Church plants spurred on by Irish mission initiative

At least two new churches have been planted in Ireland in tandem with the recent ‘What’s the Story?’ (WTS) outreach initiative in Ireland.

Christ City Church in central Dublin (some members pictured) had been looking to plant a church in the more residential area in the south of the city to reach the people there.

Knowing that WTS was in the pipeline they scheduled the launch date for the beginning of the WTS campaign. They used this as an evangelistic head start, since there was going to be city-wide advertising on buses and billboards. Steve Vaughan, Pastor of Christ City Church, said: ‘It gave us an real evangelistic push; the church launch connected well with WTS and it fortified the people for mission.’

As well as the WTS resources and the apologetic talks, they had six of their own members sharing their testimonies. ‘It was great. Those who were speaking brought their friends. It was very real.’ They also had a live Q&A after three of the services. ‘People sent in their questions via a QR code while the talk was going on. There was no preparation time and there were all sorts of questions. These were really rich times,’ Vaughan said, ‘and as well giving answers, I hope we were able to model how to receive questions and not be intimidated.’

Planting in Tipperary

Further south, in County Tipperary, David Wilson had been challenged to consider planting in the town of Carrick-on-Suir. At present there is no evangelical church in the town. David had been rethinking evangelism pre-Covid, and had developed a website during Covid (www.hope4ireland.com). Over the autumn he used ‘What’s the Story’ as a framework for a series of Bible studies in the town using ‘What’s the story, John’ to begin to explore the possibility of starting a church. They distributed postcards with the six questions on them, and saw some people coming along. ‘It gave us a tool to use. We feel there is potential, and we plan now to distribute Scripture calendars in December and to run a Bible study in the new year.’