A speaker at the Church of Ireland General Synod in Dublin yesterday said he suspected that in this century only the upheavals surrounding the setting up of the Irish State had caused the church more disturbance than Drumcree.
The general secretary of the Irish Council of Churches, Dr David Stevens, was speaking during an inter-church presentation. The appalled reaction of southern members of the church he attributed to "the threat Drumcree represents to the hard-won belonging of Protestants in the South and the opening up of memories of that deep sense of insecurity that marked the Southern Protestant position until the 1960s".
Drumcree had challenged the self-image of a church which wanted to move out of a pan-Protestantism into a wider world of ecumenical relationships, he said.
"A sickness unto death has been revealed and that sickness is not just outside the church. It is inside the church too." People in the churches were "not the people we want to appear to be", he said. "Facades of politeness and niceness hide things that we do not want to face. We run from discomfort. We are the blind leading the blind."
However it was also a reality, he said, that ecumenical relations in Ireland had been transformed this past 30 years. "There is more going on than ever before at local level. We stand on the brink of creating a reorganised and reconstituted Irish inter-church meeting which will be the main ecumenical body in Ireland," he said.
The Rev Trevor Williams, leader of the Corrymeela Community, said that in the North over recent years there had been the emergence of new ecumenical communities which had provided radical experiments in Christian unity. He mentioned the Corrymeela Community and Christian Renewal Centre, both led by Church of Ireland ministers, as examples.
A motion approving the application of the Church of Ireland to be a member of the Conference of Churches in Ireland (which includes the Roman Catholic Church) and its proposed constitution was passed by the synod.
"The conference provides a single body bringing together all the major churches in Ireland and also many of the smaller ones," as Bishop John Neill of Cashel and Ossory, who proposed the motion, explained. He also said the Church of Ireland had long pressed for a single ecumenical instrument in Ireland "rather than the parallel membership required in the Irish Council of Churches". The motion was "but one step on the road towards this".
