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With Alasdair Macleod
62 Plays4 years ago
For those involved in church leadership, getting evangelism and outreach into the natural life of the church family can sometimes be a challenge. In today's PEP Talk we hear from Inverness pastor Alasdair Macleod, speaking about the extension of discipleship and preaching into the culture of outreach in his congregation.
Alasdair Macleod has been the lead pastor at Culduthel Christian Centre in his hometown of Inverness since 2014. He was a fellow student with Andy Bannister at London School of Theology and spent several years pastoring churches around the London area. He has completed training in Christian Counselling and more recently an MLitt in Biblical Studies from St Andrews University. He spends his free time mainly supporting the interests of his teenage children but when there is opportunity Alasdair enjoys 5-a-side football, cycling and golf.
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Transcript
Introduction & Listener Engagement
00:00:00
Speaker
Thanks for listening to pep talk if you're enjoying the podcast There's one way you can really help us out and that's by going to your podcast provider whether that's the iTunes Store or Google Play or Spotify wherever it is you get your podcasts from and Rating the show and if your podcast provider gives you the opportunity also leaving a brief review Because that helps other people find pep talk and get plugged into all the great resources that we have here for you Thank you so much
Episode Introduction & Guest Introduction
00:00:35
Speaker
Welcome to Pep Talk, the persuasive evangelism podcast. I'm Andy Bannister from the Solar Center for Public Christianity. And my usual co-host, my partner in crime, Christy Mayer, familiar to many of you who listen to the show regularly, sadly isn't with us today. I can't join us, but we have as a replacement my colleague, Gavin Matthews. Hi, Gavin. How are you doing? I'm doing very well. How are you, Andy?
00:01:00
Speaker
Pretty good. I was expecting a squeaky voice and you're pretending to be Christian. I'm glad you didn't try that one. Well, Gavin, we have a great guest on the show today joining us all the way from almost the other end of Scotland up in Inverness. We have Alistair McLeod. Alistair, welcome to PepTalk. It's great to be with you.
Alistair McLeod's Journey & Ministry
00:01:20
Speaker
Well, Alistair, you and I go back quite a way. So I think it was 2000, the year 2000 we met. Is that right from memory? That's right. Yeah. London Bible College.
00:01:29
Speaker
That's at London Bible College, way down in the South London School of Theology. It is now both doing the BA in evangelism. And here we are 20 years later at the other end of the country. And I guess that leads us to perhaps my opening question really. You've got now 20 years of experience of being a minister, a pastor.
00:01:47
Speaker
and different churches, both down in the south and now up at Carl Dothall Christian Center up there in Inverness. So a couple of questions to kick off with really. Did you always imagine you'd be a pastor? Was that always something you thought you'd do? And then the context down south and up north, are things largely the same? Are people the same everywhere? Or as you've particularly thought about evangelism and taking the message out of the church and to people who don't know Jesus, have you had to kind of rethink the way you do things as you've moved from one end of the country to the other?
Stories of Faith & Evangelism
00:02:17
Speaker
Yeah, I came from Inverness originally, and I'm back in Inverness at the age of 45, but I spend most of my time down in the southeast of England in Essex and in Watford. But when I was called to my first church, just at the end of our time at London School of Theology, the job title was a pastoral evangelist. And I thought, well, I think I've got pastoral skills, but I'm not sure I'm an evangelist. And
00:02:47
Speaker
When they sort of explained in the interview what the job was all about, about evangelism, I said, well, I don't think I'm an evangelist. And they said, we think you are. We've looked at what you've done in the past and you've done a lot of reaching out to people. I said, but I'm not, I'm not like Jay John or I'm not like Billy Graham or any of these people. I just love people and I talk to them and I get on well with them.
00:03:11
Speaker
And so anyway, I was called to that church and I said to the church at the beginning, I've got my help plates on, we're gonna have to do this together. And it was Ephesians 4, which is to equip the saints for work of ministry. And the way we do that is we learn by doing it together and we make our mistakes and we go as we go along. But also that the church prays, pray for me that when
00:03:40
Speaker
mouth is opened, I would fearlessly make no in the mystery of the gospel. But over that time, we just saw so many people coming to faith. And there's one guy who basically came in off the street and he, you know, to my door and he was actually a big guy, you know, quite, you know, physical guy. And someone was wondering, you know, maybe they need to stay behind in case anything happens here.
