Church of Ireland Prime to get global audience for communion

The East Belfast-born cleric, who has just recently taken up the role as primate and archbishop of Armagh, preaches from Acts 2.1–21 in the New Testament on the work of the Holy Spirit.

The Primate will say: “As someone who was brought up worshipping in the Church of the Pentecost, outside Ravenhill rugby ground in East Belfast, the feast of Pentecost has always meant a great deal to me.

“Growing up, we were taught that the Holy Spirit was God active in the world today - God’s spirit for God’s people and God’s world.

“Preaching, in an online service to the worldwide Anglican Communion, and as much of the world begins to emerge cautiously from lockdown, it is an opportunity for me to underline that the presence and life of the Spirit is a shared experience.

“No individual can recapture it for him or herself. The Holy Spirit can only be received again when we come out of the shelter of our own lives in the present pandemic and stand with others on common ground with faith and expectancy like the believers did at the first Pentecost.”

“We must aim for a new creation for a new type of world,” Primate McDowell will add.

The service will be available at www.anglicancommunion.org/worship from 7pm on Saturday (Greenwich Mean Time) and a video recording will be available afterwards to view on the Church of Ireland website.

The Church of Ireland is among the 40 member churches making up the Anglican Communion in more than 165 countries worldwide.

The Anglican Communion is the third largest Christian communion of churches in the world.

Founded in 1867 in London, the communion currently has 85 million adherents in the Church of England and other national and regional churches in full communion.

The traditional origins of Anglican doctrines are summarised in the Thirty Nine Articles of Religion (1571).

Archbishop of Canterbury, the Rev Justin Welby in England, acts as a focus of unity in the Communion, recognised as primus inter pares - (‘first among equals’), but he does not exercise authority in Anglican provinces outside of the Church of England.

Most of its 85 million members reside in the Anglospere of former British Commonwealth territories.