The great majority of evangelical Christians in Ireland are native Irish, many of them former Roman Catholics, according to research published yesterday.
In Dublin 78 per cent of church-attending evangelicals are Irish, while the remaining 22 per cent is made up of various ethnic groupings, according to research by the Evangelical Alliance Ireland (EAI).
Seán Mullan, national director of EAI, said the research, published under the title Evangelicals Emerging, had identified over 130 evangelical churches and groups in the greater Dublin area, where numbers attending church each week were now an estimated 13,000.
He was speaking at a press conference in Dublin yesterday at which the booklet Together We Believe - a common faith, a common purpose was published. It explains core beliefs of evangelical Christians in Ireland.
"Almost every area of the Dublin region now has at least one identified evangelical church," Mr Mullan said.
Sixty-three per cent of all evangelical churches in Dublin have been started this past 25 years, while 25 per cent have been set up in the last decade.
The size of congregations can vary from between 15-20 to larger ones of over 500. Average weekly attendance at each church is estimated at 80.
The congregations include Baptists, Assemblies of God and other Pentecostal/charismatic churches and independent fellowships, as well as evangelical members of the Church of Ireland and the Presbyterian Church in Ireland.
However, and despite this recent growth, evangelicals still make up less than 1 per cent of the population in Dublin.
Mr Mullan described evangelicals as "Christians who are committed to a belief in the power of Jesus Christ and his message to transform people's lives, to a need to share that message with others, and to the Bible as our final authority".
Patrick Mitchel, who edited the booklet, said its purpose was to highlight the unity at the core of the diversity that was the evangelical movement, with its emphasis on the centrality of Jesus, on scripture, and on faith leading to action.
He acknowledged that evangelicals could tend towards being judgmental and arrogant, and that the movement had a somewhat negative image arising from the activities of some evangelicals in the US.
He emphasised the difference between fundamentalism and being evangelical, noting that while some in the movement tended towards a literalist interpretation of scripture this was by no means always the case.
Evangelicalism was "not to be confused with a political agenda in the US", Mr Mitchel said.
Evangelicals were "historically orthodox, committed to the message of Jesus and a way of life as opposed to an institution", said Mr Mullan.
Both agreed that hostility towards Roman Catholicism among evangelicals had greatly diminished, not least as so many Irish evangelicals came from Catholic backgrounds.
