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00:00:01
With Stephen McQuoid
121 Plays2 years ago
Looking at the state of the church in the UK today, it can be quite discouraging. Although there are areas of growth and dynamism, there can be quite challenging situations in rural areas or even cities with disconnected communities. What are some effective strategies for sharing the gospel and developing healthy churches in these "spiritual deserts"?
Stephen McQuoid spent the first twelve years of his life in Ethiopia where his parents were missionaries. He then lived in Ireland where he qualified as a nurse before going on to study theology. He was the Principal of Tilsley College for ten years, and is currently the General Director of GLO Europe where he has overall responsibility for the running of the organisation. Stephen is married to Debbie and they have three children. Stephen has a preaching ministry that takes him throughout the UK and abroad and is the author of several books. He has a passion for evangelism and mission and helping churches to reach out relevantly to their community.
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Transcript
Introduction and Host Change
00:00:10
Speaker
Well, hello and welcome to another exciting edition of PEPTALK, the persuasive evangelism podcast. I'm Andy Bannister from Solas and I'm joined well, again, not by my usual articulate and celebrated co-host, Christy Mayer, who is off doing something exciting and Anglican somewhere. Instead, I'm joined by one of my right-hand guys from Solas. I'm joined by
00:00:36
Speaker
Gavin Matthews. Gavin, welcome to the co-pilot seat.
00:00:41
Speaker
I'm neither celebrated nor articulate, but we'll do our best to fill in for Christie. Well, if listeners at home could see the set of headphones, we could get for glamorous, because that's quite the look. You've got going on with those.
Meet Stephen McCoy
00:00:52
Speaker
But Gavin, who have we got on the show today? Well, I'm delighted that we're being joined by a good friend of Solas, coming to us from Motherwell, just on the south side of Glasgow. It's Stephen McCoy, and I'm going to introduce you, Stephen, in a second. Stephen, welcome.
00:01:07
Speaker
Thank you. Good to be here. Nice to see you guys.
Stephen's Ethiopian Roots and Glow Europe
00:01:09
Speaker
I read in your little biography that you sent through that you were born in Ethiopia, but that's really not an Ethiopian accent that you're going to charm us with this afternoon. Tell us where you have come from and all of that. No, it's not. And actually, strictly speaking, I was born in Chester, but it's linked with Ethiopia. I grew up in Ethiopia.
00:01:27
Speaker
And where my parents lived, they had no medical care nearby. So they came back to the UK for about six weeks to have me. And I had an uncle at the time who lived in Chester. So we stayed there. I was birthed. And then back out to Ethiopia for my first 13 years of life. The rest is Ireland. Now you're in Motherwell. And you are leading an organization called Glow Europe. Just tell us very briefly what that is for people that are unaware of who you work for.
00:01:58
Speaker
Glow Europe is an evangelism organization. Our heart is for Europe. So we have about 80 or so missionaries, mission partners across Europe.
00:02:07
Speaker
mostly during church planting or general evangelism. And then here in Malibu, we've got our training center, our admin center. And our whole vision is to raise up people, to equip them, to show the good news and send them out there and support them while they are there. But we're not a controlling organization in that sense. If you find the right people with a heart for the gospel, release them and they'll do the job.
Christian Identity in the UK: Challenges and Growth?
00:02:30
Speaker
in your role within the organisation, apart from the purveyor of very colourful shirts for which you are rightly famous. What is your job title? General director of the job title really look at the whole organisation, our different departments, trying to make sure they all blend and work together, but also trying to have a focus on where the gospel is needed and how we get out there and proclaim it.
00:02:51
Speaker
It's kind of wide briefly. Yeah. So picking up that idea there, Stephen, of where the gospel is needed. One of the things, you know, that I think your role sort of brings is you give me the sense of someone who's got your finger on the pulse of what's going on in a bit sort of wider context through the college and the other kind of writing and work that you do.
