Abstract
St Benet’s day conference on inter-faith dialogue (March, 2020)
Just over 40 years ago, Peter Moss, the Youth Secretary of the World Council of Churches (WCC), asked me to write an article from the perspective of a young person who was active in the church and in ecumenical activities. The article, ‘A New Agenda for Evangelism’ 1 , was published in 1979 in Reformed World, the journal of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches (WARC), as it was then.
I set down four questions that young people, such as I was then, were asking:
Please can you make your worship relevant to me?
Please can you make your talk of God more meaningful to me?
Please can you create a community of which I too can feel a part?
What is it – to be a Christian?
That same year I was elected to the ruling Council of the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland. This was, and remains, one of the five main political parties in Northern Ireland. As its name suggests it was a ‘coming together’ of people drawn from the two main sections of the Northern Ireland community–Protestant Unionists who wanted Northern Ireland to remain part of the United Kingdom and Catholic Nationalists with more of an identification with the people of the rest of the island of Ireland. The party had been formed in 1970 and had initially proved attractive to many people, but in 1979 two key elections were held that changed the face of politics, not only in Northern Ireland but in the United Kingdom as a whole. On the 29 March the Labour Prime Minister, James Callaghan, lost a vote of confidence by 311 votes to 310. The ensuing General Election was won by the Conservative Party led by Margaret Thatcher, and so began a period of 18 years of Conservative government in the United Kingdom. In Northern Ireland, Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party increased its representation at Westminster, and while the Alliance Party had a larger share of the vote it did not win any seats. The following month, 7 June saw the first direct elections to the European Parliament and the result was a landslide victory for the Conservative Party, which won 60 of the 78 seats available in England, Wales and Scotland. The firebrand, anti-Catholic, preacher, Ian Paisley, also swept to victory, topping the poll and seizing the political initiative. From then on the situation in Northern Ireland deteriorated rapidly and although I had just qualified as a junior doctor, I quickly became heavily involved in Northern Ireland’s political life since it seemed to me that was where, as a Christian, I should be working for a peaceful resolution to the seemingly intractable violent political conflict that was tearing my community apart.
I stood for various elections, including being elected Leader of the Alliance Party in 1987, and engaged as Party Leader in all the political talks on the future of Northern Ireland with the British and Irish Governments and the various Northern Ireland political parties. It took 11 years to get to the point where we could sign off the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement in 1998. It brought the political violence to an end, and then after some more years, during which I was the first Speaker of the new Northern Ireland Assembly, I worked as one of the four members of the Independent Monitoring Commission tasked by the British and Irish Governments with closing down the main paramilitary organizations and monitoring the normalization of security.
When I stood back from those responsibilities in 2011, I found that in the intervening 30 years those four questions about faith and the church were just as relevant as ever. In addition, the ecumenical movement in Ireland had entirely lost momentum. I had been involved in church youth work from an early age and later I had been a member of the Youth Board of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, the Chairman of the Irish Council of Churches Youth Committee, a member of the Central Council of the Irish Council of Churches and a member of the Human Rights Forum of the Irish Council of Churches from 1978 until 1987. When I refocussed my attention on what was going on in the churches in the United Kingdom, and arranged to meet up again with some of those who I had known as key figures in my days in church youth work, as well as with the younger people who were trying to keep the work of Ecumenical Youth Council of Europe going, I discovered that church and ecumenical youth work had all but disappeared in Britain and right across Europe.
For many years, my wife Joan and I had spent time at a second home in southern Burgundy and worshipped at the Taizé Community which was nearby. Every year, from Easter week through to All Saints Day, thousands of young people from all over Europe, particularly from Germany and Poland, can still be found living, studying and worshipping together at this remarkable ecumenical community, founded and led for many years by Brother Roger Schütz, the son of a Swiss Calvinist pastor. I had been finding some answers to my four questions about worship, language, community and a relationship with God in our attendance there, but when I looked around me at what was happening in the wider Christian faith communities it was very clear that young people had either embraced a more fundamentalist approach to belief and faith or had slipped away from a recognizable engagement with the Christian churches.
