Return of War

This morning I arrived at the church for our prayer meeting prior to the Sunday morning service to find a police cordon round the church building; there had been a report from a member of the public to say that there was a suspicious car parked about 50 yards from the church. For about a hour it looked like church would have to be cancelled and we would have to try to get the word out to the congregation but then someone had the idea of setting up in the local school, which is just across the street. So a small group of people went to the school and started to set up some chairs so that, at least those who did turn up would have somewhere to go. To make matters worse we were having a few guests from L'arch, Belfast to talk to us about their ministry.

People in this part of Belfast are extremely resilient and don't tend to get too excited when these things happen. Even after 10 years of peace an action by the dissident IRA, if that is who did this, is not enough to surprise or frighten them. Since the foundation of the church in 1867 there have been many difficult times: the early years where years of expansion in Belfast with thousands of people coming up from the country to find jobs in the new Linen industry, but then there was the first world war and the rise in Irish Nationalism, this was followed by the years following the great depression and then the second world War. Then in the early 60s and 70s there was the industrial competition from the far east which led to the downfall of the linen industry followed by the heavy engineering and the ship building which once led the world [the fact that the Titanic was built in Belfast simply serves to remind us that it was ok when it left Belfast!!!]. Then we had the Troubles which lasted 30 years [we could call this the Thirty years war]and led to the break up of relationships and destroyed the industrial and social landscape of our beloved land.

You could say that this part of our city has known only heartache and trouble and it is certainly the part of the island that had witnessed more murders and violence than any other part and yet it is still standing: wounded, yes but still standing. It is truly amazing and certainly more than a little disturbing that we remain undisturbed by the threat of a bomb. And at this moment of writing I would even lay a wager, if I did such things, that it will hardly be reported at all.

What should our response be? What should the world be doing? What should the middle class parts of Northern Ireland be doing by way of response? In the past the government of the United Kingdom simply dug in the hells and sent in the troops to "keep the peace". while churches like ours have had windows blown in by bombs and had the congregation terrorised and while we have witnessed the destruction of a community little by way of positive and constructive action has been taken. Money has been spent in millions but what really needs to be done has remained undone because it is too costly. What needs to be done is that we need to send in a need breed of troops. We need seriously minded Christians, followers of Jesus Christ, to settle in the hard places like ours to help us to make our churches soft places. We need followers of Jesus Christ to take up opportunities to build "intentional communities" of peace and harmony but those who can do this have preferred to remain aloof and keep their distance.

We need to declare war on evil and on the one who lies behind that evil-we need to fight against evil with truth and peace. Not with the conventional weapons of deadly warfare but with ploughshares. Are there people "out there" who would take up the challenge to resist evil and to resist the evil one with the "full armour of God".

In the end we did get to worship together. At about 10.30am the police cordon was lifted and we were allowed to enter the building. we did hear from our friends at l'arch who told us stories of how the weak and the marginalised have defeated the strong and how those on the margins of society have been brought into the centre. My congregation is on the edge of life in Belfast; we have many social, economic and educational needs and now we sit on the inter-face between protestant and catholic communities but our dream is to see this place become an attractive place to live where there are no longer two separate communities divided by the walls of war but one community of people who have worked their way through our differences and have learnt how to live with them and how to disagree in an agreeable way. We want the God of heaven, the God of the bible to send in His troops to win the war and to liberate the community. Someone reading this blog could be among those troops.

A New Ireland

In this new Ireland we will be a people with a whole new set of values. No longer will we judge people by their name or culture:they will not be defined according to their name or the school they attended. They will be judged only by the quality of their lives, by the contribution they bring to society, we will have a society liberated from the shackles of the past, a place where men and women have decided that they will be motivated and identified by the principles of God's Kingdom and none else.

Unfortunately the whole of Irish society is under the constant threat of secularism. The institutional church is in meltdown and thousands of people who leave our churches, of all the denominations, never return. Many of them go nowhere to worship the next Sunday but some go to one of the new churches.

