Church Planting in (Spiritually Desolate) Dublin

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Tony Merida: Welcome to “Churches Planting Churches,” a podcast on the theology and practice of church planting. I’m your host, Tony Merida.

Ireland has a rich history of faith in the living God. At one time, it was one of the highest church-attending nations worldwide. Sadly, it’s no longer the case. Ireland’s modern population suffers from spiritual famine. While other world religions like Islam and Romanian Orthodox are on the rise in Dublin, the fastest growing religious worldview is that of the nuns or those with no religion at all. Contrastingly, evangelical Christian denomination steadily decline. Today, there’s approximately 1 church for every 40,000 people living in Dublin.

Church planting in this postmodern context is difficult. The financial investment required is high, the harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few. Yet for pastors like Mark Smith and others, the commitment to disciple-making and church planting and Dublin is unwavering because of their unshakeable hope in the gospel of Jesus Christ. Today, I’m excited to have Mark Smith with me on the podcast. Mark is married to Philippa and is the pastor of city church in Dublin. He also serves as the Acts 29 Ireland lead. Okay. Mark, welcome to the podcast.

Mark Smith: Thanks Tony. Great to be here.

Tony: Man, it is good to see you. I don’t know what event we met at. It was perhaps an event in Europe, Belgrade.

Mark: I think it was…was it Belgrade? I was at [inaudible 00:01:44]a couple years ago. I think we were hanging out for a little while with some of the other Celtic brothers.

Tony: Yeah. Speaking of Celtic brothers, I’m interviewing Dye [SP] Hanky coming up soon. You know that brother, right?

Mark: Yeah, I do. We serve his coffee over here in City Church, in fact.

Tony: Cool. I’m gonna be talking about is coffee among other things. And you are south of Lucas Parks an Elder who’s over in Ireland, right?

Mark: Yeah. Yeah. So I’m about two hours south of them. So in Dublin, but…so Dublin is the capital of the Republic of Ireland. And then Belfast is the capital of Northern Ireland. And believe it or not, they’re two different countries.

Tony: Yeah. That is wild, isn’t it?

Mark: Yeah. People struggle to get their head around it.

Tony: Yeah. Can you explain the geography a little bit? Yeah. Can you explain the geography of the U.K. to me?

Mark: Well, so the United Kingdom is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and Great Britain is England, Scotland, and Wales, okay? And so it’s the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. So that’s all queen territory, okay? And then you’ve got the other 26 counties of the Republic of Ireland, and that’s us. And the 26 counties that make up the Republic of Ireland became a state in their own right nearly 100 years ago. So in the early 1920s after our kind of a war of independence and part of the treaty that was ratified here in Ireland, it give up the six counties that then would become Northern Ireland. And that’s actually what a lot of the conflict has been over because there was people and still would be some people who would say things like, “Ireland half free would never be free.” And so we’re fighting for a united Ireland. It was a very controversial thing. So you had guys going from fighting alongside one another against the British, which all of you Americans will be saying yes and amen to…No taxation without representation, hey.

Tony: Don’t tread on me.

Mark: Yeah. Going from fighting alongside against the British to actually fighting against one another in the Irish Civil War because the Irish Civil War was along pro-treaty, anti-treaty lines. So were you for that treaty that gave up the North and people saw that as a stepping stone towards Irish unity? Or were you against it and said, “No, no, no, we cannot take this concession?” And so Northern Ireland was formed. We declared ourselves to be a Republic in 1949 around about the same time as Israel did. And we’ve been our own independent Republic ever since then.

Tony: Wow. So you tried to avoid Lucas Parks and those up in Belfast, right?

Mark: As much as possible. I actually grew up very close to where Lucas and Andrew and those brothers are, I’m a bit of a mongrel. I was born in the Republic and all my family have kind of the quintessential kind of Irish Lucky Charms accent, right, and I don’t, I have a more Northern, much like Elder accent because my parents divorced when I was small. My dad is a Catholic, my mom is Protestant, and that was your back when you just didn’t do that. Like you just didn’t have a “mixed marriage.” That was our equivalent of a mixed marriage, you know? And but they divorced when I was small and so I actually grew up in Northern Ireland, so I kind of grew up with a foot both sides of the border because all my family and cousins and aunts and uncles were down here, but Mom and I were up there.