00:03:14
Speaker
we had not that long ago, the new UK census came out, you know, showing that sort of church going people identifying as Christians a bit lower than it has been in the past. I know some Christians read that kind of stuff and get all doomy and gloomy and it's all depressing and the future is secular and it's all it's all disaster. I don't get the sense you don't strike me as someone who is
00:03:35
Speaker
who is a pessimist, you're someone who's sitting there sort of going, oh, it's just a disaster. What is going on? What do you, what are the things that give you perhaps cause for concern? What are the things that give you cause for optimism, feeling positive in terms of what's going on in the wider church and Christians kind of reaching out into culture? Really easy
00:03:54
Speaker
small question for you to get your teeth into. Well it's not really concerns first of all I mean given my context Ethiopia where I grew up but when I was a kid there were probably about half a million believers in the country they're now 18 million which is more than all of Europe put together
00:04:09
Speaker
So Europe and the UK, this is the bit where Christianity is not working well. It's flourishing everywhere, much less so here. So that is a concern. It is a small concern that people who identify as Christians is lessening. And I say small because while it's true data, lots of those folk weren't going to church. They didn't have any real relation with Jesus anyway.
00:04:35
Speaker
So all we're seeing, I think, in the big picture is more nominal of Christians for whom faith didn't mean very much.
Small Churches Making a Difference
00:04:45
Speaker
Now saying, I couldn't be bothered. But they weren't bothered in the first place. Anyway, I don't think. But that is a cause for concern. And evangelicalism, which is the real core, I would say, there are some concerns there over the last maybe 10, 15 years.
00:05:02
Speaker
I think our lower numbers have been maintained because of immigration. Without immigration, I think Evangelicalism itself would be struggling, if I'm being honest about that. But there's also a lot to be positive about. I think that true Christians are doing a fantastic job across the country.
00:05:23
Speaker
I go to large churches and small. Some of the small churches I come across, they're not big in number. They are really big in heart, really big in desire, doing some phenomenal things. And they're also quite encouraged. I was in a church not long ago.
00:05:41
Speaker
about 30 folk in the church, but they're determined to reach out. They're doing lots of good stuff, and they have huge credibility in their area. And even just this past Sunday, I was speaking at a church down in Ayrshire. It's in a small regional town. You could drive through the town in literally 45 seconds.
00:06:03
Speaker
but their afternoon service had maybe a hundred at it, great spread of ages. And again, a real heart for the community, relevant in their presentation of the gospel. Everybody knows them, their impact in the schools as well as all other facets of the local community. And on a Sunday morning, they are packed out and about a third of those folk who come along on a Sunday morning aren't Christians at all.
00:06:30
Speaker
So there is good stuff happening where there is genuine and enthusiastic Christian faith. I think there's growth, whether those churches be very small or large.
Rural and Suburban Church Challenges
00:06:41
Speaker
So there's good stuff as well as the not so good stuff. I'm from speaking to you in Mother World a few weeks ago that it's not an even picture across the UK, is it? There are some places where you can't move for gospel churches, but other places you've identified in the UK where there are some huge spaces and nothing going on at all.
00:07:00
Speaker
What's gone wrong and what can we do about those places? My concern, I suppose, really, is that when we think about mission, people tend to think of two things. You can either dig deep where you live or go abroad, but you are identifying whole places in the UK where there is nothing going on church-wise. So tell us about that situation and how we should respond and what you're doing about it as well.
00:07:21
Speaker
Well, first of all, obviously, in some of the more desperate places, it's not always that there's nothing going on, but there might be nothing effective going on. I was in a town which will remain nameless for obvious reasons, but I drove past a couple of churches that are evangelical. They're Bible-believing Christians, but they're very, very small, very elderly, and their methods of doing evangelism.
00:07:47
Speaker
are at least 60s to 70 years out of date. So while they have a heart, they don't have effectiveness. So that kind of a town does need church planting, because what's there isn't working. What's gone wrong, I think it's a number of things, to be honest. Some of it is just practical people migrating. For example, my perception is that in the southern parts of England,
00:08:16
Speaker
there are more strong, viable churches in northern England. Part of that is economic migration and Christians moving to places like London, Bristol, Birmingham, Nottingham, where there are jobs. And they take their faith with them and do a fantastic job there. So you go to Bristol, full of churches, Nottingham, full of churches. London is exploding with churches.
