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With Andrew Roycroft
153 Plays3 years ago
Today on PEP Talk we explore the changing relationship of culture and Christianity, with a look into the example of Northern Ireland. How do we adapt as Christians and churches to be authentic salt and light whether we are a cultural majority or marginalised minority? Andy and Kristi speak to a pastor, author and poet for some great thoughts on reaching out.
Andrew Roycroft recently became pastor at Portadown Baptist Church, before that he served 10 years at Millisle Baptist Church. He is married to Caroline with two children. Read his blog on theology, poetry and literature at thinkingpastorally.com He is also the author of Kristi's favourite exam survival guide.
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Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast
00:00:09
Speaker
Well, hello once again and welcome to another episode of pep talk, the persuasive evangelism podcast. I am Andy Bannister from the solar center, the public Christianity based in Scotland. And I am joined as ever by my wonderful effervescent, energetic, co-host, Christy Mayer, all the way from the other end of the country down in London. Christy, how are you doing today? Hello, Andy. Gosh, I think we need to find a new adjective.
00:00:36
Speaker
Thank you. Yeah, doing well. Well, you know, Christy, I'm excited because we have not, you know, there's been a rugby going on recently. Well, we don't have a, we don't have a Four Nations podcast. We have a Three Nations podcast because
Guest Introduction: Andrew Roycroft
00:00:50
Speaker
I'm in Scotland. You're in England. And we are joined today all the way from Northern Ireland by Andrew Roycroft, who is pastor at Porterdown Baptist Church. Andrew, welcome. Welcome to the madness that is pep talk. Thanks, Andy. Hi, Christy. Nice to be with you, Paul.
00:01:05
Speaker
Well, it's really great to have you on the show, Andrew. So before we dig into today's kind of topic and talk a bit about evangelism, particularly in your Northern Ireland context, but more generally in the kind of cultural moment we are now, tell people a bit about
Life in Portadown and Missionary Work
00:01:21
Speaker
yourself. What's it like? What do you get up to? What's it like kind of pastoring where you are?
00:01:26
Speaker
Yeah, so, well I'm living Porta Down, the town of Porta Down where the church is. I'm married to Carlin and we've got two daughters, one of whom's a teenager now and the other one's not quite there yet. Yeah, we moved to Porta Down in April time. We had served before in Malayal Bap to stop on the east coast of Northern Ireland.
00:01:47
Speaker
And prior to that had been in Peru for a bit for missionary work and then in another church inland here in Armagh. So yeah, Port of Down Baptist is almost 100 years old. It'll be 100 years old next year. Fairly large congregation and warm friendly group situated here in Middlester, which is often seen as the Bible Belt of Northern Ireland. There'll be a high concentration of evangelical churches in this area.
00:02:16
Speaker
And it's not an area we're all familiar with. We've served here before. Port of Down itself is a town of about 22,000 people there and thereabouts. And the cultural identity of the town has changed quite a bit over the years during the troubles that have been a lot of real focal point for some of the troubles. That's changed quite a bit in terms of there's been a lot of people come from other countries and other cultures for work, which has really changed the complexion of the whole town.
00:02:45
Speaker
Yeah, Andrew, you were mentioning before we started recording just some of the cultural context in which you're serving that you're saying that to begin with, there was quite a bit of social sympathy for Christians, but that just seems to have changed recently. I'd love to hear more about that, like what has changed and why do you think that's happened?
Cultural Shifts in Northern Ireland
00:03:05
Speaker
I think Northern Ireland for years is very much seen as a fertile territory for the gospel, lots and lots of churches, lots and lots of cultural Christians, and a high degree of social sympathy for the gospel here, quite a bit of sponsorship from local authorities, that kind of stuff.
00:03:25
Speaker
That's been sort of winding down quite a bit over the past number of years. I think several cultural factors have affected that. Some of our sad history in terms of the troubles had an insulating effect on the country. So nobody was coming here at that stage and many people were leaving. So there was tended to be polarized communities who were hermetically sealed really from outside influences in the world with the happy cessation of all that, I think.
