Ireland’s Charismatics: Planting Seeds of Unity

Catholic Pentecostals in Ireland now outnumber Protestant Pentecostals, according to observers. Moreover, there has been significant cooperation between Catholics and Protestants involved in the so-called charismatic renewal movement—a development virtually unprecedented in Irish church history. The number of the movement’s conferences and centers, committees, charismatic prayer groups—and critics—has grown considerably in the last two years.

More than 1,200 people registered for the first National Conference on Charismatic Renewal in Ireland held in Dublin a year ago. Planners were expecting at least twice that number and possibly as many as 5,000 at this month’s annual conference. Major addresses were to be given by Cardinal Leon Joseph Suenens of Belgium and by Presbyterian minister Tom Smail, the newly appointed director of the Fountain Trust in Great Britain (see following story). A variety of workshops were to be led by teams of Catholics and Protestants.

Several Protestant and Catholic charismatic leaders combined forces and funds last year to establish a Christian Renewal Centre at Rostrevor in Northern Ireland. Rostrevor is a small village about halfway between Belfast and Dublin, the capitals of the “two Irelands,” north and south. The project is under the leadership of Anglican cleric Cecil Kerr of the Church of Ireland, a former chaplain at Queen’s University in Belfast.

Now, a year later, nine people from several different denominations live in community at the Rostrevor center. Each member of the group, including Kerr, receives about $8.80 a week for spending money; all else is communal. The center stresses faith living with no prescribed income or endowment. According to Kerr, the purpose of the center “is to provide a place of prayer, of renewal and reconciliation for people from all traditions in Ireland. We believe that Ireland’s problems can only be solved when we come together to receive the reconciliation which Christ has wrought for us on the cross.” He projects that the center eventually will house twelve residents with room for about twenty visitors.

To coordinate the national conferences, help to found other renewal centers in Ireland, and foster renewal in the country in general, a ten-person National Service Committee was set up earlier this year. Its seven Catholic and three Protestant members come from all parts of Ireland. The three Protestants are Kerr, Presbyterian deaconness Yvonne Cooke from Northern Ireland, and Joy Marston, an Anglican from the Republic. Among Catholics on the committee are Larry Kelly, a businessman from Newtownabbey in Northern Ireland and one of the first Catholics involved in the renewal in Ulster; Father Martin Tierney, chaplain at the Dublin airport and a leading figure in the charismatic movement in that city; and Dublin businessman Thomas Flynn, the author of a recent controversial volume entitled The Charismatic Renewal and the Irish Experience (Hodder and Stoughton, 1974). Overall, the committee lineup lists two clergymen, one nun, one monk, and six laypersons.

Extensive lay participation has been one of the marks of the renewal movement in both the Republic and Northern Ireland. In the south, leadership is about evenly divided between priests, nuns, monks, and the laity. Father Tierney says that more and more lay people are getting involved, many of them thinking and acting for themselves religiously for the first time. “That’s why many Irish Catholic bishops are skeptical of the movement,” he said in an interview.

In Northern Ireland, most of the leaders are either laypeople (from various churches) or Protestant clergymen. Few Catholic priests have participated, and the Catholic hierarchy in the north is generally suspicious if not hostile.

In both north and south, the number of charismatic prayer groups is increasing steadily. The largest of many such groups in Ireland is the Eustace Street prayer meeting in Dublin. Beginning in January, 1972, with twelve people at a different location, a large throng now gathers every Friday evening at the Friends Meeting House on Eustace Street for a service of prayer, praise, hymn-singing, Bible-reading, testimonies, speaking in tongues, interpretation, and prophecy. At one recent meeting more than 700 attended, and some 150 were turned away for lack of space. Most of those who attend are Catholics. There is a sprinkling of Anglicans, Presbyterians, mainline Pentecostals, and Plymouth Brethren.

Charismatic prayer meetings in Northern Ireland are not as large as those in the south. Significantly, however, they are one of the few forums in strife-torn Ulster where Protestants and Catholics gather for extended periods of open communication. The meetings follow much the same pattern as charismatic prayer groups anywhere. The largest of them reportedly is the Antrim Road group in Belfast which attracts from sixty to a hundred people weekly. According to one northern leader, scores of similar but smaller weekly prayer groups meet all over Ulster, most of them numbering from twenty to forty in attendance.