Tony: So tell us about how you…what has your spiritual journey been? You given us a little bit about your backstory there, but how’d you come to faith? How did you have just find yourself now in ministry in Dublin?

Mark: Yeah, well, that move, back when I was three years old, I guess, was a providential one because we moved to a town called Carrickfergus, which is just outside of Belfast. And it is like Bible-belt town, you know, there’s a church on every corner. Yeah, I think it’s a population of around about 35,000 people and I think there’s at least 30…I think at last count kind of 37 Bible-teaching churches for that population. And so lots of Christians, but lots of churchgoing people, kind of nominally Christian. And I didn’t grow up going to church. When I was a teenager, I was invited along to what I thought would be a youth group and such I thought I’d go and hang out with friends and shoot the breeze. But it turned out to be a straight up and down Bible study.

It was this guy who was teaching us through the book of Romans, these 13, 14-year-olds. And my buddy who had brought me, at the end of that night said, “Do you wanna go back?” And I was like, “Yeah, sure, why not?” I kept going longer than he did. He was like, “Man, this is boring. I’m not gonna go anymore.” And I was like, “No, I wanna I see how this thing unpacks.” I don’t remember a moment. I didn’t have a kind of, you know, by my bedside moment. But I know that over the course of that year studying the book of Romans, the Lord changed my heart. And I remember the night when we looked at Romans 5, 8, and 9, “God demonstrates his love for us in this, that while we were still sinners, Christ Jesus died for us.”

I remember that just kind of just really apprehending me whether that was the point or not, I don’t know. But I know that by the end of that, that academic year, that calendar year, I was a different person. I was in a Presbyterian church. I was about 14 years old, kept going to that Presbyterian Church for a little while. And then it’s a long story, but I’m an accidental Anglican. I ended up across the road at this evangelical Anglican Church. And, you know, loving Jesus, teaching the Bible, which is not the first thing that comes to your mind, sadly, when you think of Anglicanism. But that was my first real exposure to expository Bible ministry.

And I was about 18, and that just started a huge spiritual growth spurt for me. I said, “This is amazing.” It gave me a new appreciation for the scriptures and love for the Lord Jesus. And some of the ministry staff there were saying, you know, “You should consider possibly going into ministry.” And I was kind of…because my family weren’t Christians. So my mom met my stepdad when I was about eight years old, and they were very supportive, like, they’re not against it, but it’s not something they immediately comprehend, you know? And so I thought, no, no, no, I’ll go off and be a teacher and go and be a biology teacher. And that’s what I started to train to do. But what the Lord did there was the Lord took something that was really…something that I really enjoyed and something that was really sweet and he made it really better.

And I think looking back, it’s because he was disciplining me. He was showing me that I was actually being disobedient to his call on my life. And I remember, you know, looking at my mother, I was like 21 years old. I said, “I cannot do this anymore. I’ve got to drop out.” And the voices were raised more than that. And her kinda saying, you know, “Well, what are you gonna do with your life?” And I said, “I’m gonna be a minister. I’m gonna be a pastor.” And the first words out of her mouth after…it was basically like coming out as a Christian, you know. And first words out of her mouth, “So it’s not a phase.” I said, “No, this is not a phase. I think this is what I’ve got to do.”

Like, there was a hard road. Like I ended up just going and working a job for a little while. Worked at a bakery, which stands to reason because I’ve got a body like the Pillsbury Doughboy. So that worked out well. And eventually, interned with another Anglican church quite near where Village is now in Belfast, East Belfast. And from there, went to seminary at Oak Hill Theological College in London. Met my wife there. It’s Philippa and we’ve been married since 2014. She was on the youth and children’s track. And we got married after college. We didn’t do the whole kind of bridal college thing. Like, we focused on our studies and got married afterwards. And yeah, she went on a family vacation to Ireland when she was 17 and hated it, thought it was backwards, and that the people were just funny and taught funny and didn’t like it at all, swore she’d never be back. So the Lord really does have a sense of humor and we’ve got two lovely little Irish children as well.

Tony: That’s awesome. That’s awesome. So tell us about your church plant.

