for the weak; there is acceptance for the rejected; there is a welcoming embrace for the lonely; there is always the message of salvation pointing to Jesus Christ for those who are lost and out of the way.

Our church is our Happy place. The joy of the LORD is here. Our church worships with joy, sings with joy, serves with joy, fellowships with joy, witnesses with joy, hopes with joy – and even weeps with one another with the joy of the LORD who is our strength. Our church embodies all of those ‘happy’ Scriptures we so often think and talk about: “I was glad when they said to me, ‘Let us go to the house of the LORD!’” (Psalm 122.1); “Make a joyful noise to the LORD, all the earth! Serve the LORD with gladness! Come into His Presence with singing!” (Psalm 100.1-2); “With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation. And you will say in that day: ‘Give thanks to the LORD, call upon His Name, make known His deeds among the peoples, proclaim that His Name is exalted. Sing praises to the LORD, for He has done gloriously; let this be made known in all the earth. Shout, and sing for joy, O inhabitants of Zion, for great in your midst is the Holy One of Israel.’” (Isaiah 12.3-6).    

And, I say again, all of this is so – largely because, especially over the past twenty years of your pastoral ministry here, you have taught, lead, and modeled this gracious culture in our church.

And not only do we want to thank you on this occasion for all you have done for us, but we also commit to express our continuing gratitude to you by each of us doing our parts to carry on our church’s ministry for generations to come.

With our love always,

~ Dave and Debbie Parks