While the churches are suffering the net effect is for the mass of people to loose their anchor on life and they slip into the "me" culture which makes it demands on life robing the whole of society of its cohesiveness and stability. Marriages are either serial or simply take place and anti-social behaviour has become common place. While all this happens we scamper around looking for scapegoats; the police or lack of appropriate numbers of police, politicians who can't even be trusted to make appropriate expense claims never mind work together with those they disagree with and then there is the church. Few people are asking the right questions about the kind of society we really want nor about the price we are prepared to pay to get it.

How are we going to get out of this quagmire? Tghe Old Testament says that "without a vision the people perish" and we have no vision for the future apart from the limited view of a political dispensation depending on what part of the community we come from. My vision is for a community of people who fear nothing but failing God, a community of people committed to God through Jesus Christ who will learn to live together: who can deal with differences of opinion in a mature way and who see all people throiugh the eyes of that same Christ who had compassion on the weak and the poor and the marginalised. A vision where the poor are blessed and not the rich, where the peacemakers are blessed and not the war mongers, where the meek and th gentle are the people who are honoured. An Ireland like this will be a place wherewe would all want to live. What do you think?

SEND IN THE TROOPS

Belfast is my city: I was born here and have lived most of my life here. For most of my 57 years we have experienced community strife. Sometimes that strife has broken out into outright bloodshed and all that time we have been divided into the two major opposing camps of Protestant and Catholic. Since 1999 we have told ourselves that the Good Friday Agreemenet really was good and in time it will deliver peace and harmony even when some have refused to call it good.

Last night at the switching on of the Christmas lights some young people from both sides decided to have some fun throwing stones at each other, reminding us of those days when the city centre was abandoned because the population was afraid. What are we going to do? What can we do? The truth is that we can do nothing, we are powerless. We fool ourselves if we really imagine that we are in sovereign control. Our city is as much fragmented as ever; we have walls to keep us apart and help us to feel safe. Yesterday I saw three police officers walking up our street. One of them had a machione gun strapped to his shoulder and I thought tomyself, "Is that supposed to make me feel safer?" At the moment approximatelyhalf the population wants to see more police on the streets to give the community confidence that the police are on the ball but the other half are not so sure. With the daily fight between the governing partners over the latest dispute everyone wonders how we can eveer see improvement and truly feel safer but there wedre worse days, blacker days when men and women were killed daily, much like in contemporary Afghanistan.

Yesterday I had an interview with the District Police Commander who was expressing his frustrations at the impossible task of being a community police service. He mused on the difficulty of an officer having a meaningful conversation while carrying a gun and wearing a flack jacket and a hat pulled down so that all that can be seen are his eyes. Daily "joe public" expresses frustration and growing cynicism by blaming the politicians and the PSNI rather than asking tehe obvious questions as to how we can build a better society.

In 1969 the British Prime Minister sent in the troops to establish peace in Belfast and Derry/Londonderry. That was the begining of the break up of the political system which came to an abrupt end when Edward Heath, prorogued the Northern Ireland Parliament and set up Direct Rule which lasted some 30 years until the Good Friday Agreemenbt became the basis for an agreed Ireland North and South.

What we need today is a whole new breed of Irishmen. People who are able to think about the whole community; people who have the ability to see beyond their own political and religious desires. The contemporarty world is very different to the society of 1969. Today we are much more secular,much more pluralist; much less inclined to listen to the views of the institutional church. We need a security system based upon a communal desire for real peace. We need a security system that rests on the dismantling of the walls and looks to troops of people on the streets dedicated to peace and harmony. This calls for a new heart in the community. We, who take the name of Christ in our hearts and on our lips, need to demonstrate an alternative way of living in a divided country. We must refuse to wrap the Christ we follow in either the Union flag or the flag of the Republic.Why could we not call for amoratorium on the national question for a while to allow maturity to set in? Has the time not come for us to answer the question: what do we really want for this place we call home? Do we desire peace so much that we will put the question of sovereignty on hold? We will never settle the question of union until we find peace.

What we need is a new movement of troops, a new wave of people power. Send in the troopps and send them in today to win the peace. Let a new security policy take charge, a plicybased upona new kingdom and a new power-let Christ reign in our lives and in our politics. Jesus has alrady dismantled the barriers between Jew and Gentile but we insist on rebuilding them: can we not stop? If we are unwilliong or unable to do this we have no rigt to blame the men and women who sit up in Stormont. After all they are carrying out our wishes.