00:03:53
Speaker
there has been greater openness to other cultures, other ideas, which is tremendous and enriching for the community and for society. But I think that combined with mass media, combined with greater room to think and become perhaps more secularized and less entrenched in old cultural identities that were along with political divide, have all fed into that degree of more complexity in the culture now, and certainly a really rising secularism at quite a fast rate.
00:04:22
Speaker
those things I think have all come together to change the the context that we're in Christa.
Challenges and Opportunities for Evangelism
00:04:28
Speaker
It occurs to me, Andrew I'd love your kind of sort of take on this that there's both a sort of challenge and opportunity there you know the challenge
00:04:39
Speaker
I've talked to some Northern Ireland friends who said that suddenly Christians are having to wake up and discover things like apologetics and be able to give a reason. On the other hand, of course, when you have a Christian subculture, everyone just assumes faith. You can get a lot of cultural Christianity going on that can cause all kinds of issues in itself. Do you see this as a challenge, as an opportunity, or a bit of both as the culture is changing?
00:05:06
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's a bit of both. I think some doors will close that have been very wide open for the gospel over the years. So our influence in schools, for instance, in terms of opportunities to share the gospel has been really great. And lots and lots of room for Christian principals, Christian teachers to have pretty free expression for their faith in that context.
00:05:26
Speaker
The negative, I think, will be that as things become increasingly secularized, those opportunities might close a little bit and the gap might widen between societal structures and church and evangelism opportunities. I think overall it could be a good thing because we have very little experience here of the subversive nature of the gospel or the blessing of being a minority voice, which can critique aspects of the culture, perhaps when we enjoy that social sympathy.
00:05:54
Speaker
It allowed for quiet compromise with certain parts of our culture, whereas now those two things are splitting. I think it's possibly a good thing.
Public Policy and Christian Messages
00:06:04
Speaker
It was interesting over the weekend, there was a story came up in the news about there's a harbour wall in Port Stewart, which would be one of our main tourist attractions, and for years it has said eternity where and then a Bible verse.
00:06:17
Speaker
There were a lot of people sharing the news story over the weekend that the council were going to withdraw the right to have those words on the wall because it didn't comply with equality. Now it's council property. And I noticed lots of friends here saw this as sort of a harbinger of the end times or the beginning of persecution. And I guess the question I've been trying to push back with them on is should we ever have expected that the council would give us their space to give our message in this culture?
00:06:43
Speaker
And perhaps this is a good wake-up call to see that things are not what they were 40, 50 years ago. And perhaps when they were that way 40, 50 years ago, that wasn't necessarily a brilliant thing for reaching out or being distinctive from the culture or being salt and light. What do you think, Andrew, it looks like to adjust to this shift in climate, like practically?
Evolving Church Evangelism Strategies
00:07:05
Speaker
What kind of things are you kind of preparing for or doing already?
00:07:10
Speaker
I think there's been a context here of almost an Old Testament model of evangelism in our churches, which is come and see, come to our church, come to our programs, come to our services. That still exists quite a bit. I'd say probably the surprising degree for folks here outside of the Northern Island context.
00:07:30
Speaker
I think that will have to change and will be forced to go and tell, will be forced to get out into our community. To demonstrate the love of Christ as well as declaring the love of Christ, those are things that perhaps there's been too easy a pass on over the years and I think we're going to have to really rethink
00:07:51
Speaker
know, events evangelism, there's lots of room left here and we still do events evangelism which is brilliant but I do think the distinctive thing now will be preparing people to witness in the spaces they're in and encouraging the church to get mobilized and get out and think of creative and imaginative ways to reach the community. Obviously I think one of the
00:08:12
Speaker
One of the huge opportunities for that reaching out is the workplace.