Mark: We started City Church…we launched morning services five years ago last Sunday. We just had our fifth birthday as a church. We were meeting as a launch team for about a year before that. We’re a plant of another church in the city called Emmanuel, Emmanuel Church Dublin. And they brought me on straight out of seminary with a view to leading a church plant. And so about a dozen of us left to be the launch team of what would become City Church.

And over the course of about a year, we grew to our launch size, which was right about 20, 25 people just before Christmas. Just before Christmas is terrible time to launch a church. Don’t ever do that. Especially because one of the things I’ll probably talk about later, it’s just Christmas is one of the times when people transition out of the city. So like a month after we launched, we lost like six people of our core team because they were like, “Yeah, no, our contract’s up” and, or you know, “My course is finished up.” The Lord was very kind and in sustaining us through that.

Yeah, so five years ago, and we currently…we’ve just gone to two services. We’ve got about 100 people or so over 2 services. Because the room that we’re in, it’s quite small. It’s a pretty small sports hall in the city center. It’s all that we can afford in the city. Like Dublin, in terms of real estate, is kind of second only to London and the British Isles. So we’d be expecting to pay kind of $80K a year in rent, which would just explode our budget. So while we search for a place, we’re currently at two services as of September this year.

Tony: So 100 people in Dublin, it’s a good-sized church, right, given the spiritual climate there?

Mark: Yeah. We hovered…in years, kind of, two to three-and-a-half, we hovered around 40 people for a long, long time. And I honestly thought that that would kind of be our lot and we’re kind of reasonably content with that. Yeah, the largest, longest-established, conservative evangelical church in Dublin is about 250 people. And they’ve been going for like 100 years, a large Baptist church. So yeah, to get 100 people in Dublin is…

Tony: In five years.

Mark: …in five years is a work of the Lord, and exhausting.

Tony: Yeah, absolutely, man. So it must be your electrifying preaching. What is it that’s led to the increase in numbers? Obviously, you’ve mentioned that that’s the primary reason.

Mark: Yeah, that’s absolutely it. And the single-origin coffee that Dye sends over. What is it? Well, I mean, in part, it’s the old adage of new churches attract new people. And, you know, we were coming on the scene right when there was a little flurry of church plant activity going on about five years ago. And so I can think of another church that started around about the same time that, again, has experienced a similar sort of growth. We don’t try to do…we certainly don’t do events-based. Like, we’re not in the attractional model at all. That’s not who I am. I’m not the best preacher in the city. We don’t have the coolest band in the city.

But what we try to do, we try to do well, and that tends to be doing life with one another and being intentional with our discipleship. I work hard at preaching and I wanna make that really accessible to people. There’s little things that people comment on. We do Q&As most every Sunday, which is just huge for Irish post-Catholic people because in a Catholic context, you don’t question the priest, you don’t ask why, you just accept it, and the priest doesn’t open himself up for questions. And the number of people who have come up to me afterwards, I mean, like, I’ve never been in the church where the pastor has invited questions. And like, sometimes I don’t know the answer. I don’t know. I’m gonna have to…

Tony: So do you do it? I’m sorry to stop you. Do you do it right after the sermon?

Mark: I do. So yeah, I do immediately after the sermon. I’ll give people a heads up. We’re still trying to work out what that looks like in two services. Right now, I’m doing it mostly after our second service, not our first, just because that crossover window is very tight. But after the second service can say, “Look, we’re gonna open this up to questions at the end.” And so probably what will happen is that more people who wanna kind of engage the questions might actually go to that second service for the moment. But yeah, give them a heads up. Before we do the Lord’s Supper, I’d say,”Any questions on that?” Just immediately after we pray, take three or four of them, and then there may be more afterwards. But like I say, it’s such a low-hanging fruit way of saying we’re different to the kind of religious system that you grew up with or assumed was true.

Tony: So do you normally get three to four? Do hands go up immediately or are there some weeks nobody has questions?