00:04:07
Speaker
And he just sat down and he said, who's Jesus? And I started to explain to him, you know, the gospel. And he says, I know this, I know this. And I said, well, have you ever been to church? No, I've never been to church. What happened? He said I was on an Alcoholics Anonymous course. And basically step four, I confessed all the people that I'd hurt. I confessed to the higher power. And I asked God to forgive me. And this,
00:04:38
Speaker
power just came upon me and threw me to the floor and I started calling out the name Jesus. And he went back to the AA meeting and he said, who's this Jesus? And he said, well, you better go to the happy clappies down the road. They'll explain. And then so he came to our church and knocked on the door and he said, who's Jesus? And this guy is still following the Lord. He's now got an amazing ministry with helping
00:05:04
Speaker
and he shares Jesus with people as well. And that was just one of the examples
Church as Community Hub for Evangelism
00:05:10
Speaker
of how just loving someone and walking with them, and he's still someone that I'm walking with now, almost 20 years later, still a close friend. But up in Inverness, it's a bit different. In Inverness, there's still this idea of hearers, there are people who come to church to hear
00:05:33
Speaker
and to check out the gospel. People that are not necessarily from a church background, but they're still coming along and they're listening. And so every week we've probably got about 10% of the congregation would be people that are not committed. So preaching the gospel, preaching Christ and salvation in a Sunday service, but at the same time trying to equip people for reaching their friends and colleagues during the week.
00:06:03
Speaker
That's really inspiring. I know that you're now responsible for running a good-sized church in the Highlands there with a huge amount going on. I never envy the role of pastors because you seem to be constantly juggling pastoral work, administrative work, teaching. How do you keep evangelism on the church's agenda when you've got so much to juggle all at once? I know some churches where it's sort of fallen off. How do you keep all those things in balance and make sure that these things are all happening and that some things don't get forgotten?
00:06:32
Speaker
Well, you're absolutely right. It's very possible for that to happen. And I think we're in lockdown at the moment and there's particular pressures in lockdown that weren't there before. But what I tried to do is have one evening a week, which I'll set aside to meet with non-Christians and seekers. And that might be running an alpha course or some kind of course like that.
00:07:02
Speaker
Or it might just be having meetings. I mean, during lockdown we said Tuesday and Wednesday evening, if you want to talk about the Christian faith, then we'll do a Zoom call with you. And we just said, you know, we're just going to make time for that. And just with any kind of time management, you put in your priorities and other things have to go.
00:07:26
Speaker
you know, I've been doing that throughout my ministry. And I think it starts from, you know, in my first church, I was responsible for encouraging the church and evangelism. And then when I became, you know, sole pastor, then I just continued to make that my priority. And by, by, by modeling it, then people, you know, see that that is, that is, that is the vision of the church because the church leader is actually making personal time for that. I also play tennis badly, but I play
00:07:55
Speaker
once a week with some friends. And, you know, so I'm sort of trying to keep friendships up with non-Christians. It's slightly easier in the north of Scotland because I'm kind of back in my hometown. So I'm actually meeting with my school friends to play with them on a Saturday morning at 11 o'clock. We've still got the old teenage rival, even though we're just turning 50. But it's, you know, they talk about the church, they talk about
00:08:24
Speaker
You know, Jesus, it's part of our conversation, but not the whole conversation, obviously. And has there ever been pushback from the church, saying, well, actually, you should be here visiting us and just serving us. You're setting aside all this time for people outside the church. Has that ever been difficult for you, making those priorities for the lost? Never, never. I mean, I've always been part of churches where, actually, I would say that my own eldership in the current church, I would say evangelism is the word that gets them excited.
00:08:53
Speaker
So if it's ever like evangelism, there's never a debate on budget, you know, this is what we're here for. And the church, I mean, at the moment, they actually built a community center and they built it deliberately so that it would be filled with non-Christians. And the church meets in that Christian center. And so it's almost like a sort of inside out type of strategy.
00:09:24
Speaker
You know, we've got particular challenges with that model of church as well. But the fact is that the eldership from the very founding of the church, this is why the church is here, is to reach the lost, to reach people who don't come to church. And I think that's
Discipleship & Long-Term Evangelism
00:09:44
Speaker
why people find it easy to attend on a Sunday because it's a coffee shop. It's a place where many of them would maybe spend time during the week.
00:09:54
Speaker
At least we've got a follow-up question. One of the things I've always been quite struck by when I've been up and done some things with you at Karl Dothlen, watch what the church is doing there in the community, is I've always thought Karl Dothlen seems to have quite porous borders. You have non-Christians around. The church is not just full of Christians, it's full of people in various stages.
00:10:15
Speaker
of their faith journey, which I've always found hugely encouraging. How have you gone about that? How does, as a pastor, do you help build a church where there are people free to come, people feel it's their church, even if they're not yet ready to commit to following Jesus? Because obviously, if you don't have those people, it's then very hard when you do alpha to have anyone in alpha. I always think the first step is creating a church community where there are non-Christians around. So how have you done it? What have you learnt some ways to go about that? Well, I think it's very
00:10:45
Speaker
It's very important to be ministering to the felt needs of the people. And so you've got your children's activities. You've also got work like Christians Against Poverty. We have a Listening Year service, which is basically for the community that they can come in and receive some pastoral counseling. And we offer prayer as well.
