David Matthews went through a challenging period before he took on the ministry of St Anne’s Church.

He’d lost his father, mother-in-law and son in the space of a few years. He also had a stressful job, running five parish churches on his own in rural Suffolk.

“I think from my point of view, coming here from England, I was in need of healing,” Reverend Matthews said. “It had been a very testing time and one of the biggest losses was that of our adopted son, a boy from South Africa who was born with Aids.”

Six years later he’s retiring, and considers it a blessing he was here for St Anne’s 400th anniversary celebrations last week.

“It’s amazing that we can celebrate still being an active church after 400 years,” he said. “One of the church wardens said the church services started under a palmetto tree. In fact, I understand the first two church buildings were built with cedar walls and palmetto thatch, before they were destroyed in hurricanes.”

Mr Matthews couldn’t believe it when he spotted the ad looking for a minister at a church in Bermuda. He applied “as a joke”.

“I didn’t think for a moment I would get it. I thought everyone is going to want a ministerial job in Bermuda. But the church members contacted me and said, ‘We would like to interview you. Can you come over to Bermuda for three days?’

“At that point I still didn’t think I was going to get it, but who is going to turn down a three-day holiday in Bermuda? Despite what I felt, the amazing thing is I got the post. Living in a beautiful place such as this has been such a reward.”

One of the things he’s most proud of is the ministry he’s provided after a loved one has passed away or someone has been diagnosed with a serious illness.

“That’s when people really need your presence the most,” he said. “That’s really when they need the church to come in as a representative of God in that situation.

“Everyone responds to those situations differently. Some people want a quick prayer, others will want you to spend lots of time with them. Some will want to keep their thoughts to themselves, while others will sort of bare their soul to you.”

It’s actually what got him into ministry in the first place.

Mr Matthews moved to South Africa in the 1980s to work as a project engineer for Ford Motor Company. He began attending church regularly and started preaching to a United Church congregation.

“Around that time we were getting ready to leave South Africa and go back to the UK,” he said. “I had six months before I had to pack in my job, when I got offered the chance to give my services full-time to the church as their parish worker.

“That’s when I realised that was what I was supposed to do in the ministry.

“I just felt God’s hand on everything I was doing. I wasn’t trained for counselling, but ended up talking to people in their various times of need.

“I would talk to people who wanted their child baptised and just about the faith and when I said to my wife Joan that I felt I should go into the ministry she looked at me and said, ‘At last, the penny has dropped’. She had caught onto God’s plan a lot sooner than I had. Everything just went on from there.”

He went to theological school and became a deacon in 1990.

Since then the message he consistently tries to teach people is one of love.

“Everything that Jesus taught was based on love. Even when He was turning the tables over in the temple courts it was out of love,” Mr Matthews said. “I’m talking about the service kind of love that allows you to hold each other up when you are down and that allows you to walk alongside someone who is hurting. I think the other thing I try to get people to understand is the way of the Holy Spirit, because without that it’s very difficult to achieve anything because you are working in your own strength. “When I was in South Africa I met Archbishop Desmond Tutu. He is a very small man and leans over the pulpit when he is speaking to you, and one thing he said during one of his messages is we are all God bearers; we have the Holy Spirit within us. It’s not something we have to go to pull out of a toolbox.

“It lives within us whatever we are doing; work, rest and play, God is with us. When it finally strikes you, you think ‘Wow’.”

Mr Matthews will lead his last Sunday service tomorrow at 10.30am.