Newell joked that he has been coming to Clonard longer than many of the Catholics who were attending the service, pointing out that he first came to Clonard in 1981.

Newell’s long-standing relationships with people at Clonard, and his impeccable, lived-out commitment to ecumenism over the years, enabled him to deliver a powerful message on the theme ‘What Does Communion Mean?’

You can watch a video of the Gospel reading, and Newell’s sermon, here. The Gospel relates the story of Jesus’ calling of the first disciples, fishermen who quickly left what they were doing to follow Jesus.

Newell reflects on that passage, emphasising that the fishermen brothers from Capernaum – Peter and Andrew; and James and John – had to leave prosperous and promising careers for Jesus’ sake. Then, they had to learn to get along with, and love, the once-hated tax collector Matthew. The following are excerpts from Newell’s sermon.

Ken Newell on ‘What Does Communion Mean?’

Jesus began to show them [Peter, Andrew, James and John] that they were all brothers, and even in the most unlikely people [Matthew] there are hidden treasures that Jesus can unlock.

… Jesus was teaching them about communion, with each other and with him. That the hands that must reach out to receive the body of Christ in the Eucharist are taken by Jesus … and expanded to reach out to the body of Christ in the other churches.

Now if there is a spiritual exercise I want you to take home that is revolutionary and life changing, here it is: when you reach out your hands in the Eucharist to take the body of Christ and draw it into yourself, automatically your hands will be stretched out to reach out to his body in all the other Christian churches. That’s the deal of the gospel, and that’s the story of the Christian faith.

… Peter discovered on the beach that day that the parochial spirit … was expanded by Jesus … Jesus [expanded Peter’s parochial spirit] … as wide as the new emerging universal church.

To be catholic is go be universal. … The heart of being catholic means the development and the expansion from the parochial to a universal heart. .. For Peter to be expanded he had to let something go …

If you don’t feel your Christian spirit to be expanding and to be reaching out to those of other Christian traditions in this city and in this country, I’m asking you is there something you need to let go to let Jesus expand your spirit?’

• Could it be fear? If I go there I’ll feel out of place and uncomfortable?
• … Could it be a hidden hurt, something was done to you in … your life? That someone from the other community put you down? And if they did can I apologise? From the bottom of my heart, for all the hurt and pain that my community has inflicted on yours, and on your church. … Is there a hurt there that you need to let go of?
• … Or is there in a back of your mind … a sense of pride … [that] I belong to a great big church, I’m not interested in these minnows? Well I’ll tell you something, Jesus is. Is there a pride that stops you connecting?
• … Or is there a feeling of indifference? … Why would I be interested in going to any other church or meeting any other people?

Jesus is not indifferent to our divisions and that’s why he prays for our unity.

I end with this radical truth at the very heart of our faith:

If tonight, you get down on your knees at your bedside and you say, our Father, who art in heaven; and if I get down by my bedside and pray to our Father in heaven, that means that we have one Father. Whatever church we come from.

Here’s the radical thing. If he’s our Father, what does that make us to each other? We are brothers and sisters. We are blood brothers and blood sisters through the cross. And when we make the sign of the cross we take up a lifestyle that is prepared to move out of a parish mentality and cross all the divisions that have separated Christians in this country for centuries.

We’re here to restore the family and bring it together again. We are here to win that battle. And friends, can I say to you, we’re not playing for a draw. And neither is the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Because communion means connecting.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.

I recommend you read the full post for yourselves. It covers a lot of ground, from Fischer’s description of the Conflict Transformation module to her thoughts on the hell debate sparked by Rob Bell’s Love Wins.

The Conflict Transformation module features an intensive week at Corrymeela, where Little and Verwoerd guide the students through the process they use with various groups from opposing ‘sides’ in the conflict in and about Northern Ireland (and from other conflicts from around the world).