00:11:14
Speaker
And so you have these some bridges or stepping stones with the community. And I think that I think I think how people end up on Alpha is probably friendship and people inviting their friends. But if people have heard about the church and the church is involved in the community, it does. It's not such a big thing for them to come along. So I mean, that's that's basically the I don't know if that answers the question.
00:11:43
Speaker
Yeah, I think it does. Can I wind back and ask you a question about something you mentioned in one of your earlier answers? You talked about evangelism not being just for, I guess, professionals, just for people who are qualified in it or trained in it or ordained into it. You talked about equipping ordinary church members like me to share the gospel. How have you gone about that and not made evangelism just something that you do, but encouraged and equipped and prepared ordinary folks to do as well? How have you gone about that in your ministry?
00:12:13
Speaker
Well, I think it all just comes back to relationship and, you know, Jesus and the women at the well, the way that they had that conversation, just encouraging people to, how would you talk to your friend? And it's always a conversation where there's questions and toing and throwing back. And it's not having your prepared answers that you have to actually deliver and realizing there's a conversation.
00:12:43
Speaker
It's a long-term commitment. I mean, any idea that in evangelism, we're just saying, okay, we're going to spend some time with people in order that they become Christians. If you love people, you will continue to be in contact with them. I'm in contact with someone just now that I met with last week and was asking me questions about the book of Job and the character of God. This person has hardly
00:13:14
Speaker
hardly ever come to church. He had a season where he was coming quite consistently, but it was only really a six month period. I've been in touch with him for about three or four years. And I thought he was a Christian and maybe he is, I don't know. But basically I'm discipling him and he's now wanting to understand questions that many Christians don't ask. And so we're going through, you know, what are the scriptures and what is the character of God and evil and suffering and all of that.
00:13:44
Speaker
But it's very much from a, what does the Bible say? Because he's now been meeting with someone studying the Bible for three, four years. And that relationship between, when does discipleship begin? And with some people, you know, you're actually just introducing them to more and more of Christ and say, well, would you like to learn how to pray? Would you like to discuss how we should live our lives?
00:14:14
Speaker
And yet they may or may not be born again. But at some point, the questions on Alpha run out. And you've got to move on to other stuff. I'm very interested at the moment. We're going through the Apostles Creed as an evening teaching series, but also there's people coming there that are not yet saved. And the Apostles Creed was used by the early church over a three year period of catechesis. So it took them three years to go through that as a discipleship course.
00:14:44
Speaker
And I think for some people that have come to faith in our church, it's actually been three years after they've done Alpha.
Motivation & Empowerment in Evangelism
00:14:51
Speaker
And that's profoundly changing the way I think about evangelism. Because, you know, we get one or two people that, for example, at the beginning of lockdown, when we were preaching very directly on the fragility of life and mortality and eternity, there was a few people that phoned
00:15:12
Speaker
phoned me and contacted me and said they wanted to recommit their lives to Christ, even though they hadn't been attending church for many years. But that is not a common experience for me. The common experience for me is people showing an interest, feeling loved, welcomed and accepted, even though they still have doubts. And then you continue to walk with them. And it means that I involve other people, obviously,
00:15:42
Speaker
And every term I'm trying to introduce another person in our church and saying, come along, experience this. And then they get a real excitement and say, you know, this is actually not this is something I can do. This is not just something the pastor does.
00:15:59
Speaker
Well on that very note, that's a good transition into the next question I wanted to ask. You've talked a lot about what you've done, how God has led you in this, what the church has been doing. But obviously the other side of that is how you then encourage and equip those who are in the church to pick up and run with this too. Because obviously in churches we don't just want the pastor to be doing
00:16:20
Speaker
evangelism. We want those in the pews who are followers of Christ to go, yeah, I can do this too. I can get my hands onto this. How have you found some of the ways that have been effective in the churches that you've led to really get the congregation excited and empowered for evangelism? We described there sort of introducing them to what you're doing. Are there other ways that you found work really well? Yeah, so I would say that the vision of the church has got to be whole life, whole life discipleship.
00:16:48
Speaker
And that's where people spend most of the time is the arena in which they are to live for Christ, but also to be a witness for Christ and somehow to bring into the teaching every week. I won't say that we do that, but in reality, but as an aim that you're actually trying to, it's almost like a halftime team talk. You know, people come to church on a Sunday and then they go out for the next part of the adventure.
00:17:17
Speaker
and that they're receiving some equipping to be able to speak to the friends. And that might be just picking up on evangelistic sort of type stuff. So for example, the book of Daniel, you know, when he gets the really tough question from Nebuchadnezzar, he goes back, he prays with three friends. And then you ask people, you know, are you praying with people about your boss? Are you actually, you know, people praying for you as you go into that workplace every day?