Integrating Faith and Work
00:08:17
Speaker
I often think we've got this almost untapped missionary sort of force in some ways as the church of men and women who are in all these different places, but sometimes I think don't speak up about their faith because they're a bit nervous and afraid. I know we were chatting before the show began that helping young
00:08:33
Speaker
professionals make connections from their work and their faith and they feel more confident is a thing that's on your heart. How some of that played out for you? What have you found has worked? How some of the ways that you as a church have tried to equip the men and women in your church who are in the workplace Monday through Friday to be salt and light given that changing culture we just talked about? I think we're trying to think through at the moment ways that we do that implicitly and ways that we do that explicitly, I think.
00:09:00
Speaker
So I guess implicit stuff is just integrating it into the normal life and the normal ministry of the church. So I guess growing up for me, if someone was challenged about opportunities to serve Christ from the pulpit, you know, someone was preaching on that theme, very often that was channeling human resource into the departments of the church to encourage people to be children's workers or, you know, involving the men's of the women's work.
00:09:23
Speaker
I think we communicate something in our preaching if we begin to really make that application vivid and real for where people are in the workplace. So I think there's a certain injection of apologetic material that can go into our preaching that's self-consciously saying, if someone asks you about this when you're in the office tomorrow, you can talk about it in this way. Here's some tools to think this through clearly. So for instance, in Sunday past, we were looking at slaves and masters in Ephesians 6 as a part of a series in Ephesians.
00:09:53
Speaker
And we tried to develop two applications. One was, of course, the kind of diagonal line, which is how do you relate to your workplace if either you're under authority or have authority?
00:10:04
Speaker
But the secondary strand of application we're putting in place was, what if someone says to you in work that Christianity propped up slavery and endorses slavery? And trying to listen to how they could think that text through. So I guess that's the implicit stuff, just building it in and getting people accustomed to, when we talk about application, it's outside of these four walls that most of that happens. And then explicitly, I would love to see us develop some programs here to really actually train Christians about sharing their faith in the workplace.
00:10:33
Speaker
We've got people here who are in key positions of leadership in the community. And maybe rather than, you know, doing a course about how to share faith with your employees, we'd be very keen to work on things like how to lead as a Christian. What are the Christian principles for leadership? And still that in them, because I think that will have an effect by osmosis, rather than by declaration in the workplace, if leaders are leading in gospel principles.
00:10:58
Speaker
That's really wonderful to hear, Andrew. It's such a thoughtful kind of response to the change in situation. A slight segue.
Literature and Faith
00:11:06
Speaker
You mentioned earlier on that you've just been really encouraged by the art scene and poetry. Can you tell us more about that? What's been going on? And we expect an answer that rhymes, by the way, or at least stands.
00:11:24
Speaker
Yeah, my background was literature, so I studied English at the post grad, so that's always been a passion of mine. I suppose the background that I came from, there was a radical divorce between literary interests and Christian interests.
00:11:42
Speaker
particularly Northern Ireland Protestantism with an obscene connection between its life and the arts. So when I came in the past to work, I probably didn't engage as much with that as I could have. But over the last 10 years or so for opportunities, I write a fair bit of poetry and would interact with the poetry of others. And there's a really
00:12:00
Speaker
warm scene here for poetry in Northern Ireland. There's a lot of people that have become, I think they're doing that nationwide now, aren't they? More people are plugged into poetry, performance poetry, all that kind of stuff over the last while. So there's quite a big community of people here who are interested in that. And fascinating, fascinating thing about it is we tend to think of the arts as being a very liberal area and it is, you know, there's a magnet for liberal thought.
00:12:26
Speaker
But I've also found that people want to hear a Christian voice in that context. So there's been loads of I could probably talk about this too much. So I don't I don't overload you with information about this. But yeah, just just writing poetry, you know, submitting it. I can talk about some instances of that if it's helpful and connecting with other people who are interested in poetry and finding really good opportunities just to be a Christian in that environment, which is not that not that normal, really.
