Following a vacancy of some fourteen months, the congregation called Philip Bolton Wilson, B.A., B.D., Th.M., Ph.D. to be their next minister. Born in Coleraine in 1973, Philip Wilson grew up in Terrace Row congregation. He attended Coleraine Academical Institution and studied at the University of Reading in England, before training for the ordained ministry at the University of Aberdeen and at Princeton Theological Seminary, New Jersey. He returned to Aberdeen, was awarded his Ph.D. in Practical Theology in 2003 and was licensed by Coleraine Presbytery on June 20th, 2004. His doctorate was published in 2005 in both the UK and the USA. After three years as Assistant Minister in Malone congregation in Belfast, Dr. Wilson was ordained and installed to the charge of Bushmills on 15th September 2006. Having married Miss Hannah Simpson only a month before, the Manse at Eagry on Straid Road became Philip and Hannah’s first home together. On the evening of his ordination, at the reception in the Hamill Hall, the congregation’s twenty-first minister said:
“I am not one for thinking of this as a ministry. I see this as a continuation of the ministry, the ministry of the Lord Jesus Christ … Jesus tells us ‘Others have laboured and you have entered into their labour.’”