The prayer groups in the north differ from those in the south in that they are predominantly Protestant. As in the south, the majority of charismatics are from the majority faith. However, Catholic participation in the north has grown dramatically since Catholics first became involved in the renewal there in 1971.

Director Smail of the Fountain Trust, a Presbyterian pastor in Ulster at the time, was one of the early leaders of the movement among Protestants in the north. Initially, Presbyterians took the lead in the spread of the renewal. However, Smail reports that today the charismatic movement is growing faster among Catholics than among any other group in Northern Ireland. Further, he indicated that it is growing faster among Methodists and Anglicans than among Presbyterians, who tend to be the most resistant to the movement among the mainline Protestant denominations (except perhaps for the Baptists, a much smaller group than the Presbyterians).

Smail stressed that in the charismatic movement in Northern Ireland “the situation is fluid and growing, and currently exists under a certain amount of threat.” Other charismatic leaders in Ulster agreed with his assessment. The Catholic hierarchy and denominational leaders are wary of the movement, and militants on both sides dislike the fraternizing between Catholics and Protestants.

But even under the “threat,” a number of significant breakthroughs have been reported in Protestant-Catholic relationships in charismatic meetings. For example, at one gathering in Belfast a young Catholic girl whose close relative had been murdered by Protestant militants embraced a Protestant girl whose brother had been killed by the Irish Republican Army. In another instance, a rough, hard-drinking, nominally Protestant shipyard worker was converted at a recent charismatic gathering in Rostrevor. After receiving the baptism of the Spirit he confessed his former hatred of “Taigs” (Catholics) and announced: “I think I used to be the most bigoted man in the Belfast shipyards, but the Holy Spirit seemed to come into my life and push the hate right out.”

But not all is sweetness and light. Critics of the movement have increased in recent months. Father Tierney in Dublin frankly admits that most of the Irish bishops “would like for it to go away.” Firebrand Ian R. K. Paisley, Ulster’s best-known preacher-politician and minister of the large and influential Martyr’s Memorial Free Presbyterian Church in Belfast, has spoken against the charismatics.

Herbert M. Carson, a leading Irish Baptist minister, questions the movement’s doctrinal base and expresses concern that Protestant charismatics are unwilling to come to grips with Catholic charismatics’ adherence to Rome’s teachings on the papacy and the Virgin Mary. Other Baptists and many Presbyterians criticize the movement for emphasizing experience and the subjective without a counterbalancing stress on doctrinal and scriptural objectivity.

In response, Father Tierney asserts that the movement is interested not in doctrinal wrangling but in “a real mingling of heart with heart, united in the heart of Christ,” and “in learning to live together and love together in a deeper way through the power of the Spirit.”

Other charismatic leaders frankly admit there are unresolved problems of Protestant-Catholic relationships and doctrine. But they emphasize that the renewal is thoroughly evangelical in that it stresses repentance and commitment to Christ as essentials of the Christian life. “The last thing we want and the last thing Ireland needs is a new denomination,” Kerr declared in an interview. He insisted that after the Holy Spirit breaks down the walls “the doctrine will follow.”

For the moment, Tom Flynn’s observation about the spiritual and social dynamics of the movement in Ireland appears to be largely true: “The most important universal feature of the charismatic renewal is that it is bringing Christians of all denominations together in a new and exciting way.” Still to be demonstrated, however, is the renewal’s power to sweep away the memory of the Irish past, silence the guns of the terrorists, and create the kind of trust necessary to solve the present conflict in Ireland.

PREPARED

Retired Foursquare pastor Melville S. Taylor had often said that when it came time for him to die he wanted the Lord to take him while he was preaching. Last month he was guest preacher at Baseview Assembly of God church in Emerado, North Dakota. He said when he started to preach that he hadn’t realized until then what the Lord wanted him to talk about, commented Steven Robbins, Baseview’s pastor. “Then he talked about eternal life. He stated in his message that he loved his family, but that if the Lord chose to take him home he was prepared to go right now.”

A moment later, said Robbins, the 71-year-old Taylor collapsed and fell from the podium, apparently having suffered a heart attack. Attempts to revive him failed.

Taylor’s long-standing wish had been honored.

Charismatic Concerns

A number of important meetings of charismatics were held last month.

