In our sixth episode, Stephen Baker and Aaron Prelock sit down with Andy Constable, pastor of Niddrie Community Church in Edinburgh and a Frontier Shepherds speaker, to talk about the schemes, Scotland's poorest communities. Scotland has healthy churches in its richer areas, but in the schemes the churches are dead or dying, and Christians are too comfortable to move.
Andy tells how a London student ended up under Mez McConnell at a church with, from a student's perspective, nothing to offer, and how Niddrie holds word and deed together without sliding into pietism or the social gospel. Fruit comes slowly there: a woman thrown out of the kids' club came back twenty years later and was saved. A line from Andy's new book on addiction surfaces near the end: behind every single smile is a story of wicked rebellion.

Learn more about the Frontier Shepherds conference at newgenevaacademy.com

00:00 - Introducing Andy Constable
00:46 - Ministry this time of year: the church weekend away
02:05 - Niddrie Community Church: a century of gospel presence in a scheme
03:11 - The UK class system and working-class ministry
06:43 - From London to Edinburgh
07:16 - Meeting Mez McConnell and a church with nothing to offer
12:21 - Word and deed: avoiding pietism and the social gospel
17:28 - The long game: a conversion twenty years in the making
19:55 - From intern to pastor: Mez's training model
22:45 - A training church: indigenous converts, three plants
26:50 - Christians too comfortable to move
27:46 - 20 Schemes: 18 churches in 13 years
31:30 - Whole-life discipleship at Niddrie
36:29 - Loving people, not just books
39:24 - Addiction and the Local Church
43:57 - "Behind every single smile": respectable and unrespectable sins
48:14 - The Ragged School of Theology
52:09 - Frontier Shepherds this September