| Friday 20th November, 2009 You are here: Home - 20th November 2009 Index Page - 20th November 2009 Editorial |
Editorial
Church Leaders
In his column last Saturday (14th November), under a headline declaring, ‘It’s time Church leaders caught themselves on’, the religion correspondent of the Belfast Telegraph, Alf McCreary, berated the leaders of the four largest Churches (the Church of Ireland, the Methodist, Presbyterian and Roman Catholic Churches) for being so concerned not to upset one another or their flocks by their joint-statements that they found difficulty in "producing anything which the public might actually read, and hopefully heed". He went on to suggest a more ‘muscular’ approach.
However, whatever about style, Mr McCreary has identified an issue that raises at least two other questions. The first concerns how Church leaders, individually or ecumenically, can speak into everyday political debates. The fundamental point here, surely, is that Church leaders are not elected as politicians and therefore have no specifically political mandate. However, they are elected as spiritual leaders and have a clear mandate to point the members of their Churches towards deeper and more committed Christian life and witness, and to call society at large to transformed values, repentance, forgiveness and the acknowledgement of the lordship of Christ. This touches on the moral content and the quality of political discourse rather than on political points as such.
A second question is one of ecumenical principle. Mr McCreary’s comments were directed at the leaders of the four largest Churches and it is notable that in their most recent joint-statement they call for politicians and community leaders to demonstrate united leadership in the face of violent crime and the dissident republican threat. That is, indeed, a moral demand. However, when the same four Church leaders act together in a no doubt well-intentioned way but outside the sixteen member-Church Irish Council of Churches/Inter-Church Meeting (ICC/IICM), formally established by the Churches as the national ecumenical structure, they exclude their smaller ecumenical partner-Churches from their witness and thereby actually militate against properly united leadership, which is precisely what they are demanding of politicians and community leaders. The ‘big four’ may be united on such occasions, but they have left out any representation of the other twelve ecumenically committed Churches. Such a practice is flawed in ecumenical principle; that is one of the reasons why there is the ICC/IICM in the first place.
• The twelve other member-Churches of the ICC/IICM are: the Antiochian Orthodox Church, the Coptic Orthodox Church, the Greek Orthodox Church, the LifeLink Network of Churches, the Lutheran Church, the Moravian Church, the Non- Subscribing Presbyterian Church, the Religious Society of Friends, the Rock of Ages Cherubim and Seraphim Church, the Romanian Orthodox Church, the Russian Orthodox Church and the Salvation Army.