00:12:53
Speaker
Yeah, well, actually, I'd love to hear you because I know when you and I met a few months ago, Andrew, we talked about something like that. I'd love to share a story or two, because I think what interests me particularly, obviously, poetry is a thing for you. But I think sometimes as Christians, we don't stop and think about what are our interests and our passions.
00:13:11
Speaker
you know, whether maybe it's rock climbing or maybe it's, you know, it's art or it's something else. And we sort of don't connect that to the gospel. What I love is that God's given you his passion for literature and you figured out, here's a way I can actually both do the thing that I love and I've been equipped to do, but also use that passion for the gospel. So by all means, tell us a bit more about, sort of share a story or two of how this has created space for conversations.
00:13:36
Speaker
Yeah, I think there's a number of things for me.
Poetry as a Medium for Engagement
00:13:41
Speaker
I think what you've talked about, Andy, is really helpful about passions and interests. And I think
00:13:46
Speaker
For me, it springs from a place of genuine and sustained passion for poetry and for literature. I think that's vital. You know, there's that meme they have of, if it's Steve Buscemi, you know, and he's got his cap on backwards and he's got a skateboard and it says, greetings, fellow kids. You know, sometimes I think in social circles, that's what we can look like, you know, that we commodify media so we go into poetry so that we can talk to people about the gospel.
00:14:14
Speaker
And our interest is synthetic, not organic, and it's forced. And we suffer from imposter syndrome because we know we don't have a hard interest in it. So poetry for me is just an area that from I was in my teens onwards, I've just read poetry and written poetry. So I think there's an unforced part of that. I think that there's just a natural attraction to writing and reading and hearing poetry.
00:14:41
Speaker
What I find is a great task for it is writing poetry and submitting it to certain journals or organizations here, which are secular. There's no past for being a Christian here. It's not looking for doggerel about Christian themes. It's looking at the world and trying to write poetry that's credible.
00:15:00
Speaker
And I've prayed a lot about that, that God would give me both, you know, the eye to see and the material to write and also then the opportunities to share. And there's been just such great opportunities. So I can think of that. Yeah. So there's a there's a project here in Northern Ireland called the Pottery Jukebox, which is slightly mad, really, but it's brilliant. So it's a it's a pottery collective have put together this machine. It looks like a ship's funnel sticking out of the ground, this large blue funnel.
00:15:29
Speaker
You probably have to use quite a bit of imagination to think what this is like, but they install these poetry jukeboxes in strategic places in Northern Ireland. So, for instance, in Belfast, it'd be on a city street. The idea is that people come along here out shopping here, not particularly interested in literature, and they press a button and the machine reads a poem to them.
00:15:47
Speaker
So they have a permanent installation in part of Belfast and then they move these around. So a couple of years ago, I think it was 2018 actually, they sent out like curations, like invites for submissions. And the one that they were doing was in C.S. Lewis Square in Belfast, which is just like an open net. And the curation was called The Deeper Country and it was
00:16:10
Speaker
writing on that theme. So I sent in some work that a guy in Nigeria, who was one of the judges and another local poet, my work was accepted for it. So then it was audio poetry. So that was tremendous because the theme that I wrote on was common places, you know, the kind of emotional points we had in life that suggest there's something deeper behind lived reality.
