Holyrood Evangelical Church meets a short walk from Waverley station, but is hidden from the centre of the city behind Calton Hill not far from Holyrood Park and the Scottish Parliament. I had got to know their pastor Joe Barnard through the East of Scotland Gospel Partnership, where we’d got chatting last year.
He is passionate about evangelism and discipleship, and so it was great to do this event with them, the first in what I hope could become a fruitful ministry partnership. The church is situated in a densely populated residential part of the city, with thousands of neighbours who Joe is keen to reach with the gospel. So they decided to do a guest event and leafleted the community with invites.
Five or six people from the community accepted the invitation, and so a small group of about forty folk in all met together in the church, in groups of five seated informally around tables.
The topic for the evening was “Is there any hope for the future?” I had a long conversation with Joe about the sorts of topics which might be useful for his community, and he was keen that we addressed this one. And it is a Great topic!
We looked first at some of the reasons that many people today say that hope for the future can be difficult to find. Global conflicts, the cost of living and the environmental crisis are just three issues which can cause despair in our world. So where can we find hope when things seem as if they are spiralling out of control? Is the world really going to die in the next few decades?
Most worldview are insufficient to provide the hope that we need given the scale of the problems we face. I looked at a few worldviews with the folks at Holyrood to show them the ways in which many common beliefs, when tested are inadequate. Many of them bring us back to a form of humanism in which everything is down to us and we have to fix everything ourselves. Yet the evidence suggests that the human capacity to fix our own problems is severely limited. When we are honest we admit that we actually need some help from outside of ourselves; so that we can be restored in order to live out the kind of lives we were supposed to in the original plan! And that is a pointer to the gospel itself!
We did a Q&A session too and about half the questions sounded as if they were from non-Christians. Afterwards I got chatting to a couple of students there who are not Christians, one of whom is a physics student, who is really seriously investigating Christianity. He brought a friend with him – and they both commented that they had never heard a defence or presentation of the Christian hope like this before and that they would be back!
Solas exists to partner with churches to get the gospel into their communities. We do it all kinds of ways – as the news feed here on the website is intended to demonstrate! If you would like to find ways of engaging the community you live in with the gospel, then please do speak to us. We really love travelling around the country, working with all kinds of churches and talking about Jesus to anyone who will listen. You can contact us here.