Mark: Yeah. This last Sunday, nobody had questions. The sermon was clearly excellent and just cleared up all of the issues. And so last Sunday, there was no questions. I mean, no, yeah, normally you’ve got three or four, I think on average. We’re in our advent series right now, but we just did the first 11 chapters of Genesis and we were hitting things like gender and all of this and there was, like, loads of hands. And it’s always interesting when a brand new person ask the questions, like, wow, you really…like, you’re courageous to come in here for the first time, I don’t know your name is, and for you to stick up your hand and ask a question. Yeah, it keeps me sharp. It helps me to…it’s kind of demographic research as well. It helps me know like what are the actual questions in people’s minds. And yeah, I like it. I kind of thrive off that.

Tony: How has it impacted, kind of, the core of your church in hearing you answer these questions? I’m sure that indirectly equips them to do the same, right?

Mark: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the core of our church, like, they’ve always been a very, like, eager to learn group. I mean, City Church was started with a bunch of students and young professionals and, you know, that’s kind of who we are. You know, Dublin has two things right now. It has universities and it has tech companies. So Amazon, eBay, Google, Dropbox, Microsoft, they all have their European hub because of the lower rate in corporation tax, Facebook as well. And then there’s 100,000 students come into the city of an academic year.

And so, you know, we were reaching those spiritually-hungry, skeptical, questioning people and they wanna learn. And so it was really kind of taking…the questions that I was being asked anyway in mid-week Bible study, or community group, or whatever, around the dinner table, or the church weekend away and saying, “Okay, well let’s open this up to the mixed multitude on a Sunday morning so that you’ve got those overhearers that don’t quite have the courage to ask a question, but it’s their question that’s being answered, you know.

Tony: That’s good. So of the things people mention about your church, you’ve got to this atmosphere, this culture in which people can ask questions and, you know, hear answers that show them respect and are hopefully well-reasoned answers and so on. Would there be other things that people comment on, perhaps kind of during the course of the week type of ministry, hospitality? How have you seen lives changed through other avenues of ministry?

Mark: Yeah, so we meet throughout the week in different locations all throughout the city for our, we just call them community groups, or MCs. And for many people, they haven’t experienced a model like that, that it’s more intentional. We don’t do it perfectly. Like, we’re not total Soma [SP] fanboys. We could improve on lots of things. But one of the repeated feedback…especially when people are leaving because people leave every year, one of the repeated comments is feeling just a real sense of community, a sense of family that perhaps they haven’t experienced before. And a part that’s our size. You know, when you go to a church of 50, 60, 70, 100 people, but even because it’s 2 services, the 2 services actually feel small.

And our introverts at City Church love that. They love that we were going back to two smaller services. One girl literally come to me like, ‘I’m so excited to go to two smaller services because I just get so overwhelmed about talking to people that I ended up not talking to anybody.” But yeah, so we…come back to actually answering your question. You know, when we meet mid-week we do different things on different weeks. So we will do some study weeks, which are immediately off the back of the sermon. So it’ll be study week. But then we’ll do, you know, guys prayer, ladies prayer. So the guys will meet together and the ladies will meet together. They’ll go for dessert or something and pray for one another.

Then we’ll have another study week and then we have family dinner where we’re all together eating with one another. With students, if you called it a social night, they wouldn’t come because they say the Bible study has value, social night doesn’t, they could be studying. So I say, “No, no, no, no, it’s not social night, it’s family dinner. We are family together while you are here.” And so that encourages them to come along. And then on the fifth week, we have a whole church kind of members’ meeting, prayer gathering.

Tony: That’s good. I love it, man. I love your commitment to exposition and the culture you’re creating and the community you’re emphasizing. One of the questions I love to ask church planters, and really anybody in ministry, is what are some of the discouragements or low points that you’ve experienced along the way? And what did the Lord use to kind of get you through that moment? Perhaps you’ve had none, perhaps you’ve been above discouragement in five years.

Mark: There’s two things come up. Talk about a perennial discouragement and then a particular season. The perennial discouragement is the transition. You know, those initial years where it really felt like you were pastoring Doctor Who, you know, he’s just regenerating into a completely new beast every 12 months, you know, you’re losing, kind of, 40% if not more of the people who are at your church. And it comes in a season, seasonal roundabout, kind of May through to the end of June where…When we were small, we would say goodbye to and pray for people publicly every Sunday, and that just emotionally just wrecked me and the core team who were, kind of, staying. And what’s really hard is to actually pick yourself back up in September, to have the emotional energy to, with gusto, kind of welcome people again and embrace them and to put yourself out there knowing that they’ll say goodbye again.

