Press Releases
From decline to hope
“Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.” Genesis 1.2
The Pioneer Ministry Leadership Team welcomed an audience of 80 people from across Ireland to a morning with Mark Sayers, Pastor of Red Church Melbourne, in Holy Trinity Rathmines on Saturday, 31st May.
Mark’s theme of hopeful renewal draws on his 2019 book – Reappearing Church: The Hope for Renewal in the Rise of Our Post–Christian Culture – and current trends which he observes and considers as a ‘cultural interpreter’. Part of this process is to recognise blind–spots in culture (e.g. an acceptance of church decline, in an Australian context, which has not given the full picture of what’s happening).
Indeed, there are several signs of hope from Scripture and experience.
The darkest moment in the Bible is the one just before Creation when Earth is a formless blank canvas over which the Holy Spirit is hovering. A new and wonderful beginning is about to happen.
The word crisis is also not necessarily as negative as its modern meaning suggests. The founder of classical medicine – Hippocrates – changed the ancient world’s understanding of healing when he identified that the human body was built to fight back against infection; it could face a turning point (termed krisis in Greek) from where a recovery was possible. The Church therefore was facing a moment in which it needs to choose which understanding of ‘crisis’ it would accept, the latter being far more positive.
After the Covid–19 pandemic, societies are experiencing rapid geopolitical, economic and technological change: “The entire globalised world that your country has benefitted from, my country has benefitted from, that undergirds that very comfortable life, is now being rocked and shaken.”
Young people look at the narratives that they have been told and no longer like the direction in which these are leading. Smartphones connect people, of all ages, to a “digital nervous system” and a greater sense of isolation and individual vulnerability is setting in. We are spending less and less time together – falling alcohol sales and smaller nightclub crowds tell some of this story and it also has implications for how to sustain volunteering in church life.
The picture of the Spirit hovering above the waters implies that He is about to move like an eagle “looking with its incredible vision to where to land”. Ireland’s entire landscape is “scattered with evidence that you were once at a time like this.”
Mark took the listeners back to Augustine writing the City of God. Knowledge would have been forgotten if not for a movement in “a country on the edge of Europe through prayer and patterns and the power of God” – the beginning of Patrick’s mission in Ireland occurring around the same time (in the 430s AD) as the fall of Augustine’s owncity in Roman North Africa.
Our world is “infused with patterns of recovery” and this renewal is the constant pattern of how the Holy Spirit “works in a community to contradict the default mode of the human heart – cynicism, decline, melancholy.” It’s a counter–cultural story – one that begins within us as personal renewal leads to corporate change.
“First let Christ change you,” he affirmed, so that people around us will say: “There’s something different about her, there’s something happening in him.” Repenting from cynicism, we will “allow the flow of the renewal of our lives to spread outwards.”
Cynicism and an acceptance of decline can be reframed into a holy discontent – an approach where we look around and acknowledge that things are tough but we still want to rise above any low standards in our faith, church or culture.
This renewal in our lives is a process rather than an event – and a process that begins with a lot of preparation. God will use life experiences, including in our families and churches, to shape us into vessels “to carry the Holy Spirit and be an agent for change”.
Looking back over a pathway through ministry can mean recalling many difficulties, he noted. While we would not want to live through these experiences again, what we can give as a result of them is deeper than it would otherwise have been. Humility, laying down control, resistance to sin, and greater empathy and compassion are among the things that God can grow in us when He is “building a dwelling … where people can see Jesus and what He has done” in us.
There is also an element of contending prayer in renewal, where we continually call out to God to move in our families, churches and communities. This can sit alongside an attitude of “I might not see it [renewal] but I am willing to contend for the generations to come after us.”
What are some of these tentative signs of renewal?
Mark pointed to 1.3 million guests taking part in the Alpha Course each year over the last 10 to 15 years, and more and more young men turning up to seek meaning at church services in Norway and Australia. The spiritual temperature “has risen slightly” – similarly to the point in a football match when a team realises that things are changing for the better.
The renewal of the Church, he anticipated, would look different than before but for Ireland this was an opportunity “to reconnect with what your DNA as a nation really is.”
Pioneer Ministry is an initiative of the Church of Ireland to reach those with little or no connection to church. Emerging from within to encourage, support and release a movement that has the capacity to reach people in new places and in different ways.
Administrator/PA to National Director
Ingrid Brennan
c/o Atlas Language School Residence
96-98 Rathmines Road Upper
Dublin
D06 Y684
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