I also came to realize that there was a connection with political developments. When I was involved in the Ecumenical Youth Council of Europe, I was delighted to find that I could engage with youth leaders from right across the continent and from both sides of the Iron Curtain. I had known previously about the extraordinarily important role that Pope John Paul II had played in the dissolution of the Soviet Union, however I had not realized that much of the funding for the ecumenical youth work among the Protestant and Orthodox churches in the East and West, and indeed for the WCC as a whole, had been coming from churches in the West whose political commitment was to bring down Communism. Once the Berlin Wall fell the funding for ecumenical activities dried up. This was not just true of ecumenical youth activities but of the work of the WCC itself.
From the later times in the Irish Peace Process I had been addressing the problem of religious fundamentalism because my research moved into international terrorism, which, at least in some of its guises, had links to religious fundamentalism. 2 These studies had taken me back to the work of the most distinguished Irish Presbyterian theologian of the 20th century, J. Ernest Davey. 3 He had been viciously attacked by fundamentalists in his own denomination and had been taken to heresy trial in the 1920s. While he was acquitted and went on to become Moderator of the Church as well as Principal of Assembly’s College in Belfast (the main theological seminary of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland) he had to endure a great deal of criticism during his life-time and the more liberal theological tendency which identified with him suffered many setbacks after his death in the early 1960s. The connections with the political conflict that I had spent much of my life addressing were not hard to find. The leader of the anti-ecumenical tendency was Rev Dr. Ian R. K. Paisley, anti-Catholic preacher and the founder and leader of both the Free Presbyterian Church and the Democratic Unionist Party. He eventually became the First Minister of Northern Ireland and his party played a key role in the pro-Brexit campaign not only in Northern Ireland but in the United Kingdom as a whole. His close relationship with Bible belt leaders in the United States of America is another example of how these religious and political networks have had a pervasive and powerful influence on recent political developments – an equal and opposite impact to that I have attributed to Pope John Paul II.
I have spent a great deal of time thinking about why the ecumenical movement has so completely lost its momentum and why indeed it seems more common for those who come from more fundamentalist or at least conservative background to maintain their faith and commitment into succeeding generations than those with a more liberal disposition. I have concluded that there are various psychological reasons for this, some of them seemingly paradoxical, but the problem is not that the spiritual dimension of life is fading in significance. While the ecumenical movement and the leaderships of the various Christian churches – Roman, Orthodox and Reformed – have focussed on issues of doctrine, liturgy, structures and forms, the real driver for people is not these questions but is what we might term ‘religious experience’ and this is not something that is the prerogative of any one denomination or faith. While ecumenical conversations still have a place, the real challenge is now inter-faith dialogue, not alone for reasons of religious experience, but of political imperative. When I engaged with Iranian Shia colleagues to run a conference together in Oxford, they were clear that they could find much in common with people of a different faith than with those who dismissed and disregarded the transcendent altogether. 4
Karen Armstrong 5 and others have shown how the study of the religious texts of the different faith traditions is a worthwhile part of the inter-faith enterprise and others are even dipping their toes in the water of inter-faith worship 6 , though without a fuller exploration of the nature of religious experience as something common to all humanity, I wonder if there is not a danger that efforts towards joint worship may not fall foul of the same endless disputes over doctrine, liturgy, structures and forms that have sucked the life out of ecumenism. In that case, it may again drive young people not only to ask the same questions that I was asking more than 40 years ago, but just as I did, they may turn towards politics and other fields to find answers to the human dilemma, when eventually we must all return to address the same transcendental questions of meaning that have always engaged the minds and hearts of humankind. It is that conviction that has led me to address religious experience and to see it as a path towards not only to individual fulfilment but to ecumenical conversations, and beyond into inter-faith dialogue.
