New Presbyterian moderator: We do not judge women who have had multiple abortions

Rev David Bruce was speaking at a press conference today marking his election to the role of moderator of the church, as a result of an island-wide vote on Tuesday night.

He will take over from current moderator William Henry on the first Monday in June.

Rev Bruce – who describes himself as an “open evangelical” on the “conservative wing of the church” – was quizzed by the News Letter over a raft of issues, including sexual orientation and abortion.

The church has a history of opposing all sex except that in a heterosexual marriage, and of opposing abortion.

Rev Bruce was asked his view of the following scenario: imagine a someone came to the church seeking baptism, but they had undergone an abortion, did not regret their decision, and may go on to have another one in future.

Could they be baptised into the church?

“I honestly would struggle to answer that in a binary way,” he said.

“But let me tell you a quick story which is right on the button with this. In the former Soviet republics, abortion is a form of contraception. And there are women who, simply because it was the societal norm, may have had six, eight, 10 abortions in the course of their lives, and for them it was normative.

“Now I’ve met some of these women in the course of my work in that context. Do we judge them for it? No.

“It was normative, it was what was expected.

“What do we offer to them? What do we say to them? ‘You cannot be baptised?’ No, you don’t say that.

“You listen to their story, you seek to understand the context from which they came... Maybe they were in abusive relationships. Maybe the expectations and indeed the economic realities for them were so impossibly toxic that the idea of having another child in the apartment was just too much to bear.

“We need to hear those stories before judging people and saying ‘oh you have done a terrible thing’ or even that ‘your mind is fixed on this, you haven’t changed your mind’. That does not appear to me to be what Jesus did. I think his approach was much more subtle than that.

“And we need to be able to develop pastoral skills to be able to say to people: ‘Let me hear your story so that I can enter into it’. And then, yeah sure, if it comes to a question of whether or not you are baptised, well, we’ll get there you know, but it’s at the end game.”

LESBIAN, GAY, BISEXUAL and TRANSGENDER PEOPLE:

He was also asked about people who would describe themselves as transgender. For example, would someone who presented themselves as a woman but was biologically, anatomically and legally male be eligible to be a full member of the church, in his personal view?

“Again, each story is different,” he said.

A report is due to come up before the next general assembly on human identity which will cover the issue of transgenderism, and Rev Bruce said he wanted “to wait until the church had considered this full because of the complexities of the issues involved”.

On the subject of homosexuality, he said that a document to “flesh out” the decisions made at the 2018 general assembly will be presented to the 2020 general assembly. These 2018 decisions involved opting to withhold full membership from anyone in a same-sex relationship and denial of baptism for their children.

Asked yesterday if someone could be baptised into the church if they were in an active gay relationship and had no intention of changing this, he said: “On the face of it, the stated position of the church would be no in answer to that. But it’d be important to frame my answer in these terms: that simply to start with the rule-book and say ‘no’ is not going to help anybody.

“If that starts with a relationship of open[ness], integrity and trust, then you can have a conversation about love and intimacy and isolation and loneliness and spiritual growth and honouring Christ and an expression of faith in a loving Father.

“There’s a lot of things that, if we were talking about baptism or becoming a full member of the church, we’d want to talk about anyway.

“And we’d be talking about those things whether the person was heterosexual or homosexual. And no matter what their past had been or what their future aspirations were.

“You don’t start with the rule book and say ‘this is what the church says so the answer is no’. You say ‘what is your name, tell me your story’.”

HOW IS THE MODERATOR CHOSEN?

The moderator holds a one-year post as the chief figurehead of the Presbyterian church – the biggest Protestant denomination in Ireland.

However the church itself stresses the moderator is not the “head” of the church – that title belongs to Jesus Christ.

The church today says it has 326 ministers and over 225,000 members who belong to 536 congregations, from Bushmills in Co Antrim to Aghada in Co Cork.

However, the 2011 Census – covering just Northern Ireland – asked people what their religion was. In all, 345,101 said ‘Presbyterian’.

Rev Bruce, 62, from the Lisburn area, and who does not hold an active ministry, will be the 175th moderator of the church.

There are 19 presbyteries on the island of Ireland; most are in NI, but two (Monaghan and Dublin & Munster) are wholly within the Republic, and one (Derry & Donegal) is split between the two jurisdictions.

Each presbytery represents roughly 25 to 40 congregations.

Each presbytery meets annually on the first Monday in February at around 7pm. All those in attendance at each meeting have one vote, and they cast it for a raft of candidates.

The one who wins the most number of presbyteries emerges as the moderator-elect.

The votes this year were as follows:

Rev David Bruce – 14 votes (the presbyteries of Ards, Armagh, North Belfast, East Belfast, Carrickfergus, Derry & Donegal, Down, Dromore, Dublin & Munster, Iveagh, Monaghan, Newry, Templepatrick, Tyrone)

Rev Dr Trevor McCormick – one vote (the presbytery of Coleraine & Limavady)

Rev Richard Murray – three votes (the presbyteries of Ballymena, Omagh, Route)

Rev Mairisíne Stanfield – one vote (the presbytery of South Belfast).