Minister: At last, someone calls for our churches to be opened again

(His article can be read here: ‘It is time for all of our churches to reopen’).

He has stated exactly what other voices have failed to do.

The smock and gown ecclesiastical elites are matched by the silence of evangelical churches and ministers.

It seems to me that there is no clamour for opening because there is little sense of essentialist public worship.

There is no protest because there is no longer any loyalty to the crown rights of the redeemer.

Our American cousins for all their faults continue to meet in their buildings and where they are closed, in the open air.

Further, what Billy Kennedy calls the diktat has been rigorously opposed by them.

Meanwhile here, statism rules. The state is now God.

Those who prostrate themselves before the state have seemingly taken over the pulpits.

Hence the lackluster response to the lockdown.

What we need to learn is who exactly is calling the shots at Stormont and, upon what basis was it decided that numerous centres, such as garden and shopping, can open and the churches remain closed?

Opening for solitary prayer is not an evangelical practice.

The public professing Church of Christ should hang its collective head in shame at its abject failure.

I fear that there is no lobbying because there is little fear of God.

Rev ET Kirkland, Free Church Manse, Ballyclare