Highland retreat centre for Christian pastors and missionaries ran by ex tech worker
When I say to Oliver Vellacott from Culbokie that one of the transitions in his life was ‘a big step’ he smiles, saying ‘I quite like taking big steps!’
Yet about this piece, he says ‘don’t focus too much on me!’’ He sees God as the inspirer and enabler of the big steps and the smaller ones. And his unique story, authentic Oliver, is woven together with countless others in a divine tapestry.
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Having worked in early international computer networking in the 1960s, he set up a flourishing software company. He married his first wife Valerie; they had six children. A sense of ‘call’ led him to sell the company, and immerse himself in ‘spiritual entrepreneurship’, planting new churches, first in Salisbury, later in Forfar.
In between, he and Valerie ran a retreat centre for Christian pastors and missionaries at Olrig House in Caithness. For five years he was pastor of Wick Baptist Church. Now retired, he’s active in Culduthel Christian Centre.
We catch glimpses of his inner life. Here’s the teenager’s never-repeated vision of Jesus Christ on the cross (‘The look in his eyes! Dying, you know, for my sin’) which has inspired and reassured him ever since.
Here’s the businessman’s resolve not to keep his faith a secret. Here he is in 1979 listening to someone talking about church expansion. ‘It just felt as if he were speaking to me, and he even looked at me directly.’ This was the final prompt leading him out of industry.
Here’s his daily pattern of prayer, his journal-keeping, the entries fuller at times of particular spiritual enrichment. Here’s his attitude to hardship - first Valerie’s sudden death, and then the loss to cancer of his second wife Isabel, an advanced neo-natal nurse practitioner at Raigmore Hospital.
Her illness was diagnosed just four months after their marriage in 2018. Of her suffering, he says in the book they wrote together - Living with Cancer, Walking with God - ‘I can honestly say I have not been angry with God.’ Rather, there is a sense of God giving each to the other for support during the long cancer journey.
Here’s his admiration for Scott of the Antarctic’s right-hand man Dr Edward Wilson, whose life is ‘a testimonial of what a man can be like if he belongs to God,’ the kind of man Oliver himself clearly aspires to.
There’s another reason why Oliver said ‘don’t focus too much on me!’ He wants people to realise that each one of us live a God-given life of possibilities. We are never more authentically ourselves than when we express God’s love and vision for the world. There’s my thread, failures and all, woven into Christ’s tapestry, beautiful.
You can listen to some sermons from Oliver at www.vellacott.com
