wfn.org | Pastors in Northern Ireland Struggle to Balance Parish and Peace

[PCUSA NEWS <pcusa.news@ecunet.org>]

23-August-1999 
99275 
 
    Pastors in Northern Ireland Struggle 
    to Balance Parish and Peace 
 
    As Violence Persists, Church Leaders Stressed by Too Many Demands 
 
    by Alexa Smith 
 
LOUISVILLE, Ky. -When negotiators in Northern Ireland were brokering 
ceasefires with loyalist paramilitaries in 1994, the Rev. Roy Magee was 
right in the middle of it, trying to assure unionist gunmen that it wasn't 
a sell-out and trying to persuade the British government to hang in. 
 
    He was running all over Ireland in those days - and nights. 
 
    The drill was something he'd refined over the years: The phone would 
ring, an anonymous caller would leave directions, Magee would disappear 
into the night and return home sometime after daybreak with a morning 
paper.  In the intervening hours, he'd sit with loyalist gunmen doing the 
delicate work of condemning their killing, while sympathizing with the 
political and moral bind they found themselves in. 
 
    His wife was back home in bed, worried sick. 
 
    "It was consuming all my time.  The elders and the congregation knew 
it.  But they turned a blind eye to the fact that I was neglecting them," 
Magee says now, believing that his Belfast congregation came to understand 
that brokering peace was church work too.  "It was very traumatic.  I was 
being torn apart. 
 
    "And I was not doing the work of the church well at all, though my 
preaching was more relevant." 
 
    While Magee's dilemma is more dramatic than most, ministers in the 
Presbyterian Church in Ireland (PCI) agree that there's too much to do and 
too little time to do it.  The church studied the problem in 1996 and 
concluded that too many clergy were too stressed by time pressures, 
congregational conflict, a sense of isolation and conflicting expectations 
- including unrealistic self-expectations. 
 
      Most clergy did not cite "the troubles" - which is how the Irish 
euphemistically refer to the violence that has convulsed the nine counties 
that comprise Northern Ireland for 30 years - as a major cause of stress. 
But those, like Magee, who live in more volatile areas say the violence 
plays a role because parish work suffers and stress goes up when clergy are 
drawn into the fray. 
 
      Even when the streets are quiet time and attention that might have 
gone into more traditional church work is spent in efforts to preserve 
peace - gatherings of inter-church groups and cross-community groups, not 
to mention the work that goes into developing official denominational 
statements about Northern Ireland's political quagmire. 
 
    But the regular routines of preaching and praying and pastoral care 
don't stop, and there's seldom anyone to pick up the extra work. 
 
    "There's a limit on the time we all have," said the Rev. Robert Herron 
of Omagh, who knows better than most. 
 
     Herron has been intimately involved in that city's recovery from a 
bomb planted on Aug. 15, 1998, by a splinter group of the Provisional Irish 
Republican Army (IRA), killing 28 people and wounding more than 200,  just 
months after the province's voters overwhelmingly approved a political 
agreement that gives republicans more seats in government, while still 
maintaining historical ties to Britain. 
 
    Herron has his regular parish and presbytery responsibilities - which 
includes convening the denomination's sometimes controversial Inter-Church 
Committee which coordinates relations with the province's Methodists, 
Anglicans and Roman Catholics. He also has been involved in everything from 
the Omagh City Forum - designing the plan to rebuild the bombed commercial 
district - to establishing a Young People's Forum, so the city's youth may 
begin to envision an Ireland free of violence.  He meets regularly with the 
25 or so other clergy who've done the funerals, hospital calls and home 
visits in the wake of so much death. And he was one of the principal 
organizers of Omagh's internationally-televised memorial service 
commemorating the city's dead on the first anniversary of the bombing. 
 
    He counsels "the chap" who can't get the images of his neighbors' 
dismembered bodies - like mannequins, he says - on the city sidewalk, out 
of his mind.  And he counsels the woman who - after a number of skin grafts 
- can't bring herself to re-open her now-destroyed downtown restaurant, 
though the government won't compensate her for damages unless she rebuilds. 
Couples are quarreling more.  Drinking is up.  A few teens committed 
suicide this year - probably because they lost hope, some speculate. 
 
    "I spend a lot of time just listening to people," said Herron, who 
pastors Omagh's 350-family Trinity Presbyterian Church. "The most difficult 
part is my own emotion, just trying to contain or control my own emotion." 
 
    David Cupples understands that dilemma well: trying to care for others 
when he's pretty broken up himself. 
 
      Cupples, 41, was in his first year of ministry in Enniskillen, near 
the border with the Republic of Ireland, when an IRA bomb killed 11 people 
attending a memorial service for veterans.  Six of the dead were from his 
parish, and he buried them in four funerals in quick succession.  When he 
heard that a seventh parishioner - who had been injured - was expected to 
die, Cupples found himself sobbing uncontrollably in the living room of an 
elder while the two prayed. 
 
    "On the one hand a clergyman, as a professional, has to have some kind 
of detachment," he said.  "I hate to use the phrase, `switch-off,' but 
you've got to lay your burdens down in some way.  On the other hand, if 
you're not emotionally involved with people, you can't minister to them at 
all.  You're just uttering Bible verses, using well-worn phrases, with no 
human contact. 
 
