Revitalisation Revisited: An Interview with Pastor Steve Auld Pt.1

Steve Auld has been serving as the pastor of Great Victoria Street Baptist Church since May 2017. He’s married to Lynsey and has three young kids. Steve and Lynsey served in Madagascar for two years before moving to Chicago, Illinois to study for his Master of Divinity degree. He also earned a Master of Theology from Southern Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. Before coming to Great Vic, Steve served as assistant pastor at Eden Baptist Church, Cambridge. Our Managing Editor, Andrew Roycroft, recently spent some time interviewing Steve about his experience of church revitalisation and some biblical principles that have undergirded his work in this area. Steve’s answers are biblical, humble, and eminently practical. Our interview with him will be serialised here over the next few weeks.

Steve, thanks for taking the time to talk through the work of church revitalisation with us today. This is a vitally important area of ministry, and we value being able to hear of your experiences, as well as the wisdom you have picked up along the way. I’d like to start by asking you to briefly introduce yourself. 

Thanks Andrew. I was born and raised in rural County Tyrone, Northern Ireland during the latter part of what we now refer to as the Troubles. I’ve been married to my wife Lynsey for 19 years and we have three children, Hudson, Elliot and Grace. I’ve been serving as the lead pastor of Great Victoria Street Baptist Church (Great Vic) in Belfast for the past nine years but have had quite an eclectic range of ministry experiences before this period. This includes, four years working as a youth worker in a Presbyterian church in Lisburn, (I was raised a Presbyterian but emerged out of seminary more of a Baptist!). After this, Lynsey and I did some short term (two years) missionary service in Madagascar.

I realised after this, that whatever the Lord had for us next it would be good for me to get some solid theological training, so we headed off to Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield Illinois, where I studied an MDiv from 2011-2014. Towards the end of my studies, Eden Baptist Church in Cambridge called me to come and serve as their assistant pastor where we enjoyed three very happy years from 2014-2017. It was during these years we were approached by the elders of Great Vic and invited to consider coming to be part of an effort to revitalise this inner city church. Alongside my ministry I really enjoy everything sporty, especially rugby and triathlon. I’m also currently working on a part time PhD on the preaching of the 18^th Century English Particular Baptist Pastor, Andrew Fuller.

Before we think about the actual hands-on work of church revitalisation, could you reflect for us on how effective you think theological education/ministerial training is for this specific aspect of ministry?

I would never want to say that theological education is an essential prerequisite for vocational Christian ministry due to the effective ministry of someone like a Dr Martyn Lloyd Jones, but I would come pretty close to saying it is essential where it is accessible. Church revitalisation is the work of a local church pastor and any training he can get to help him become a worker who rightly divides the word of truth will be of great benefit to himself and the flock God has entrusted to his care.

For many people, church revitalisation is associated with dwindling numbers in what was once a healthy or thriving church. It can seem like a last-ditch rescue mission for a church on the brink of closure. While that’s often the case, are these metrics symptomatic of other deeper issues? And, on a related note, is there a case at times for numerically healthy churches to be thinking through their need for revitalisation?

I teach a class at the Irish Baptist College on church revitalisation and in that class I outline five characteristics of a church in need of revitalisation. They are as follows:

1. A general absence of spiritual life

2. Presence of low or high level relational tension or hostility

3. Orthodox in practice but graceless in culture

4. Little or no ecclesial vision

5. A trajectory of decline that has or may in time lead to very low numbers

It is usually numbers 1-4 that lead to number 5 on this list but not always. Remarkably sometimes larger churches that are “well-oiled machines” can keep things going in a superficial manner for quite some time while there is a general absence of real spiritual life. Busyness yes, spiritual vitality not so much. The reformers said the reformed church should be always reforming. In the same way, the revitalised church should be always revitalising.

Tell us about the specific work you have been involved in at Great Victoria Street Baptist. Where is the church located? What is the history of the church? What factors led to its need for revitalisation?

Great Vic is right at the heart of the city centre of Belfast. Great Victoria Street is where you’ll find big hotels, lots of student accommodation and the Grand Opera House! It is a part of Belfast experiencing a lot of regeneration, economically speaking. A new state-of-the-art transport hub has opened beside us, and most visitors to Belfast arrive right onto Great Victoria Street. It is an exciting location to have a healthy church.

Great Victoria Street Baptist Church can trace its origins back to a small group that gathered in another part of the city (Academy Street) in the year 1810. They moved to our current site and built a new spacious Victorian style building in 1865. In the 1960s Great Vic was the biggest and most influential Baptist church in Ireland. In its heyday it had a membership of over 600 members, a megachurch by Northern Irish standards! When the troubles clamped down hard on Belfast in the 1970s, it really devastated Belfast city centre.

The city centre population largely emptied out to the suburbs, leading several churches over the next thirty years into a period of sharp decline. As you can imagine, parents did not want to drop off their kids at their youth ministry in a bomb zone. Great Vic was not immune to this demographic shift and entered a steady period of decline. There may well have been other factors that contributed to this decline, but the troubles were certainly a major factor.     

What kinds of things excited you about following God’s call to go to Great Victoria Street Baptist, and what kinds of things caused you apprehension?

God’s call to leave Cambridge and give ourselves to the revitalisation of Great Vic was strong and clear. When I first visited Great Vic back in 2015, one of the deacons said to me, “when this current generation dies, Great Vic will close its doors.” I returned to Cambridge and that statement became a proverbial stone in my shoe. I looked at how Belfast was experiencing a social and economic revitalisation post the signing of the Good Friday agreement in 1998. I saw rebuilding everywhere, the relocation of the University of Ulster Campus to the city centre and I asked myself, “who is working towards the spiritual renewal of the city centre?” All of this led to a very clear calling that we were to leave lovely Cambridge and relocate to Belfast. It was the calling that made this move exciting. I really believed God was going to revitalise Great Vic and He was calling me and my family to be part of that story.

Scripture reveals the Living God to be a God of revitalisation. He is the God of Ezekiel’s valley of dry bones in Ezekiel 37. I knew he could do it again in Belfast and that genuinely excited me. At the same time I was apprehensive about the move. We were leaving a flourishing church in Cambridge with lots of kids and young families at our age and stage to go to a church with no other kids but our own. Matt 6:33 was precious to me at that time, I knew all we had to do was to keep seeking first the kingdom of God and that he would look after all the things that were making us anxious. How lovely to be able to say today nine years later, I have seen God look after all those things.

In part two, which releases on 8th April, Steve unpacks some strategic and biblical priorities that he brought to the work of revitalisation in Belfast, providing help and insight for all who are concerned to see local churches made healthier through gospel work.