Fischer sees conflict as an inevitable part of life and she urges those in the emergent conversation to face up to – rather than hide from – it:

I bring this up here, because I see the danger of continuing a bad ‘family’ trait even into this new emergent generation.  I grew up in a non-christian home and a Christian extended family, both of which pretended that if we didn’t talk about conflict, it meant that we didn’t have any;  I studied theology at an inter-denominational college where conflict as a theme in and of itself was never addressed theologically; and I spent years in churches, seminars, conferences, retreats and missions (Evangelical, Charismatic, and Lutheran; in America, Sweden, Australia, PNG and Germany), where, besides an occasional reference to Matthew 18:15-17, and the ever-present lapel to forgive, there was no strategy and no underlying concept for helping their communities deal with conflict constructively.  The cardinal assumption being that good Christians don’t do conflict!

But rather than fostering fraternities exuding peace and justice in the world, this refusal to take conflict head on theologically, exacerbates the friction inevitable in any human plural, and conditions cultures to fester and fracture over matters both profound and piddling.  Of greater consequence even than the personal stories of disillusionment with Christian fellowships that abound, as grim as that is, however, is the general disconnect that many faith communities and institutions have toward complex societal ills, the prolific number of armed conflicts around the world, and trans-global injustices.  With the exception of my brief time in Church of the Savior, DC, of which Sojourners Magazine is a part, nary a mention of these realities in the Christian sub-cultures I’ve experienced in over twenty years!

She sees some of the present debate about hell, whether you agree with Rob Bell or not, as distracting from more important questions in the here and now such as dealing with conflict, and one of its roots, poverty.

As a lecturer, I’m of course pleased to see Fischer making links between one of our modules and debates in the emerging church. The emerging church is one of my current research areas and I’m always looking for connections between what I know from the fields of conflict resolution and reconciliation, and my work on the emerging church.

I’m also intrigued by her observation that Christians have refused to take conflict on theologically, other than issuing some rather glib urgings for victims to ‘forgive’.

This is not a million miles from the argument put forward in the new book about the churches in the Northern Ireland peace process by John Brewer, Gareth Higgins and Francis Teeney: that the churches as institutions didn’t adequately analyse the conflict sociologically or theologically – meaning that they struggled to help transform it.

I look forward to the emerging conversation moving forward on these themes.

This is the Review:

This book is the fruit of very extensive research and analysis and explores a wide variety of backgrounds and faith journeys.

As an academic study, it is remarkably free of jargon and enables the general readers to gain a deeper understanding of how individuals experience their religion over time and of the factors and circumstances which influence expressions of faith.

The authors demonstrate that evangelicals in Northern Ireland are a very diverse group and that the stereotypes which surface from time to time in public debate are far from representative of evangelicalism.

A very important aim of this book is to explore the everyday life of evangelicals and how they are coping with the rapid pace of change in post-conflict Northern Ireland.

They affirm the conclusions of other published sociological studies with regard to the role of religion in providing a sense of identity in uncertain political circumstances and how this can lead to the deepening of division. However, this study shows that there is a wide variety of ways in which evangelicals engage with politics and social and ethical issues. It is a very complex picture.

Thanks to extensive qualitative research – mostly through in-depth interviews – the authors have been able to gain valuable insights into why and how religious beliefs change over time and to identify the factors which impact most significantly on people’s faith journeys.

The fieldwork carried out by Mitchell and Ganiel reveals an important link between political and religious change, but what distinguishes this study from so many carried out during the past generation is that it deals with the changing pattern of religious belief in a post-conflict situation.

This is a well-written book with extensive notes, bibliography and index sections. It will serve as a valuable textbook for those wishing to carry out further research in the complex subject of religion in Northern Ireland.

(George Irwin, Church of Ireland Gazette, 30 September 2011)

The best place to purchase the book is on the UCD Press website, for a reduced price of €22.

Other Resources:

Book Launch at East Belfast Mission (including remarks by Glenn Jordan)

Book Review by Alan in Belfast on Slugger O’Toole

Interview on Sunday Sequence (BBC Radio Ulster)

The initiative, which began last year, is an opportunity for Christians from different traditions to celebrate communion/Eucharist together.

