19.06.2025
From Decline to Hope … From Platforms to Pillars
A look at Pioneer Ministry’s ‘Hopeful Renewal’ event in Holy Trinity Rathmines last month by the Church of Ireland Press Office.
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.”
From Platforms to Pillars
“The one who is victorious I will make a pillar in the temple of my God.” Revelation 3.12
“You also, like living stones, are being built into a temple of the Spirit to be a holy priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.” 1 Peter 2.5
Preparing for renewal involves a change in character, Mark Sayers explained in his second talk for the Hopeful Renewal event hosted recently by the Church of Ireland’s Pioneer Ministry team in Dublin. Around 80 people gathered at Holy Trinity Rathmines on Saturday, 31st May, to hear about cultural and personal trends that can precede a renewal of the Church through the Holy Spirit.
Our world, he remarked, is at a “peak platform” stage – in a mentality where people expect individual desires to be met, people expect to be affirmed and seen by others, and a platform is built for us to meet our needs. However, at the same time, the institutions that are subject to these self–centred demands are “buckling”.
A platform, by definition, is “an artificial structure where you put something on it for something different to happen” – most obviously a stage for actors – and people are “pushing to live this performative life”. Performance also becomes a “constant evaluation” between ourselves and others, with constant scrutiny and self–criticism when we don’t live up to our preferred standards.
So cities build similar skyscrapers, even though tourists come to see authentic streetscapes. In church life, it’s really easy to look at other places of worship online, draw comparisons and copy others.
The idea of a platform goes back to Ancient Egypt with its creation story of mud being raised above water, for Pharoah to sit above his people on a throne. In contemporary society, though, there is a sense that everyone should be on a platform which conversely means that no–one really is and “you begin to live in a way so that you are oppressed by your own self.”
Church, in its essence, gives different approach to living life. It’s a communal activity, with kneeling and bowing in some traditions, and a sense of opening ourselves up and worshipping God: “I turn up and give to others.”
Mark took an example from Australian culture – the acknowledgement of Aboriginal lands, their traditional land holders and their elders – to illustrate the concept of ‘pillars’. The role of Aboriginal elders in leadership, passing on teaching, and living for others contrasts with the attitude of “live your best life … no–one else matters”.
To be a pillar of the community is to be a person of wisdom, strength, reliability and character who provides support for those around them, and someone who has earned that description through a process of personal formation.
Picking up on the reference to “living stones” in 1 Peter 2, Mark pointed out that the supporting structures of a building are not always seen but help to keep up a roof and a create space for the presence of God.
In contemporary Christianity, he added, the presence of God is sadly sometimes replaced by the presence of self but His presence – rather than hype – is what many young people are now seeking: “To find peace, a sense of the divine, to meet the person of Jesus.” However, it may not exclusively become a movement among young people as renewal can take place within different generations or ethnic groups, in various countries at different times.
Renewals can take the form of “flash floods” which last a few years but have little long–term impact, or longer spiritual renaissances through which institutions and cultures change. To see this happen, we must set our mind to the creating pillars – people of prayer and presence who are “consequential for others.”
A pillar will see the impact of what they have done “through heavenly eyes” by accepting that he or she will not know the full impact of their ministry. It’s a matter of not underestimating the little seeds that we sow spiritually, and instead trusting that others will nourish them and take them further in good time.
Young people, he suggested, should not automatically look to others as pillars to lean upon but become pillars themselves. For all of us, this formation allows us to become “custodians of the ancient ways of renewal” which have been such a strong part of Ireland’s story.
The event was attended and led in prayer by Archbishop Michael Jackson and Bishop David McClay, as Chair of the Pioneer Ministry Governing Council.