00:17:47
Speaker
And so you've got that regular teaching, but also the conversational occasionally bringing a bit of story and get people to share. You know, in our evening service at the moment, I've got people sharing and we had a, you know, someone who was just, you know, he's a postman and he talks about how he meets people as he goes from door to door and he gets lots of opportunities to talk to people. And you're just encouraging people to share
00:18:16
Speaker
you know, where they have their opportunities. We'd like to do more of that. I would say that we need to do more of that as a church, but I was getting people to share their stories and what has gone well. And that's obviously in small groups. It's an ideal place for that to happen. The other thing that we do is when I'm leading an alpha course, I always try and bring a new leader in on every single course. And then normally someone who hasn't done it before, and then they end up leading the group.
00:18:47
Speaker
And then they get experience of the stuff that I find second nature almost. They then say, well, this is, this is something that I can do. And then they can go on and lead a follow-up group or maybe even do their own off. Cause one of the best phone calls I ever received was the people phoned me and they said, we've got this alpha day away and we don't want you to come. And I was a bit kind of miffed cause I obviously wanted to come and I really enjoy being
Personal Stories & Challenges in Ministry
00:19:16
Speaker
there.
00:19:16
Speaker
I said, why is that? And he says, because we want to lead them to faith. We want to do the prayer. And I said, OK, go for it. And they run the whole Saturday. And I think I think. That's the challenge for me is to be able to to just say, you know, you run with it, you do it. And and I think that's that's an ideal model, which we see in the in the gospels, where Jesus sends them out, doesn't he?
00:19:46
Speaker
and they learn through their mistakes and they come back and they get a bit more teaching and then they do it again. That's fantastic. Last question then, I think. You've been doing this for decades. What is it about the Gospel of Christ that keeps you excited and keeps you motivated to work with people for three years and do it year in, year out? What is it that keeps you fired up in evangelism? Well, if you'd asked me that question many years ago, I would have probably said the reality of eternity.
00:20:16
Speaker
And that we're only here for a short time. And then we know that there's this time. We know that not everyone will come into a living relationship with Jesus, but we know the stakes are really high. And so a concern for people in a lost eternity would be the number one reason. And the second reason is just an overflow. It's an overflow of
00:20:46
Speaker
because you want to share it just flows out from your life. And I just, I think a life or a church that's not outflowing, there's something wrong. And I don't actually think about why would I want to do it? It's actually just something that is natural. And I think that's the case for most Christians. Maybe they have a confidence problem.
00:21:12
Speaker
But and all of us, you know, have have have a journey on that, don't we? But but I think that the reality is is that we desperately have something incredibly valuable to share. And we'd want we'd want people to experience what we want. I had an experience, just a really difficult experience two weeks ago, where I took the funeral of my best man rather than I was I was his best man and his wife.
00:21:43
Speaker
passed away at the age of 49. And I went to that funeral and there was basically, I think almost everybody there was non-Christian. And there was a walled funeral in the cemetery. It had this wall round it and people were still attending outside the wall, socially distanced. And that morning when I prayed for guidance, I felt that God was saying to me,
00:22:10
Speaker
you know, remember the people outside the wall. And it was almost like a powerful word to me that Jesus said, you know, there are people outside of the sheepfold that still have to come in. And then Jesus himself died outside the walls of Jerusalem. And so in evangelism, we need to, as Hebrews says, we need to be prepared to go outside the camp and to bear the disgrace or bear the shame
00:22:36
Speaker
of being a follower of Jesus. And when you're actually taking the funeral of one of your closest friend's wife, you know, talk about fear of getting the words wrong, fear of saying the wrong thing, fear of the relationship being hurt. But thankfully, they all said that it had been a really beautiful funeral and it had been really comforting.
Conclusion & Encouragement
00:22:58
Speaker
And I think when you love someone, you take the time to get the words right.
00:23:05
Speaker
even though, you know, so I think that's just one example of just how it just flows out of your friendship and your relationships.
00:23:16
Speaker
Alastair, we're really grateful that you've taken the time to chat with us today. This has been so helpful. So much stuff in there, I think, both in terms of advice that those who are church leaders can take away, but also just people who've got a real passion to reach their friends and their neighbours and a story at the end. Very powerful, too. So thank you so much. It's been great to have you on the show today. And blessings on what you're doing up there in Inverness. Yes, indeed. Thank you. All the stuff that Solas is doing and
00:23:45
Speaker
I'm learning so much from you. Keep up the good work. Oh, that's very kind of you. Well, thank you to everyone listening at home. And I hope you can join us for the next episode of PEP talk in two weeks time. Have a great day.