By Andrew Irwin, Juicy Ecumenism. (Image: Unsplash)
After the passage of 28 years, old tensions have abruptly resurfaced in Northern Ireland. Global news reports from Portadown, a small and otherwise insignificant industrial town, are raising questions about how much has changed under the surface of a hard won peace following The Troubles.
How quickly can familiar divisions reclaim our attention and then narrow our imagination until the future begins to look like an endless cycle of the past? Yet, there is a deeper question for the body of Christ, the Church.
What does our worship and witness mean in communities where Christian identity remains entangled with the culture and the loyalties it demands?
We wonder what witness and worship look like as tension ripples across our island. The Christians who gather in the nearby town church almost seem an afterthought. Even as leaders of the denominations concerned have called for reconciliation and sought to mediate locally – a request ignored – and yet one that leaves us wondering what is the role of “the Church” and our mission at times like these.
The question is simple: does ordinary Christian faithfulness carry a hope that our familiar political arguments and culture cannot provide, and how do we renew our hope in Gospel hope?
In a previous article I described a “poverty of hope” in communities where generations of violence, neglect, and limited opportunity have made a hopeful future difficult to imagine; and the idea of a gospel-vibrant church seems impossible. Ministering in North Belfast, I encountered both the weight of that figurative “winter” lived as normal life, and the extraordinary strength so many people display when they strive to do more than simply survive. Yet, the danger is when “winter” becomes normal in the life of the Church, and our own expectations of what God might do diminish – that is when a poverty of hope becomes a hopeless mission.