In London, the Fountain Trust—Britain’s leading charismatic organization—brought together 1,800 persons for a five-day conference that stressed among other things charismatic involvement in social action. Among the speakers were Archbishop Bill Burnett of Cape Town, South Africa; Jesuit theologian Paul Lebeau, an aide to Belgium’s Cardinal Leon Josef Suenens; Bishop Chiu Ban It of Singapore; Dominican priest Francis MacNutt of St. Louis, one of the first Catholic Pentecostals to be involved in a healing ministry; and Anglican cleric Michael Harper, 44, founder of Fountain Trust.

Burnett, reports correspondent Michael Garde, disclosed that he had received the “baptism in the Spirit” when he became an archbishop and that the experience had turned him around theologically and socially. It had been easy to support the oppressed and to attack the government, but it was something else to love the oppressor, he said. Vast structural changes need to occur in South Africa if Christian justice is to be achieved, he told a press conference. But, he asserted, it is primarily people who must be changed by the Holy Spirit. Otherwise, “you change the furniture but don’t change what happens in the room.”

Lebeau told how he had moved from pacifism into Marxism but how the charismatic experience led him to seek ways to be truly Christian apart from any ideological movement. (Most discussion groups, while endorsing justice and liberation from oppressors, condemned the use of violence in obtaining social goals.)

On another topic, Harper acknowledged that division exists between Protestant and Catholic charismatics (Catholic participants had their own daily mass and did not participate in the communion service that concluded the conference) and between charismatic and non-charismatic evangelicals. He stressed the need for continuing communication and for grappling with the theological issues.

It was Harper’s last speech as director of Fountain Trust. He announced his retirement, saying he wants to devote more time to study and writing and perhaps take on pastoral responsibilities. An aide, Presbyterian clergyman Tom Smail of Northern Ireland, was named as his successor.

Conferences of Catholic charismatics attracted 450 to Manchester, England, 3,500 to San Diego, 6,000 to Detroit, and others were scheduled this month and next. Joyous occasions, they nevertheless were held against an ominous backdrop of increasingly vocal criticism of the movement. Critics in some Catholic circles think the church’s bishops ought to investigate the movement to determine how Catholic and how responsible it is.

In Minneapolis, an estimated 20,000 attended the fourth International Lutheran Conference on the Holy Spirit—the largest crowd yet. Catholics were the most numerous among the one-third non-Lutheran registrants. The sponsoring committee, made up of clergy and laypersons from the three main Lutheran bodies, is chaired by Larry Christenson, an American Lutheran Church pastor of San Pedro, California. Richard Denny, a St. Paul, Minnesota, businessman, was named to a full-time post as executive secretary.

A recurring theme emphasized by a number of the speakers: Stay in your church and be an instrument for new life and love. Also stressed was the need for charismatics to get involved in social action. Said Christenson: “When a concern for the needs of the world is matched with a concern to discern the will of the Lord as to how, when, and where to minister to that need, we [will] see a charismatic explosion in the social arena.”

Lausanne: Continuing The Action

Meeting for the first time since the Lausanne Continuation Committee’s first executive secretary assumed his post, the LCC’s executive committee instructed him to put a high priority on regional and local action. Gottfried Osei-Mensah, a Ghanaian who left the pastorate of the Nairobi First Baptist Church for the international post, was assigned itineration duties around the globe during the coming year.

First on his agenda will be a November meeting of the South American participants in last year’s evangelism congress in Lausanne. The Rio de Janeiro meeting will be convened by Nilson Fanini, a Brazilian Baptist pastor.

At the sessions, which took place in London, the executive committee heard reports from a national congress on evangelism held in Nigeria in August as a direct outcome of the Lausanne congress. It was attended by 1,000 participants from twenty-seven denominations. A number of topics were discussed, including “Christianity as an African religion,” and these discussions became the basis for a declaration of evangelical faith and action in Nigeria.

In another action, the panel directed that the committee’s information function be expanded to include, among other things, the publication of a bulletin to report on evangelistic work. An initial bulletin was published in April after the LCC’s first gathering in Mexico City. It went only to registered Lausanne participants. In London, the executive committee directed that circulation and coverage be enlarged.

The next meeting of the full LCC was planned for January 1976 in Atlanta.

Incarceration In Korea

Four prominent South Korean clergymen, including the general secretary of the Korean National Council of Churches (KNCC), received jail sentences of six to ten months for improper use of foreign relief funds.

The four are: KNCC head Kim Kwan Suk, a Presbyterian; Pastor Park Hyung Kyu of Seoul’s First Presbyterian Church, who is a leader of the Seoul Metropolitan Community Organization (SMCO); Kwon Ho Kyung, assistant pastor of Park’s church; and Cho Seung Hyok, a Methodist associated with the SMCO.