00:08:41
Speaker
But some of the northern towns are pretty devoid. And I would say the same in Scotland. Some of the big cities have strong, vibrant churches. You go out to some regional towns and country areas, not many really strong churches, and therefore an overall weaker witness. So that's part of the issue. But a big part of the issue as well is just no longer being relevant. I think sometimes Christians are tempted
00:09:11
Speaker
to withdraw into themselves to maintain their purity, which of course is a biblical thing, we're called to be holy. But sometimes we think that our call to be holy means we don't have anything to do with people outside the church walls. And therefore we also confine our evangelism to us in our church walls where it's safe, where we can control the conversations. And folk just don't come to church any longer. So as you said, there are real black spots.
00:09:40
Speaker
There are cities and towns in the UK where maybe in the town center there are some stronger churches and folk will come in from the suburbs to be in church there. You get out to some of the big housing estates.
00:09:53
Speaker
not a lot happening. And it wouldn't be unusual for somebody who lives in a big housing estate on the edge of a city like Newcastle, for example, to go in and meet in fellowship with a big church in the centre of Newcastle. It doesn't work the other way out. And so you have large housing areas where there's almost nothing happening and no outreach going out there either.
00:10:18
Speaker
The attractional model might pull people to central location, but it's that location is, for example, the center of the city. But large ways of the population don't live there. The attractional model doesn't even begin to touch them. So we need to really think about that. And you might have strong viable tutors, not far away. But not far away isn't good enough, particularly if you're, for example, a working class person.
00:10:43
Speaker
who might not have access to a car. Public transport is rubbish on a Sunday in lots of places. Even the practicality of getting to church doesn't make any sense.
Reaching Rural Communities
00:10:54
Speaker
So we need to rethink all of that and look at areas where there's either nothing or there's very little viable happening and try to re-reach them again, re-evandalise, I think, big parts of Britain.
00:11:07
Speaker
Yeah. Do you know, it's interesting the way you answered that, Stephen. I hadn't made that connection between actually there are some things in common with rural settings and with very urban settings, depending on those urban settings in terms of where there is activity, where there's a desert of Christians. But let's talk about the rural bit just for a moment, because that's something I don't think we talk enough
00:11:32
Speaker
about, you know, we can get obsessed with cities, can't we? But I think 55% of the population of the country doesn't live in a city, and it's getting close to 5050, but there's a huge number of people living in more rural settings. What have you seen as some of the ways that we can begin making differences there reaching rural communities? Because obviously, the answer is not to go right.
00:11:50
Speaker
Let's go for the rural places that are middle class and get more bust into the game to drive into the cities. That's an answer. People need good local Christian
Evangelism Through Major Events
00:11:58
Speaker
witness where they are. So how do we begin perhaps making inroads in some of those those more rural locations? We can talk about the housing developments kind of separately, but the rural thing I'd love your your thoughts on.
00:12:08
Speaker
Yeah, I think there are times we just need to be a bit creative and think out of the box. If I can give you an actual example from the Welsh valleys, my wife is Welsh, and one of the most unreached areas are the South Wales valleys. Now, given the Cardiff and Swansea,
00:12:26
Speaker
not far away if you've got a car, or have very vibrant and strong churches. The valleys have been up until very, very recently, a spiritual desert, even though they were the land of revival. If you go back 100 years, you've got lots of empty chapels now. They're either pubs or warehouses or whatever. And there has been, of late, some church planting taking place. But because it's small, they'll be scattered about.
00:12:54
Speaker
They use a network model where you might have in a slightly larger town an established church. When I say established, it could be a church of 50 people, but that's for a Welsh Valley's context, a really established, strong, almost virgin and mega church for the Welsh Valleys.
00:13:15
Speaker
churches like that have begun, say, a house group in a village. And the house group might literally be that, a meeting house, half a dozen people, half a dozen Christians. And the mother church is empowering them just to reach out to their neighbors, to bring neighbors in for events that they do from the home. And by doing that, you can begin to reach out to the local community. It has to be local.
