God Is Not Finished Yet
Reflections on a day that changed us, and a God who is still at work
St Paul's & St Barnabas · 175th Anniversary
I have been trying to find the right words for the past few days, and honestly I am not sure I have them. What happened on Tuesday the 30th of September was one of those days that you suspect, even as you are living through it, that you will be trying to describe for years. It was the kind of day you did not want to end. And it ended three times.
Three services. Three different congregations, three different moods, three different voices from Scripture and from pulpit. The same Spirit at work through all of them. I want to try to capture something of what each one held, not as a record for the archives, but as an act of gratitude to God and to every single person who made that day possible.
But first: thank you. To every person who prayed, who organised, who carried chairs, who made sandwiches, who sent a card, who turned up when they could easily have stayed home. You gave us something that will outlast the occasion. This is your story as much as it is mine.
The 175th Anniversary Day · 30 September 2026
The Morning Service
The Faithfulness of God
We began the day with an act of worship built around Psalm 145. The theme was simple and overwhelming at the same time: God is faithful. Not faithful in a vague, poetic sense, but faithful in the way that shows up in the details, across the generations, through the people who have sat in these pews and stood at this lectern and knelt at this rail in every decade since 1851.
We heard stories from the past. We heard from people whose families have been part of this church for two and three generations. We were reminded that what we call a church is really just a succession of ordinary people saying yes to God, and that those ordinary yesses, stacked up across 175 years, produce something extraordinary.
There is something deeply moving about standing in a building where people have worshipped through the formation of Ireland, through partition, through the Troubles, through boom and recession, through pandemic. The walls hold a kind of memory. And on Tuesday morning we leaned into that memory, not with nostalgia, but with gratitude, and with the intention of asking what it means to carry this faithfulness forward.
The Anniversary HC Service
God Is Not Finished Yet
The 11:30am service was something else entirely. Rev Ross Mungovan from St Elizabeth's Dundonald brought a message from Haggai chapter 2 that I think a lot of us will be quoting for a long time to come. He looked at a people who had come back from exile and found themselves standing in the rubble of what they had hoped to rebuild, and he told us three things that I have been turning over ever since.
He told us we are not the first to grieve over what has been lost. The people of God in every generation have looked at the gap between the glory they expected and the reality they found, and felt the weight of that gap. That grief is not faithlessness. It is honesty. And God does not rebuke them for it. He speaks into it.
"Be strong. Work. For I am with you." Three imperatives. Not a vision. Not a blueprint. Not a strategy. Just the presence of God, and the command that his presence makes possible. Three verbs and a promise. That is enough.
He told us that we are not finished because God is not finished. The same Spirit who animated the first generation is still at work. The silver is his. The gold is his. Everything needed to complete his purposes here is already in his hands. We do not build the church on what we can raise. We build it on what he has already pledged.
And he told us this: the latter glory will be greater than the former. That is not a prediction based on demographics or property values or trend lines. It is a declaration based on the character of God. He does not downgrade his own work. He brings it to completion.
The Evening Service
He's a Man of His Word: Confirmation
By the time the evening came, I was not sure I had anything left. I was wrong. The Confirmation service, led by Bishop George Davidson, was the note the day needed to end on. Not a recap of history. Not more anniversary content. Just six people, six declarations of faith, and the ancient rite of confirmation. And a Bishop who had the grace and the wisdom to preach with clarity and with love.
Owen, Glenn, Ian, Francis, Lisa, and William. Six people who, surrounded by the congregation they have grown in, said: I choose Jesus. I want to say plainly that I do not take that lightly. Not one of them came to faith easily. Not one of them arrived at that moment without having wrestled with doubts, with questions, with the ordinary complications of a life in which God can sometimes feel very distant. Their yes on Tuesday evening was costly, and I respect them for it enormously.
Bishop George preached from Matthew 21 and the parable of the two sons. It is one of those parables that sounds simple and then gets under your skin. Two sons. One says yes and does nothing. One says no and then goes anyway. The question Jesus asks is: which one did the will of the father? And the answer, predictably and uncomfortably, is the one who initially said no.
The Bishop's application was direct and searching: what matters is not what we say about Jesus, but what we do with him. And he looked at those six people and he said something I want the whole congregation to hold onto. He said: he is a man of his word. The promises he makes, he keeps. You are stepping into a life with someone whose character is his covenant.
Looking Forward
What 175 Years Teaches Us About the Next Chapter
I have been asked by several people: what was the main thing you took from the day? I want to answer that honestly rather than giving the expected ministerial response. The main thing I took from it was hope. Not the thin, wishful kind of hope that mistakes good feelings for good theology. A hope that is grounded, specific, and costly.
It is grounded in the character of God, which does not change. The God who was faithful to the people who built this church when Belfast was a much smaller and simpler city is the same God we are trusting with its future. What he began in 1851, he has not abandoned. The threads of faithfulness that run through this congregation are not things we wove. They are his work, and he does not unravel his own weaving.
The hope is also specific, because it has to be. Our future is not an abstraction. It is York Street. It is the 210 address that has not changed. It is the neighbours we are still getting to know and the ones we have known for decades. It is the people who came through the doors on Tuesday for the first time and the people who have been coming for fifty years. Our calling is as particular and local as it has always been.
And the hope is costly, because the things Ross said from Haggai are not comfortable things. Be strong. Work. They are imperatives. They are asks. The God who says I am with you is also the God who says get up and build. The promise does not cancel the labour. It makes the labour possible.
I want to say one final thing. Many of us were tired by the end of Tuesday. Not the bad kind of tired, but the kind that comes from giving yourself to something fully. I felt it, and I suspect many of you did too. And in that tiredness there was something like joy. The kind that settles rather than fizzes. A sense that something real had happened. That God had shown up, as he tends to do, in ways that were both ordinary and overwhelming all at once.
St Paul's and St Barnabas is 175 years old this week. And God is not finished with it yet. That is not a tagline. It is a confession of faith. And on Tuesday the 30th of September 2026, three congregations in three services on York Street said amen to it together.
I am so glad to be here. I am so glad you are here. Let us keep going.
Andrew Irwin
Minister, St Paul's & St Barnabas · 210 York Street, Belfast BT15 1JJ
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