They were accused by the government of embezzling a slum-work grant of $47,000 from a West German organization, Bread for the World. The trial established that most of the money was used for community-organization projects among slum-dwellers instead of for food or other aid. Some of the money went to families of imprisoned opponents of the government, part of it for living expenses, part of it to hire lawyers. The prosecution insisted that the money has been misappropriated—even though a Bread for the World representative testified that the use of the funds fell within their intended purpose. The judge dismissed the embezzlement charges but found them guilty of misuse of the money.

The four have been in trouble with the government in the past over issues of repression and freedom; Park was sentenced to prison on two earlier occasions.

Nearly two dozen missionaries and about 300 others, among them a number of Christians, were in court this month when the sentences were announced. Afterward, some of them gathered outside and began singing “We shall overcome,” but police scuffled with them and dispersed them after only a few minutes.

Mozambique: Missionaries Jailed

Three American missionaries were still in prison in Mozambique at mid-month. They are: Armond Doll, 59, and Hugh Fryberg, 32, both with the Church of the Nazarene, and Donald Milam, a youth associated with Teen Challenge. Details were sketchy because of a lack of diplomatic relations between the United States and Mozambique. Milam was apparently jailed in July for handing out tracts, and the other two were arrested in August, reportedly for making religious broadcasts.

Mozambique gained its independence from Portugal in June. Almost immediately, FRELIMO—a black liberation movement that is now the ruling political party—began building a socialist state. Religion was declared to be a divisive force in the life of the nation, and a number of restrictive measures were laid down. Infant baptism was banned, apparently in retaliation against the Catholic Church for its strong ties to the former Portuguese colonial government. Mission schools, hospitals, and other property were nationalized, and funds were frozen.

Most missionaries had slipped out of the African nation by the end of last month. Some narrowly escaped arrest after selling their vehicles and other property that the government declared it now owned.

East Africa: Revival Revisited

After sweeping across tribal, national, linguistic, and denominational lines for more than four decades, the East African Revival movement still appears to be alive and very well.

Two conventions of the movement were held this August, one at Butere, Kenya, and another at Kabale, Uganda. Peak attendance at each of them was estimated to be over 25,000.

One of the speakers at Kabale was Joseph Church of London, a retired Anglican Church Missionary Society (CMS) worker who was one of two men generally credited with leading the original revival. Starting in Uganda in the 1930s, the spiritual fires spread into neighboring Ruanda, then back into parts of Uganda that had not been touched originally. Then it moved into Kenya, Tanzania, and other East African areas.

The conventions are held at ten-year intervals and in various locations. This year’s was the fourth. They have been characterized by exuberant singing, sacrificial giving in preparation by host groups, and hundreds of conversions of the curious who were attracted by the joy and excitement. Many people have traveled long distances on foot to attend.

This year’s meeting at Kabale was a combined jubilee celebration of the fiftieth year of gospel preaching in that section of western Uganda and the fortieth year of the revival’s influence. The convenor was Festo Kivengere, Anglican bishop of Kabale. “Christ’s Love Reconciles Us” was the theme, and observers say that a number of participants long at odds with each other were reconciled during the meeting.

General Secretary William Butler of the CMS Ruanda Mission gave the opening Bible messages each morning. The rest of the program was determined on a day-to-day basis by a team of 100 who met twice daily to seek the Holy Spirit’s guidance. While some overseas personnel were involved, most of the 100 were African. Clergymen, whose ranks included an archbishop and nine bishops, were outnumbered by laymen.

According to estimates, over half of those at the Kabale gathering were under twenty-five.

About 2,000 guests came from outside the immediate area. Part of their food came from crops planted by host churches many months ago specifically for the convention. Among the visitors were Christians from other areas of East Africa as well as people from seven nations on other continents.

Loose Ends

After six years of court battles, Kirby J. Hensley and his mail-order Universal Life Church were cleared of all charges in California. A San Jose municipal judge dismissed a $625 fine and a one-year suspended sentence against Hensley involving a 1969 conviction for selling courses from a non-accredited institution. The conviction was overturned by a federal appeals court in 1973, but the loose ends were not cleared up until last month.