Those who attend observe the discipline of the Catholic Church. This means that Catholics and those from Protestant traditions do not actually share the bread and the wine. Rather, those who are not permitted by their church to partake in another’s service simply observe, or receive a blessing.

I think In Joyful Hope is an imperfect but powerful way to draw attention to the pain that many ‘ordinary’ Christians feel about the continued divisions in the church – and to express their desire to heal those divisions.

This is a subject Fr Gerry Reynolds of Clonard Monastery spoke about during a homily on 30 October.

Fr Gerry introduced the ‘Living Bells’ initiative for the upcoming Eucharistic Congress in Dublin in June.

The Eucharistic Congress is of course a major international event for the Catholic Church. Fr Reynolds is among those Irish Catholics who see it as an opportunity to invite Protestant Christians to join in the celebrations.

Since March, a special Eucharistic Congress Bell, from the Dominican Convent in Portstewart, has been travelling throughout Ireland. The idea behind ‘living bells’ is that Christians will joyfully spread the word about the Congress, and in the process have their faith and their relationships with other transformed.

You can watch Fr Gerry’s homily in full here.

Below, I’ve quoted liberally from his text:

Fr Gerry Reynolds on the Living Bells of the Eucharistic Congress

It’s 80 years since Ireland was host to an international Eucharistic Congress. And the congress will be so totally different … the church is in a new place … the old enmities are fading away … the various churches are growing in friendship with one another and that’s going to make things very different.

Cardinal Brady said the Congress would be an event for everyone. Why’s that?

First of all, because it is about Christ. Christ our saviour, our redeemer. Christ is for everyone. It’s a proclamation of his presence among us, a celebration of his gift of himself among us in the bread and wine.

[Second] … The congress is about our shared identity as Christians … all who are baptised are bounded in the body of Christ … we live in communion with Christ and with one another in him. So the congress is about that common shared identity, the grace of God that makes us one. [Though] not fully one, not fully reconciled …

Thirdly, the congress is about our common mission. All the churches share that mission to bring the good news of the gospel to all the peoples of the world. And for that mission Jesus prayed, may they all be one, so that the world may believe.

So the congress is about making an end to our divisions … We must hope, expect great transformation and cooperation together in our common mission to bring the good news of the gospel especially to the generation of younger Irish people … [We must] bring the experience of Christ to them that will transform their lives.

[Not long ago]… Pope Benedict … was speaking in Erfurt where Maritn Luther was a monk … He said in the 16^th century Christians emphasised what divided them. So what came of that, we know.

But in our time Christians are growing to emphasise what unites them: the grace of God, the communion in the Holy Spirit, the love of the Father, that sharing in the life of God. And our great task is to make visible the invisible bond that is between us. To make it visible in the way we work together and the way we celebrate.

… [The] call of the bell is to be converted to Christ, to live his life, to give our whole lives for him.

Fr Gerry then suggests ways that Christians can become ‘living bells’ of the Congress, including praying the ‘living bells’ prayer that was distributed on leaflets at that day’s mass. He also urged listeners to participate in ecumenical activities, listing those that are supported by Clonard such as the Unity Pilgrims, ecumenical day at the Clonard Novena, joint bible study, joint prayers of adoration, and the In Joyful Hope initiative.

He concludes by saying of the In Joyful Hope initiative:

We live with the discipline of the Catholic Church because at our grassroots level we can’t change it. But we long to see it changed and see the common Eucharist that Jesus destines for us all.

The remaining In Joyful Hope Celebrations for 2011-2012 are:

St Malachy’s Roman Catholic Church, 23 November 2011

Joanmount Methodist Church, 7 February 2012

Fitzroy Presbyterian Church, 23 May 2012

(Image: St Malachy’s, sourced on Wikipedia)

This is my final post on the book, intended as a general review of the book. It’s my hope that the review will prompt others to revisit – or to consider for the first time – some of Hurley’s ideas. I’d encourage people to try and get their hands on a copy of the book and read it for themselves.

