Virtual Methodist

With the upcoming council and European elections I've been reflecting lately on the nature of Christian citizenship insofar as it applies to this corner of this island. My thinking is partly shaped by a series of Bible studies I'm leading at church based around the 25 year old, yet still painfully relevant, ECONI document, 'For God and His Glory Alone', partly by reading I've done around a sermon for this Sunday on what we mean when we pray 'your Kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven', partly by some of the ideas in  my ''banned'' Thought for the Day and partly in response to the attacks on the Alliance Party Offices in East Belfast on Tuesday night , and again last night . Whilst I do not believe that democracy, as we know it, is especially endorsed by God - indeed the Bible has nothing specific to say on the matter, I am worried by any state where it seems to be acceptable that the offices of a democratic party, a...

28 years ago I headed off to university in Edinburgh kicking the dust of Northern Ireland off my proverbial sandals, never intending to return, like many of my generation, particularly on the Protestant/Unionist side of the divide. I had had enough of the Troubles in my native statelet... they had been going on for most of my life, and by that stage I felt, quoting the words of my least favourite Shakespeare play "A plague on both your houses." 3 years later, however, a group of people some of whom I knew, most of whom I didn't, came together as Evangelical Contribution on Northern Ireland (ECONI) to draft and release a document entitled "For God and his Glory Alone". The title was a conscious and direct challenge to the motto of the UVF and mental framework of many Ulster protestants brought up on the mythologuy of Carson and the Somme etc - "For God and Ulster", which too often got reversed in practice with people putting Ulster (or at least the s...

I'm currently reading (among others) a local history of the area in which I minister, Dundonald, on the eastern outskirts of Belfast, entitled “The Most Unpretending of Places” . That is the origin of the grainy photograph at the head of this post, and according to the author, Peter Carr, it is a picture of some citizens of Dundonald signing the Ulster Covenant on the 12th September, 1912. Either the people of Dundonald were ahead of the curve and wanted to sign that document a fortnight before Edward Carson appended his signature to the top of it, or else the author got his dates wrong… It was on this day, September 28th 1912, that the majority of the adult Protestant population of Ulster signed a document known as the Solemn League and Covenant, in order to articulate their absolute opposition to the Home Rule Bill then being proposed by the British government. This piece of legislation would have left Ireland still firmly within the British Empire, but many within Ulster beli...