NEW GOVERNANCE proposals for State-controlled schools in Northern Ireland were “in danger of sectarianising education in a way we have not seen before”, the Clerk of the Presbyterian General Assembly said in Belfast yesterday.
Rev Dr Donald Watts continued: “we need to say truly to the politicians ‘we are not going there’.” His speech, along with others trenchant on the issue, were heard by education spokesmen from the Northern Ireland Assembly in the public gallery yesterday, including Sammy Wilson of the DUP, John O’Dowd from Sinn Féin, Basil McCrea from the UUP and Alliance party adviser Ian Parsley.
Dr Watts continued: “I believe in equality. The gospel demands equality. It also demands we do so in the context of the New Testament understanding of equality and not in the context of the ridiculous understanding we see in Stormont today. We need rule by politicians and not equality lawyers.”
He warned against those who would portray the Presbyterian and other Reformed Churches’ similar positions on the issue as “Protestant against Catholic. It is not so. The Cardinal is totally behind us. Catholics want faith schools, the Christian ethos of Protestant schools.”
In the middle decades of the last century the Church of Ireland, Presbyterian and Methodist churches transferred their school buildings, pupils and staff into state control on the understanding that their Christian ethos would be maintained. In return, the churches were given rights to representation on school boards of governors, including those of schools built subsequently, as well as education and library boards. New governance proposals indicate that all controlled secondary school boards would lose Protestant Church representation by right.
These proposals were part of “a flat earth policy” said Rev Dr John Dunlop regarding “equality lawyers in Stormont” who held that “faith communities do not fit their flat earth equality theories”. He said “secular people are possessed of a state of mind in which God has no operational relevance in the individual’s understanding of life and the choices which are made”.
Rev Trevor Gribben, deputy clerk of the General Assembly said the proposals “clearly discriminate against the Protestant Churches”. The issue “strikes at the very heart of the church’s involvement in education, and has produced deep anxieties within the Protestant community.”
The Department of Education proposals were rejected unanimously by General Assembly delegates.
At an innovative “Presbyterian Talk Lifestyle” gathering last night, former moderator Rev Dr Trevor Morrow said Christians today had bought into materialism, while combining it with an otherworldly spirituality. In practice they had become creatures concerned with maximising pleasure and minimising pain.
Speaking on the theme that “what we hope for determines our lifestyle”, he said practical materialism taught that contentment came with the next purchase.
This, and the need for more and more, “causes us to abuse ourselves and pollute the planet”. What was needed was to hope for a new heaven and earth which would give us responsibility as stewards of the environment so we would care for the planet, he said.