00:13:40
Speaker
Any small rural area will be quite locally focused inevitably. And you have all the prejudices that you have of big towns or cities or whatever. So doing stuff locally, having a presence there and sustaining it by a bigger church.
00:14:00
Speaker
And it may well be that house group might never become a church or it could become a satellite church. You don't need to have a huge group of folk to be a church. You can have a church of 15 people. That's viable, provided you've got a strong local leader in that place to make it happen and the support of Christians elsewhere. And they might not be very far away. But that kind of model, I think, is really working well. So it provides the local witness and fellowship.
00:14:31
Speaker
But also the support mechanism of a slightly larger and more established church. I think that model could be spread out. Again, go back to the North East that I mentioned earlier on. If you take your pencil on a map and draw from Newcastle up to say Edinburgh, you're going to pass right through Northumbria and then into the
00:14:53
Speaker
the southern Scottish counties. It's all rural. And then if you try to look for an evangelical church in those areas, you will find very few. There are huge swears that kind of like that that we just need to reimagine and reach out to. The other end of the spectrum, I know one of the bits of work that you do that you're really enthusiastic about is when there's a major world event going on. So when the world comes to a city, whether it's the Commonwealth Games or the Olympics or COP26 in Glasgow, and you send teams,
00:15:23
Speaker
to share the gospel when the world is descending on a particular location. Tell us something about how you've gone about doing that, maybe some of the conversations you've had. And is that a viable, fruitful way of doing evangelism? And if so, how can other folks get involved in that kind of work next time a big event is going on somewhere in Europe?
00:15:40
Speaker
It's really viable and I would say very fruitful. The most recent team I did of that nature was last summer at the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham. We took a team there. There's a church that actually has sent out one of our mission couples who are working in France. We base ourselves in the church, not far from the city centre. And what we did honestly was really, really simple stuff.
00:16:05
Speaker
I wrote a tract. Bespoke literature, I think, is really, really useful. So I wrote a tract, and we spent most of our time just in the busy areas where lots of people were, giving out tracts, having conversations with people, offering to pray with people. There was no preaching per se allowed. And also interacting with the other groups, because, of course, at these events, you have other religious groups, too. So we met loads of Muslims who were there doing evangelism.
00:16:35
Speaker
We met Sikhs, we met Hindus, we met a group of Hare Kṛṣṇas, loads of JWs all doing their evangelism. So that's also folk you interact with and talk to. And you just need to have one little idea that you requested. The idea I had for that one was
00:16:52
Speaker
We've had all this self-ID legislation going around. And of course Birmingham itself is a very multicultural city. So I thought I'd just go around with a camera. Our glow media guy was with us. So we were filming all of this and asking, can we interview them on camera? Ask them just general questions. My first question always was, what is a woman?
00:17:13
Speaker
which is a somewhat punchy question given our current situation. And then can we self-identify, can we change gender?
00:17:24
Speaker
What do you think of gay marriage? Not that I'm picking those particular issues as such, but that was a current issue. We're dealing with a multicultural city. And I was actually hoping to find a few woke people who could make good film. We found very few woke people at all. Most of the religious folk that we find, they were either Muslims or they were folk from the black community who were Christian. They were the opposite. They were
00:17:53
Speaker
religious, socially conservative, concerned for their kids, very happy to talk. So doing stuff on film led to great, great conversations. And even folk that we did find who
00:18:07
Speaker
We're more of an open mentality and wanted to say, we believe in self-id, we believe everyone has a room at the table. That opens up permission for a conversation. And all you're doing is talking to people. Now, the fact that there's a camera there, they actually, after a while, forget about the camera and they just talk. And it's a great way of just being open, being honest, and then sharing the scripture with them.
00:18:31
Speaker
to talk into focus. It's never changed since the first century. You want to do a vandalism, you just talk to people. And if you're friendly, if you smile, if you're approachable, have a bit of a laugh with them. It just...