So I think one of the real mistakes that I made, again, kind of roundabout year, kind of, two to three, especially in year three, I think it just got too hard that I actually started to like just emotionally kind of go into like a safe space and kind of shut down a little bit. So these people were…you know, people would come up to me with tears in their eyes kind of saying, “This is my last Sunday and, you know, thank you so much,” and I’m just there just totally deadpanned. I know, like, I should be weeping with those who were, should be feeling more. And actually one of the things that really helped me was Bill Riedel’s article that he wrote called “Hugging the Parade.” And just kind of making our pace with that and enjoying that and seeing God use that.

Like, we’ve seen, you know, the Lord take people, you know, back home to their home countries. I mean, Dublin has 40,000 Brazilians. That’s a weird fact about Dublin. We’re the number one city for Brazilians to come and learn English. I just love the idea of folks walking around the streets of Rio and Sao Paulo in thick Dublin accents. But that’s what…and, you know, I read with one guy “God’s Big Picture,” that Vaughan Roberts’ book that had a Bible overview. He just so blown away by that, went back to his senior pastor and they worked on translating it into Portuguese together so that they could use it as a resource, and like, praise the Lord for that. So that’s a perennial discouragement. And I got to kind of see, you know, the good that the Lord is bringing through that.

The most difficult season for us in ministry was when a staff member walked away from us. That’s always gonna be tough when a staffing relationship begins to…and a friendship, you know, begins to fray a little bit. And, you know, one of the things that really helped me in that was actually my Acts 29 coach. My Acts 29 coach was Jonathan Dodson. Amazing. Like, just because we had a prior relationship. So when I came into the network, he said, “Well, I’ll coach you.” And I remember him, kind of, pastoring me through that season. And one of the things he said was, “They’re just walking away from you. They’re not walking away from Jesus.” So again, just apprehending me and think, okay, it’s only me that they’re…like, let’s keep this in perspective.

Tony: That’s good.

Mark: We didn’t see eye to eye. Stuff didn’t work out. Now, since then we’ve been able to meet up and reconcile and forgive and be forgiven. But just to be reminded, they’re not walking away from Jesus, they’re just walking away from you. And it’s so easy. Like, I’m sure I’m not the only guy that can kind of fall into, you know, Jesus loves you, but I’ve got a wonderful plan for your life, sort of, mentality and just being just gently rebuked in that way, I think it was really important for me in those early years of planting.

Tony: Those relational wounds, man, the perennial challenge you face, we face that as well, the parade, and yeah, people leaving. You would think after a long season of ministry those things fail to affect you, you know, but the relational wounds, for me too, those are the most challenging, discouraging. Those are the low points. And I can recount many of those with you, the similar situations you talk about.

Mark: I remember…

Tony: Go ahead.

Mark: So just on that, I just remember being at a large church plant in Belfast that was just blowing up, they were killing it. They’re about, kind of, 10, 12 years in, and I remember talking to my friend who brought me in just saying, “This is amazing.” Like, I don’t think we’d started, like, we hadn’t started yet. I think I was still in seminary, actually. I said, “This is amazing. Like, this is what I want,” you know. And my buddy pointing to the lead pastor who was kind of counseling somebody up at the front and said, “Yeah, but you should see his back. You should see the scars that are on his back that have got him to this point.” And again, that was just…you know, there are scars that we all bear, but we do it because Jesus is worthy of it.

Tony: Amen. Amen. We go to his wounds, right, as we endure ours. That’s good, man. You mentioned Acts 29, you had mentioned Bill Riedel, mentioned a coach. You also now are the new Ireland lead, right? Can you tell us about that, what’s going on in Ireland?

