Billy Kennedy's Churches: Presbyterian witness beyond the boundaries in Ireland

​The general assembly of the Irish Presbyterian Church has affirmed the importance of church planting across Ireland, particularly in the Irish Republic, and approved a strategy that should sustain the denomination right across the island well into the future.
By Billy Kennedy
Published 30th Jun 2023, 20:07 BST
Moneymore parish church, Co Londonderry Picture: Billy MaxwellMoneymore parish church, Co Londonderry Picture: Billy Maxwell
Moneymore parish church, Co Londonderry Picture: Billy Maxwell

​At its recent annual gathering, the assembly, the church's ruling body, also gave the green light to creating a new role – ‘'Mission Pioneer’ - focusing on church planting, or strategic pioneering work across the 550 congregations in both Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic.

Presbyterian council for mission in Ireland convenor Rick Hill said that the council’s church planting panel had worked hard to develop a strategy that can guide the denomination in its church planting efforts and offer help to individual congregations seeking to plant.

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“Our desire is to fan into flame a vision for church planting. We can point to the need to open an overflow area in Kilkenny, church planting progress in Balbriggan, encouragements in Sligo and Naas, the process of electing local elders in Galway and Corboy.

"We can also point to a significant property project to establish an inaugural church building in Maynooth, Co KIldare after almost two decades of meeting in rented space," said Mr Hill.

“More generally, there have been new communicant members, the sustaining of stable witness in rural areas, congregations reaching migrants in grace-filled ways, and the fruitfulness of an Alpha Course in the church's international meeting point, which led to more than two dozen baptisms in one congregation,” he added.

“This is the mixed economy of moving forward missionally, as a church in this cultural moment. Birth and death. Renovation and innovation. Sustaining the old and pioneering the new…!”

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The Presbyterian Church in Ireland has a membership in excess of 200,000, 90 per cent of whom locate in Northern Ireland congregations. Church membership in the Republic totals approximately 13,000, mainly in Ulster border counties Monaghan, Cavan and Donegal..

Addressing the incoming Presbyterian moderator, Rev Dr Sam Mawhinney, minister of Adelaide Road Presbyterian church, Dublin and who has also served in two congregations in counties Cork and Tipperary, Mr Hill said: "You know more than most the reality of ministry in the Republic of Ireland and I know that close to your heart are the many villages, towns and even cities which lack a strong evangelical witness or Protestant reformed church presence.

“Church planting lies in the history and heart of Irish Presbyterianism. For each of our congregations to exist, they had to be planted, and today the need remains to spread our nets wide across this land. If we don’t, we will simply go about the task of reallocating resources and managing decline in a way that gives us our day, but fails in our basic missionary calling.”

Mr Hill pointed out that more than 80 towns of more than 10,000 people in the Irish Republic had been identified as having no significant Presbyterian witness.

Related topics:ChurchesNorthern IrelandPresbyterian Church