    "And if there's no human contact, there is no ministry," said Cupples, 
who has learned in the ensuing years, to "hand over" final responsibility 
for the welfare of people to God, but admits it is a hard thing to do.  It 
is equally hard to shirk the emotional and civic needs of the wider 
community, so clergy feel a responsibility to work there as well. 
 
    "But there are the ongoing demands of parish life, particularly the 
need to preach good sermons and the stress comes in choosing," said 
Cupples.  "Even when you've done what you think is best, you still feel 
some guilt, that you've left out the essentials, that you've been trying to 
do everything, but not done anything well." 
 
    The Rev. Gordon Gray has consistently chosen to be involved in the 
community beyond his parish door - so much so that he believes the 
distinction some make between the two worlds is a false dichotomy.  "It is 
necessary to address the community dimension of people's lives," he said, 
after ministering for 26 years in Lisburn, just outside of Belfast, in a 
church that has been bombed  and from which he plans to retire in a year. 
 
    Gray has helped shape an Inter-Church Project, in which seven Lisburn 
congregations - Protestant and Catholic -- provide social services and also 
train cross-community facilitators [individuals who move between the 
Protestant and Catholic communities].  He has helped establish the Lisburn 
Churches' Forum on Community Affairs, which sponsors lectures by key 
figures in the political process, and has worked in cross-community groups 
for many years. 
 
    "We're trying to do a half-dozen jobs all at once.," he told the 
Presbyterian News Service.  "There's limited staff in the [wider] church 
and, now, there's no assistant minister at the moment in my parish, though 
I've got a good deaconess.  It's crazy the demands we put on ourselves in 
ministry and it has taken a toll on the health of a lot of people, 
including myself," said Gray, who was hospitalized twice last month. 
 
    "The longer this [conflict] goes on, the more draining it becomes," he 
continued.  "Some retreat into private parish life.  But the vision keep 
drawing us on.  In many ways, it is a great privilege to minister in a 
situation where simply an act of reaching a hand to one's neighbor may be 
charged with abnormal significance because of who we are and who the 
neighbor is." 
 
    "Of course," he added, "if I'm running out to attend a meeting of the 
New Cross Community Group, I'm not visiting in someone's house." 
 
    While some pastors are convinced that parishioners prefer their 
ministers make a visible witness to the wider community, others are a bit 
more skeptical.  Magee, for instance, felt ostracized within the PCI for 
trying to interpret the mind of loyalist paramilitaries because some 
thought he was justifying them instead.  When he revealed his clandestine 
meetings with paramilitary leaders, he was surprised to find 100 percent 
support from his own congregation.  Other congregations, in contrast, began 
canceling preaching commitments he'd made. 
 
    "What was I going to do?  Tell [the Session] I was talking to people 
who were involved in murder and mayhem?  If I asked, the Session might well 
have said, `No.  You're not doing it.'  So what I chose to do was do it and 
be public about what I was doing," he explained. 
 
    Herron has felt more secure from the get-go. 
 
    "I get the impression parishioners want clergy to be involved in 
community work, but clearly there's a price to pay as far as time is 
concerned ... The situation is unreal in terms of the impact of violence in 
this community, the effect the Omagh bomb had on this community," he said. 
"And I've been involved in all kinds of community initiatives in an attempt 
to ensure that the response of people is cohesive, that the response in 
this community to the bomb not be a sectarian one, that Protestants and 
Catholics be seen as working together." 
 
    Most pastors in Ulster, like elsewhere, just struggle to cram a study 
leave into the parish schedule and stay active in their presbytery. Rarely 
- even in Northern Ireland - does an incident register as seismically as 
the Omagh bomb, where, because it is so small the shock waves are felt 
across the province.  The stress is often more subtle: a soldier's wedding 
that has to be performed in England because there are too many security 
concerns in Ireland; or trying to find politically neutral words for Sunday 
morning prayers in church to which all worshipers will be able to say 
"Amen."; or trying to arrange a baptism for an infant born in a so-called 
mixed (Catholic-Protestant) marriage. 
 
    "The emotional side of this is very deep ... [for those of us] caught 
up in this grief," said the Rev. Godfrey Brown, a former PCI moderator. 
Ironically, he added, the tragedy of violence often isolates extremists in 
a community and pulls ordinary people together in a profound way.  "It's a 
tension we all live with and parishes are often brought together in their 
pain and hurt as Omagh has been in their shared pain and grief." 
 
    Longtime church and community leader the Rev. John Dunlop of Belfast 
doesn't hesitate to say that his radio broadcasts, his speaking commitments 
and his lectures in the United States are all "very difficult" to fit into 
his local church life.  "But the congregation encourages me and is aware of 
the difficulties and time constraints," he said. 
 
    Dunlop has worked tirelessly in inter-church issues for years now, 
producing one book and some television programming, with royalties going to 
his parish to compensate some for his absences. 
 
    "You just work 60-70 hours a week," he said, though it is an emotional 
strain.  "It is not easy work ... there's a lot of hurt, anger and 
suspicion.  It is draining, but it has to be done." 
 
     Then he paused, "Sorry,  I can't talk any longer.  I must go to this 
meeting." 

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