I work at the Irish School of Ecumenics, and I am often greeted with a blank stare when I tell people where I work. I know that it can’t be taken for granted that people actually know what Ecumenics is. So, it’s helpful that significant chapters in the book are taken up with definitions, which I have explored in earlier posts on this blog:

Fr Michael Hurley on Ecumenical Tithing

Fr Michael Hurley on Ecumenical Theology and Ecumenics

Fr Michael Hurley on Ecumenism

Although published more than a decade ago, the concern that motivated Hurley to write the book is strikingly contemporary – the sense that the ecumenical movement is in the doldrums.

The words Hurley writes in the introduction (p. 1) could have been written today:

‘But despite some remarkable success … ecumenical efforts have not only failed to achieve their goal but the whole movement has, it would seem, failed to maintain its momentum. It has lost its drive, its nerve, its sense of direction. It is now like a ship becalmed needing the mighty wind of the Spirit to get under way again.’

Indeed, last year I reflected on a 2008 article in Doctrine and Life by my Irish School of Ecumenics colleague Andrew Pierce, in which he argued that ecumenism in Ireland remained uninspired and uninspiring.

There are also several chapters that bemoan the shortcomings in the Irish churches’ contributions to peace on this island, and aspects of these read as if they could be written today.

A chapter called ‘The Church of Ireland: Challenges for the Future’ considers the difficulties posed by its relationship with the Orange Order, difficulties that have not yet gone away. Other chapters deal with the challenges of churches caught up in Ireland’s sectarian system can meaningfully promote. forgiveness and reconciliation.

Given this diagnosis, much of the rest of the book could be understood as Hurley’s plea to get people excited about ecumenism and, in the Irish context, reconciliation. This is done through an eclectic mix of chapters, organised into three sections:

Ecumenical Vision

Ecumenical Issues

Ecumenical Initiatives

The section on ecumenical initiatives offers fascinating insights into the history of the churches in Ireland. Chapter topics ranged from the Milltown Park Public Lecture Series 1960-1969, the publication of the book Irish Anglicanism 1869-1969, and the formation of the Irish School of Ecumenics and the now-defunct Columbanus Community of Reconciliation (which was housed in the building now occupied by the Belfast campus of the Irish School of Ecumenics).

Reading the chapters on the Milltown Park Lectures and Irish Anglicanism was like stepping back in time. The socio-religious world Hurley described seems alien in contrast to the Ireland of today.

Can you imagine a church service to celebrate the launch of a book on Anglicanism being broadcast live during prime time on RTE today? Or can you imagine 700 people turning up at Milltown Park on a winter’s evening to hear talks on ‘drugs, brainwashing and the self’ and ‘psychiatry, the moralist and sin’, both delivered by Catholic priests (p. 243)?

Hurley also writes that Eamon DeValera attended several of the Milltown Park lectures, which made me wonder to what extent this founding father of the Irish state realised that the Ireland that he ‘dreamed of’ was fading away?

The historical chapters also provided some perspective on the challenges faced by ecumenists of that generation. While the challenges for Christians committed to Christian unity today might be different, the qualities of patience and perseverance needed then are also surely needed now.

In the other sections, Hurley considers themes of both general ecumenical interest, and others specific to the Irish context. He offers suggestions on how to make baptism and Eucharist more ecumenically meaningful. But again, today, it seems that the practice of both remain as divided as ever in our churches.

Other chapters are Hurley’s own reflections on how the wider church can honour the contributions of Christians of other traditions. So as a Catholic, he praises the insights of Presbyterian John Calvin (in a chapter called ‘Catholicity: The Witness of Calvin’s Institutes’), Methodist John Wesley (in a chapter called ‘Wesley Today and Evangelisation Today’), and Anglican George Otto Simms (in a chapter called ‘George Otto Simms: Ecumenical Examplar 1910-1991’).

I think these reflections can be understood as part of Hurley’s own process of ecumenical formation – really delving into the thought and the spiritual life of Christians of other traditions, and finding there real insight and common ground.