Mark: Yeah, yeah. They’re clearly insane. They asked me to take over from Lucas as he moves up to, you know, yet to be announced thing. So that’s your exclusive. Yeah, no, I was thrilled to be asked. In terms of Acts 29 Ireland, we don’t make a political distinction between North and South. We’re a whole Island body. So there’s the four of us, right? There’s myself and Lucas and then Andrew Elder who was sent out from Lucas, and then John Irvine and Raf Reiland [SP]. And John’s really going hard and foster over the rural collective stuff, which is so important for us. I mean the evangelization of Ireland is gonna be church planting in rural areas. And so that’s just gonna be absolutely key.

You know, there are 102 towns in the Republic of Ireland…this is excluding Northern Ireland, but there are 102 towns in the Republic of Ireland of a population of 5,000 or more that have no evangelical witness, or to put that in Acts 29 speech, “Where Jesus is neither named nor known,” 102 towns. And so Acts 29 Ireland is collaborating with other networks here on the island like Baptist Missions and the Calvary Network, which has little church planting network out in the West of Ireland, to see there was 102 towns it reached for the gospel. We have an assessment conference coming up in January and, by God’s grace, got an Irish guy going through assessment who’s currently planting out near Galway, again, in the West of Ireland.

And so we’re thrilled. Like, my prayerful hope under God is that in the next 12 to 18 months, we’ll double our membership. Now, that’s only from going from four to eight, but you know, that’d be really good. You know, we had our, kind of, Christmas lunch with the four of us last week and one of the things that I was saying, you know, maybe we need a bigger table this time next year. We have a guy currently in the application process here in Dublin who’s seeking to plant a Farsi-speaking congregation because we have loads of Iranian Muslims who come to Ireland seeking asylum.

He himself was a…he became a Christian in Iran and had to flee and planted a church in Belfast. He knows that I can talk about this. He planted a church in Belfast and is now seeking to how did that often indigenous leadership and seeing do the same and in Dublin. And so we think that Acts 29, especially with some of the emerging regions contacts, can really help a brother like that. And how amazing that Acts 29 Ireland wouldn’t help start a Farsi-speaking congregation.

Tony: That’s amazing, dude. That’s great work, man. You’ve got a lot of exciting things happening, a lot of challenging things. You also told me before we started that you’re moving today, is that right?

Mark: Yeah, that’s right. We moved the date of recording this because I thought around the window of the original date that we’d been moving house, but with all the toing and froing, we’re actually moving today. So I’m going from here to go and pick up keys and, you know, sign on the dotted line with lawyers and things like that. And so yeah, typical, really.

Tony: And you’ve got your Acts 29 raincoat on, is that what you guys wear in Ireland?

Mark: Yeah. Yeah, that’s right. Yeah. You guys get lovely hoodies. We get rain jackets and actually you need it today. So if anybody wants an 89 bomber, just hit me up.

Tony: Hey, if listeners are intrigued about your work in Ireland, what would you tell them? Send checks where, come visit, anything you’d like to make an impassioned plea before we sign off?

Mark: Yeah, well, I mean there’s, you know, three things. We’re getting ready to send out our first church plan so we brought on our first resident just there in September past. He and his wife just had a baby, their first baby, last week and we were prayerfully seeking to send out a launch team from us in the next 18 months or so. You can subscribe to that prayer letter on our website at citychurchdublin.ie/plant and read up about Duncan and Becky. Duncan’s originally from Ireland, which is just a huge deal for us because getting indigenous gospel workers is a real chore. There isn’t, kind of, the gospel pipeline for raising up guys within the island. We have been very missionary-reliant, and that’s fine, the Lord has done great things through it, but it’s just great to have an Irish guy. So you can be praying for that if you wanted to support that. If you wanted to come and visit us and see what’s going on.

So it’d be through those three things, pray, give, go, come and see Ireland. You know, we work with a…we partner with a company that offers faith-based travel. So you don’t even need to pretend that it’s a mission’s trip. Just come over on a vacation. Be better informed how to pray for our land. Learn a little bit more about the history. I could have watched lyrical [SP] about all of the history of our beautiful country. And so I’d encourage you, if you haven’t taken that trip back, especially if it’s a trip to the homeland, you know, my grandmother was an O’Flattery or whatever, now is the time to come and see what God is doing in Ireland.

Tony: Super. Mark Smith, City Church Dublin. Thanks for being on the podcast, brother.

Mark: It’s an absolute pleasure, Tony. Thank you.