00:18:45
Speaker
breaks down barriers. And yeah, these events are great. And you meet people that you would never normally meet. There's one lady I spoke to actually when I was giving out these tracks and I had a busker. One of my team was a busker. So he was playing away. And a lady came up with two young kids and she had a burka. And surprisingly, she took the track off me and asked me what it was about. And I said, it was really about Jesus. But I want to talk to you about your life and what your belief system is. And her name was Halima.
00:19:16
Speaker
And I asked her about herself. To cut a long story short, she was born in Saudi Arabia, migrant parents. She then went back to Somalia where she's from, fled Somalia because of the danger. She's now living in Norway with her family. They escaped to Norway. And I said, are you here in Birmingham for the game? She said, no, I've got family in Birmingham.
00:19:36
Speaker
there are these connections all across the world. And she had never, as far as I know, met a Christian before. We had a brilliant conversation together. That kind of thing can happen at these major events that wouldn't happen normally in other contexts.
Cultural Engagement in Evangelism
00:19:54
Speaker
The other thing I like about that story, maybe this is a final kind of sort of thing to explore in the last question, because I'm conscious we're sort of, you know, rapidly coming up to 20 minutes, but we can go over slightly. So, the way that you asked, you talked about those questions that you asked, Steven, you know, the sexuality stuff, the identity stuff, we often run away, I think to one or two things happens, either as Christians, we run away from those issues.
00:20:18
Speaker
And we say we say we say nothing for fear of offending anybody or Christians kind of, you know, like a bull in a china shop, they go charging in, you know, sort of culture warring and there's mess and blood and guts everywhere. What I like about what you describe is you were basically having a conversation, not not ducking the difficult questions, but then talking about Jesus.
00:20:37
Speaker
through them. So talk to us a bit more about that. How as Christians can we use some of these big issues in culture, not as things to compromise on or things to be afraid of, but as ways to open up deeper conversations?
00:20:51
Speaker
Well, I just think all these things have a real resonance. I've had conversations this week, by the way, about Kate Forbes here in Scotland because, of course, she's been standing for the SNP leadership and has been panned in the media. So I've just been asking folk, including my neighbour, who's a lapsed Buddhist. He's half Chinese, half German, but lives next door to me in New York Hill.
00:21:17
Speaker
We play chess together. And last Friday when we were playing a game of chess, he said to me, because he knows I'm a Christian, he said, that led to Kate Forbes. It's totally unfair the way they're treating her. So I asked him why he thinks it's unfair. That led to a good conversation. These issues are pertinent in society.
00:21:38
Speaker
I actually think we make a bigger deal of them by avoiding the issue. And I think if you smile, if you have a warmth, that makes a massive difference. If you're non-judgmental, because we're not here to judge people, we're here to introduce people to our friend Jesus. Our tone has to be non-judgmental, but how we approach the conversation is what warms people's hearts. And I don't think there are no go areas, none at all.
00:22:06
Speaker
We just need to do so carefully and not come across as mean, scolding, unpleasant people. A smile is just key. It's absolutely key. Your tone of voice, your friendliness, that'll melt people's hearts. And if you just go from there and keep it conversational, I think that's what you do. Just take whatever's in your local newspaper, use that as a basis for a conversation, and it opens people up.
00:22:37
Speaker
Lots of fantastic piece of advice to bring this to a close on. So much in that last 20 minutes. Stephen, thank you so much for taking
Conclusion and Future Episodes
00:22:48
Speaker
the time. It's been a real pleasure to have you on the podcast and lots of stuff in there. And we'll put a link in the show notes to glow and the kind of stuff you're doing over there. So if you want to follow that up, you can click through and find out what's going on.
00:23:01
Speaker
But I'll be back in two weeks time with another episode of Pep Talk, whether it will be Gavin in the co-pilot seat or Christie. But I hope you'll be able to join us. And remember, if you love Pep Talk, if you enjoy it, please don't forget to subscribe. Do leave us a review on wherever you get your podcasts from. And do tell friends about the show because we'd love to keep on growing and what we're doing. Anyway, thanks for listening and we'll see you again soon. Bye for now.