Hensley, 63, a one-time Baptist preacher and self-designated “bishop” of the Universal Life Church, claims to have ordained more than two million people by mail and issued some 10,000 honorary doctor of divinity degrees at a charge of $20 each. Last year a court ruled that Hensley’s “church” is entitled to federal tax exemption.

Playing With Numbers

Father Joseph F. Lupo of the Most Holy Trinity Fathers in Garrison, Maryland, got a lot of press attention after he placed a $9,000 ad in the January, 1972, issue of Playboy. The ad was aimed at attracting recruits to the priesthood.

Playboy last month used the ad as the basis for full-page ads in several large dailies to promote the magazine. Downright irreverent, scolded Lupo. And also in error. The Playboy display boasted that Lupo’s ad had produced some 600 applicants within a few weeks time. While the ad generated a number of inquiries on a variety of topics, explained Lupo, the number of applicants within a year’s time was only thirty-five.

Religion In Transit

The National Courier, a 48-page biweekly Christian tabloid newspaper, will make its initial appearance with the October 7 edition. To be published in Plainfield, New Jersey, its first press run will be 500,000 copies, according to a Courier spokesman. The editor-in-chief is Robert Slosser, a former editor in the New York Times Washington bureau. Logos International, which publishes charismatic literature, is sponsoring the paper. But, says Logos head Dan Malachuk, the paper will be aimed at a broad audience.

Nearly 100 voluntary agencies, including eighteen religious ones, received a total of $688 million from private sources and $260 million from the U. S. government last year, according to a government report. The contributions were in the form of cash, food, supplies, and equipment. Catholic Relief Services, Church World Service, and CARE distributed the “overwhelming bulk of the amount of aid,” said a government source.

Thirty-three churches, all but three of them Baptist, reported average Sunday-school attendance of 2,000 or more in the annual Christian Life tabulation of the nation’s 100 largest Sunday schools. There were only twelve in the top bracket eight years ago, says Sunday-school editor Elmer Towns. In the first place is First Baptist Church of Hammond, Indiana, which reported an average attendance of 13,561.

Most of Hartford Seminary Foundation’s library was sold to the Candler School of Theology of Emory University, a United Methodist School in Atlanta. The $1.7 million transaction involved 215,000 volumes. Hartford kept 45,000 volumes (its archives, an Islamic studies collection, and books on clergy training and parish life). Hartford dropped its traditional seminary curriculum in 1973 in favor of a continuing education program for clergy.

A motion to endorse the United Methodist Church’s stance against homosexuality was defeated at a recent national seminar of the Women’s Division of the denomination’s Board of Global Ministries, attended by more than 300 persons. The denomination rejects homosexual practice as “incompatible with Christian teachings.” The women’s unit also announced it will monitor primetime TV to determine how it affects the “socialization of women.”

The Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches, a gay-church denomination with nearly 100 congregations, is sponsoring a bicentennial program dubbed Affirmation ’76. The program will culminate in a Washington, D. C., meeting affirming the rights of homosexuals to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” say leaders. (More than 1,000 persons attended the group’s sixth annual conference last month in Dallas.)

As expected, Harvey Stegemoeller resigned as president of Concordia College in St. Paul, Minnesota. Teachers and students asked him to reconsider, but Stegemoeller—a critic of the conservative policies in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod—feels hemmed in by the mandates of his now conservative board.

Kimberly Ann Jensen, a high-school sophomore of Caldwell, Idaho, was crowned recently Miss National Teenager. A Mormon, she says hopes to use her extensive travel opportunities “to be a really good missionary [and] to talk about the gospel.”

In May, 1973, only 3 per cent of Soviet Jewish emigrants went to countries other than Israel, but that figure is now 45 per cent, and most of these are choosing the United States, say authorities. Reasons include the high cost of living in Israel, fear of war, and the good life in America.

Personalia

Denominational executive Norman D. Fintel, 50, of the American Lutheran Church was named to the presidency of 1,200-student Roanoke College, an ALC school in Salem, Virginia.

United Methodist evangelism executive Joe Hale, 40, was selected to succeed Lee F. Tuttle as general secretary of the World Methodist Council. Tuttle will retire next year. The council is composed of sixty-one Methodist/Wesleyan denominations in eighty-seven countries. Hale’s selection is subject to confirmation at a meeting of the council next summer in Dublin.

Dean Richard Gross of Gordon College in Wenham, Massachusetts, will succeed Harold John Ockenga as president of the school next spring. Ockenga will become chancellor.

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