Glenn is the author of the 2001 book, Not of this World? Evangelical Protestants in Northern Ireland. Claire and I were of course influenced by his book so we were keen to hear what he had to say about our research.

You can listen to Glenn’s remarks in full by clicking the play button below:

I’ve reproduced a selection of Glenn’s remarks here:

The evangelical community which has helped shape me to a large extent … [has] … been picked over and studied by so many people, as the abundance of the studies referenced [in this book] … bear reference to. … Academics … have pinned [evangelicals] wriggling to the page and picked them apart. Many of those studies have done that analysis, fixed them to the formulated phrase, without much by way of sympathy or the understanding of an insider. …

[But] what’s obvious to me … once you reach … the stories of the people … the book really does take off. And what I learned from this … was here were two researchers who had a deep sympathetic understanding of that community … and also an ear for a good story. It’s made up of stories of people who spoke incredibly honestly about their experiences of faith, some of which have been very painful. …

You [Claire and Gladys] are to be commended for what is a first class contribution to the sociology of religion, yes, but also to the understanding of this often much maligned community in Northern Ireland.

You reminded me of the gentle goodness of so much of evangelicalism, but also of the fear that constrains it so often, and also the social awkwardness of the community that sometimes holds it back and expresses itself in anger and disaffection.

… You captured some of the complexity of the evangelical community, demonstrating for me that there is no single coherent narrative that captures the journey of people, of evangelicals. Evangelical expressions of faith are as varied and different as the people that tell those stories. … For people outside that community that is a message that desperately needs to be heard.

… I think above all what you have done in the book is that you have dignified the stories themselves. You have respected those stories. Whilst you have the objectivity of the academic you have not coldly pinned those stories … you have dignified the stories, reminding me as I read of the heroic nature of the ordinary stories of everyday people who have had to face extraordinary events that have been part and parcel of growing up in Northern Ireland through the history of the Troubles. Stories that don’t make the headlines, but nonetheless are extraordinary ones. Extraordinary stories of people who have sought to make sense of faith, through a conflict here, through the framework of their faith.

…[To those of you here who were interviewed for the book, Claire and Gladys] have respected your stories, which is a serious and deep contribution as well.

[You are to be commended for] respecting and dignifying the stories of ordinary people trying to hold on to faith in extraordinary circumstances.

Claire and I are deeply grateful for Glenn’s complimentary remarks.

We thank him and everyone who participated in the production of the book, all those who attended the launch, and Prof Geraldine Smyth, Head of the Irish School of Ecumenics, who helped host the evening on our behalf.

The best way to purchase the book is via the UCD Press website, where you can get it at a reduced rate of €22.

You can read another review of the book, by Blogger Alan in Belfast, here.

(image: Claire Mitchell, Glenn Jordan and Gladys Ganiel at the launch of Evangelical Journeys)

My talk is titled ‘Surveying Religion’s Public Role: Perspectives on Diversity, Reconciliation and Ecumenism.’ It will draw on some of the research conducted for my School’s Visioning 21st Century Ecumenism research project.

The seminar is a joint venture of Dublintellectual and the Hugh Lane, and the purpose is to explore representations of conflict and post conflict in art and culture. The event is in conjunction with the Rita Donagh & Richard Hamilton Civil Rights etc. and Willie Doherty: DISTURBANCE exhibition running to Jan 15th 2011.

This is the programme line-up:

WELCOME ADDRESS
Jessica O’Donnell & Barbara Dawson, Hugh Lane
Dr. Marisa Ronan, Director, Dublintellectual
SPEAKERS
Dr. Declan Long, NCAD, “Spectres of the Political: Art and Aftermath in Northern Ireland.”
Dr. Eamonn Hughes, Queens University, “Conflict & Popular Culture.”
Dr. Gladys Ganiel, Trinity, “Surveying Religion’s Public Role: Perspectives on Diversity, Reconciliation and Ecumenism.”
Prof. Liam Kennedy, UCD, “Historicising Photography & Conflict”
Wine Reception 9:00-9:30

Please book in advance at: www.hughlane.ie/education