00:16:35
Speaker
So there's loads of opportunities. There was a public reading where it was able to engage with other poets. There's a piece in the Irish Times which would be sort of one of the main papers in Northern Ireland running about it, quoting some of the poetry, talking about C.S. Lewis, but also personal conversations with other poets. And there's one particular poet I was talking to and they said to me, you know, what do you do for a living? And I said, I'm a pastor, which was like a
00:17:00
Speaker
like dropping a bomb into the conversation, you know. But it immediately led to them telling me that they were an atheist and with a really good conversation. And then about, I suppose about seven or eight months ago, they contacted me and said, you know, there's a specific thing they're facing in life. And they said, I know you pray. And when you're praying, would you pray about these issues for me, please? Which just really
00:17:25
Speaker
you know, such a blessing that someone would come and ask that. But it was through a genuine shared interest in poetry. And I think part of that as well is promoting the work of poets who don't share your worldview. So I try to read very widely. And if there's something really good in those poetic works, highlight it, encourage it, show that there's appreciation there. And very often that it's not you're trying to open a door, but it automatically opens a door to talk about the gospel in your faith. Does that make sense? Yeah, it does. This is probably a
00:17:54
Speaker
This is probably a slightly odd question, but you're a pastor, you're used to odd
Authenticity in Evangelism
00:18:00
Speaker
questions, Andrew. Obviously, you figured out for poetry how to make this work, and I love the story of that conversation with an atheist friend. Is there anything from that that you can apply more widely? Because I'm intrigued that I really help people think through how can you connect
00:18:15
Speaker
interests and things. If somebody's got a different kind of interest or whatever, what are the first steps that you might take in connecting? For you it was poetry, for others it might be say sport or something. How might you go about trying to, you know, use that to open up connections for the gospel?
00:18:31
Speaker
Yeah, I think there's a few things. I think one is pursue authenticity. I've talked about that a wee bit already, genuine interest. You know, don't join the local rugby club to reach rugby players because you just want rugby players to be reached. But if you play rugby, go and play in your local club. So I think pursuing that authenticity.
00:18:50
Speaker
I think embodying integrity as well, you know, in the Christian subculture, we sometimes give one another quite an easy pass in what we do. So that's true of literature, you know, stuff that passes as Christian literature sometimes wouldn't pass as viable literature in other contexts. So I think sort of embodying integrity. So if it's sports, training while training hard, playing with the very best of your ability, demonstrating commitment and kind of transparent approach to what you're doing,
00:19:18
Speaker
I think as well then avoid privatization. I think that's really, really important that we had a guy came to us once and said, you know, could we start a badminton club in the church? And we had a long conversation about it. And I said, no, I don't think we should do that. You know, why don't you go and join a local badminton club?
00:19:38
Speaker
And because if we start a badminton club, 95% of the people here will be Christians and anybody who comes from the outside will be horrendously outnumbered in a strange environment. Why don't you go and be the minority there and show by your life that
00:19:51
Speaker
you know, Christ makes sense to you and that you followed him. And I think it's making sure that we don't privatize things, that we don't come into subgroups. So I look at, for instance, cycling, you know, should you start a Christian cycling club? Great idea for fellowship, complete another death knell for evangelism, perhaps. Whereas if you go and join the local cycle club,
00:20:11
Speaker
you might, I know a Christian who's done that and he gets called the bishop, you know, because they've grasped that he's a Christian and they give him a lot of stick, but he's there in that environment. And the flip side of it is he's a brilliant cyclist and really into this. So I think pursuing authenticity, embodying that kind of integrity and trying to avoid at all cost privatising things into the Christian subculture, but taking it right into public.
00:20:36
Speaker
Andrew, that's so wonderful to hear.
Conclusion and Farewell
00:20:38
Speaker
Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom and insights and particularly thinking about that subculture that you mentioned that takes us back to where we started really, doesn't it? I feel like there's so much more we could ask you, but sadly time is up.
00:20:51
Speaker
Before we finish there and say goodbye, I have to ask you, are you the Andrew Roycroft of the small kind of booklet called Don't Panic, the ultimate survival guide to exams, something like that? Yes. Wonderful. I remember using that a lot when I was working for UCCF. So thank you so much for producing that resource for us all. Check it out if you're listening and you're going through your exams right now. Really worth it.
00:21:21
Speaker
Andrew, thank you so, so much for your time. Listeners, thank you so much. No, let's thank you, Andy, Andy Bannister as well. Thank you to Andrew Roycroft. Thank you, Andy Bannister, this great conversation. And thank you so much to you, the listeners. We'll be back in a couple of weeks' time with the next episode of Pepper Talk. But until then, we hope you have a great couple of weeks and we look forward to seeing you soon. Bye.