Pastoral Calling and Cultural Understanding: A Conversation with Mark Sayers – Part 1

Mark Sayers, Senior Leader of Red Church in Melbourne, Australia, is passionate about spiritual renewal and the future of the church. He is also a respected cultural commentator whose perceptive insights into faith and contemporary culture, tethered as they are to historic, biblical Christianity, shed light on our cultural moment and afford Christian leaders a sense of direction as they strive to faithfully carry out their calling to pastor and disciple others. Mark is the author of seven books (such as Strange Days: Life in the Spirit in a Time of Upheaval and Reappearing Church: The Hope for Renewal in the Rise of Our Post-Christian Culture), with his eighth, A Non-Anxious Presence: How a Changing and Complex World will Create a Remnant of Renewed Christian Leaders, due for release in May 2022. In fall 2021, Mark was kind enough to give me an hour of his time. What follows is part 1 of 3 adapted from a transcript of our conversation.

Mark Ryan (MR): Mark Sayers, good morning, and thank you in advance for your time.

Mark Sayers (MS): It’s great to be with you.

MR: Mark, you are known as a local pastor with a keen sense of cultural understanding and for keeping an eye on the wider trend lines of contemporary culture. So, I’d like to focus our conversation today around two main things: First, I’d really like to hear you connect your cultural expertise back to your calling as a local pastor and to leading in ministry. And second, I will ask you to help the rest of us grow in naming and navigating what’s going on in the general culture we minister within today. With those two things in mind, let me ask you: Did your emphasis on cultural understanding and discernment come as a part of entering pastoral ministry, or was it something that you cultivated later? 

MS: I think I was always interested in culture. I studied it straight out of high school. I went to the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, which is part of the University of Melbourne, and studied advertising. During my studies at RMIT, there came a real sense of how to read culture. Part of what was interesting about advertising—and they were no-nonsense about this—is that advertisers must read culture for an economic end. They’ll cut through a lot of ideology and other factors to really understand what the public is thinking and feeling. And although I struggled with some of the ethics of this, the task captured my imagination.

Later, when I went into ministry, one of the first subjects I studied at seminary was evangelism, and the lecturer just gave a sort of sweep of Western culture. In the beginning, I was totally lost with most of this, but as everyone else in the room seemed to understand it, I thought I had better start learning about it. And so, for a little while there, I was learning by myself and reading all kinds of stuff, and I think God used that, too.

Then, once I started pastoring in Melbourne, I noticed that there were some profound cultural changes happening. I saw a lot of established ministries really struggling to reach people with the gospel. I’d also grown up around a lot of missionaries and I think from them I had gained something of a missionary lens, and I brought this into my pastoral situation also. This was not me trying to do anything tricky. It was literally just asking: how do I minister effectively within my context, and how do I understand the cultural changes that are happening? Using a missiological lens for that proved helpful.

MR: Thanks, Mark. That’s very helpful. Now over here, across the big pond, many know you not as a local pastor, but via your podcasts, the Rebuilders series,[1] and especially This Cultural Moment,[2] which continues to have significant traction. As we think about this aspect of your ministry, can you share with us why you as a busy pastor decided to give time to producing these series? How does that time in preparation, in understanding the culture, relate to your own sense of being a pastor and to fulfilling basic pastoral duties?

MS: Great question. It’s funny, I don’t think I’ve ever been asked that question. It’s actually really cool to answer it because it’s such a part of my life. For me, some of the preparation simply comes through passion. I’m just fascinated by the world, and I’m fascinated by culture. So, for example, I’m now reading a book by a New York journalist about William Cooper, who was an American conspiracy theorist in the 1990s.[3] And I’m reading that for fun. It’s an element that’ll dribble back into my work at some stage, but I’m genuinely curiously passionate about understanding culture. A lot of the research I do is not me sitting here at a desk thinking, “Man, I’ve got to read all this stuff.” It comes from overflow and enjoyment. God has given me a passion to understand the world, and so I try and bring that into my pastoral ministry.

And this is what happened, particularly with This Cultural Moment. I was speaking at my friend John Mark Comer’s church in Portland, and he just suggested we sit down and talk about the 2016 election. We did. And then he suggested we sit down and talk further about what’s happening in the world. The next time I was in Portland we recorded again. Literally, This Cultural Moment was about four or five days’ worth of recording (with some coffee breaks in between). And God has just used that tremendously. From my end, there hasn’t been a lot of work that had to go into that. It was more that God breathes on certain things. In his sovereignty, there are times in which what we offer just goes out there and helps people.

But circling back to the pastoral context, what people heard in This Cultural Moment is the conversation I’m often having with others and with my friends. It’s me trying to work out my understanding of the world. And the thing I really appreciate about being a pastor and doing this writing and talking is how it functions as a kind of filter. I will often come up with a theory or think about something, but then I’ll come back to my church and to ordinary people who don’t really care that I write books about culture and have a profile. They’ve got pastoral needs in the local community. I’m forced to wrestle with how their lives are impacted by this. I’ve got to always put it through this real-life filter, which is helpful.

So, I’m always feeding into a circular loop—the cultural stuff, then what’s happening in the congregation, and then what God is saying, what is Scripture saying? It’s sort of like a circle I’m always working through. It’s a continual process.

MR: Over time, and as you have become more known for your cultural commentary and related work, what has that meant for your pastoring and preaching? Have there been changes because of your podcast and publishing work?

