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Interim Pastor Update

Many of you may have missed our Town Hall Meeting last Sunday evening where the Leadership Team announced its intention to bring on an interim pastor. An interim pastor is a skilled individual who has years of experience pastoring and serving the local church. Our interim pastor’s primary role will be handling the Sunday morning preaching each week, which will enable the staff to handle the other day-to-day ministry needs. He will not be a candidate for the next lead pastor position, and will serve in this role until the next lead pastor is called, or as long as the Leadership Team deems necessary.

So with that said, we are excited to announce that Dr. Anthony Chute has joined our NP staff as interim pastor! He is a gifted preacher, has served various churches as an interim pastor before, and works at Cal Baptist University training young people for ministry. Your Leadership team looked at various organizations and recommendations from the EFCA before deciding that Dr. Chute was indeed the best fit for this next phase of our church. Dr. Chute preached at NP last week and will do so again NEXT Sunday, July 8.

Here’s his official bio:

Anthony L. Chute is Associate Dean of the School of Christian Ministries and Professor of Church History at California Baptist University in Riverside, California, where he has served since 2003. He is the author of two books on the life and ministry of Jesse Mercer, a nineteenth-century Georgia Baptist pastor and educator for whom Mercer University is named. Chute co-edited and contributed to Why We Belong: Evangelical Unity and Denominational Diversity (Crossway, 2013) and co-authored The Baptist Story: From English Sect to Global Movement (B&H Academic, 2015), now a standard textbook in Baptist historyHe has contributed chapters to several books including various ministerial profiles in The Noble Company series, as well as “Missional Spirituality is Congregational,” with Christopher Morgan in Spirituality for the Sent (IVP, 2017), and “A Heritage of Evangelical Spirituality,” in the forthcoming volume on biblical spirituality in the Theology in Community series. He authored the article on “Fall and Redemption,” in the CSB Worldview Study Bible (B&H, 2018) and contributed over half a dozen articles in the Encyclopedia of Christianity in the United States (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016). His current projects include co-authoring volumes on the pastorate and on the church in the forthcoming series Theology for the People of God (B&H Academic). He has served as president of the Evangelical Theological Society Far West Region, currently serves as chair of the Baptist Studies Group for ETS, and is editor of the Journal of Baptist Studies. His service to the church includes pastorates in Alabama, California, Georgia and Wisconsin, along with multiple interim pastorates. He received his Ph.D. in Historical Theology from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in 2002. He and his wife, Connie, have been married for 27 years and they have two children, Amos and Joelle.