MS: Great question. One thing I’ve noticed in this season of pandemic, and as we in Melbourne have cut ourselves off from the world, is that, yes, some people are coming to church because they’re Christians who have heard This Cultural Moment, or listened to Rebuilders, and it has resonated. The pandemic has brought a lot of disruption—people moving, there’s a lot of movement around the country—and as people move, we are hearing, “Oh, we were at this other church, but now we’re looking for a church in Melbourne and we’ve heard you.” At the same time, there have also been a lot of unchurched people who have been listening. Surprisingly, I’ve found that it’s evangelistic. So often what you get is someone who’s listening to it as a Christian, and then they’ve got a friend or brother or sister who’s on the edge of faith, but doesn’t have faith, to whom they say: “Are you interested in culture? Well listen to this.” It’s this weird thing. I’m very aware of that.

As to preaching, something we at Red Church were just talking about yesterday. We are still engaging with Scripture (obviously!) and speaking Scripture into our moment. But we are also doing that in a way that is unchurched-friendly as well. In fact, just yesterday, we had a correction point. We’re like, “It’s great that we’ve got all these people who are coming because of the success of this stuff, but let’s not forget that there are people in our neighborhood who don’t care.” Indeed, we’ve also had people coming who are Persian asylum seekers, who were Muslim and are now questioning, and Buddhists, and all sorts of people. I’ve got to always keep this in mind and not let this seemingly successful thing take focus away.

MR: You mentioned there that some people don’t care as much. When I was ministering in Melbourne, just down the road from where you are now, I encountered a tension. On the one hand, there were some who encouraged me to understand the culture. Some really wanted me to (and helped me to), think theologically about the culture. Yet, for every one of them, there were always several others who thought that was a dangerous path to tread. These folks felt it best to avoid cultural issues. With this kind of tension in view, in what ways do you encourage interpreting culture as an aspect of Christian discipleship? Is this filtered into the way you train your staff and the way you lead and equip others in the congregation?

MS: Yeah, I think I noticed something similar probably around the same timeframe as you. But I also think I’ve noticed a change now. The culture has become so all-encompassing that it’s like there’s a cultural flashpoint every day. It’s part of the new digital reality that pastors must deal with. I hear from so many pastors who say, “I wasn’t touching that stuff. But now, on our Facebook page, I put up something and it becomes a whole cultural war battleground.” So, we’re seeing that particularly. And yet for us, it’s something that has just become part of our culture. We really do try and listen to the culture—that’s something I’ve tried to model as a leader. But exactly as you said before, there is a key division here and I try to be mindful of it.

That said, I love to talk about culture. I can talk about culture until the cows come home. Yet I do strive to consider the ways that we need to look at culture to aid our preaching of the gospel. I ask, how do we look at the cultural barriers? What cultural barriers are there? Are they changing? And so on. So, a live example: I have a real sense that there’s almost a moving away from this quite secular moment to a place where there’s a greater irrationality, a greater religiosity in the culture. People are interested in all kinds of things. I’ve just been fascinated with this whole thing about UFOs now. It’s so interesting. People are posting US Navy videos and you’re seeing these discussions of them, and people are being thrown into it. “Oh, wow, the Pentagon is talking about UFO’s.”[4] I can’t help but wonder what aspects for communication this can open. I’m always looking at this stuff and asking what evangelistic opportunities does this open?

Even conspiracy theories I find interesting in the sense that they’re almost a secular form of religious belief, and even politics is becoming a form of religion. So, again, I’m always looking at these things but I’m always catching myself because I could just talk about this with no solution. This is where the Scriptures come in and my faith comes in. This is where I ask, how do I equip our team for these conversations? Interestingly, just yesterday, one of us was talking to someone who wasn’t a believer, and it was here that we found an opportunity to use one of these cultural issues to talk about the gospel. I overheard that conversation and I thought, “That’s great! We’re doing well if people are seeing it that way.”

MR: Rather like yourself, I do find it fruitful to be able to think about the culture, and to be willing to engage it together with the questions others raise in relation to it. That said, what about when someone in your congregation is alarmed by this? How do you navigate the Christian for whom the effort to understand and give time to the culture is seen as suspect? 

MS: To be 100% honest, I just don’t meet those people anymore. Increasingly, what I am hearing, particularly among young adults, is this story: “I’m the last one of my Christian friends who is still a Christian.” That’s the dominant story we are hearing at Red Church. And so, when I talk about the culture and try to help others understand it, I don’t get much pushback anymore. I’ve not experienced that for some time. It seems the more time that goes on, the less I have to make the argument for engaging the culture anymore.

See part 2 of this conversation here.

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Notes:

[1] Sayers’s 68-episode podcast Rebuilders began in September 2017 and is ongoing (with the most recent episode dated November 21, 2021). See: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/rebuilders/id1462274371.

[2] This Cultural Moment was a 28-episode series, co-hosted by Sayers and John Mark Comer, that ran from February 2008 to March 2020. See: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/this-cultural-moment/id1342868490.

[3] Mark Jacobson, Pale Horse Rider: William Cooper, the Rise of Conspiracy, and the Fall of Trust in America (Blue Rider Press, 2018).

[4] For those interested, see: https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/Prelimary-Assessment-UAP-20210625.pdf.