Presbyterian moderator: Overwhelming sense of praise and worship

Along with a number of other church leaders, the Rt Revd Dr John Kirkpatrick took part in the State Funeral at Westminster Abbey.

Speaking to the News Letter afterwards, he said: “I think today has been a very successful and impressive completion to the planning, of the years and years that have gone into this, and I would imagine that if the Queen was observing that she would be saying that it was perfectly what she would have wanted – the type of funeral that would have displayed and reflected both her and her faith and her nature.

“That service, while it had all the additional elements in terms of having the bigger music, the bigger venue, it had the bigger crowd, but there is a sense in which that service was like many an Anglican funeral service for the ordinary church member on any given day.

“It followed the Church of Ireland prayer book and that in a sense is what she would identify with – that while she had great responsibility, she also had great humility, and that was a lovely thing in the service.

“It was very balanced. It had a great note of victory in it – in the face of death, which is the one thing which every world view has to confront and every person, our mortality, if you have a sense of hope and victory in death, that is a world view that is something real, and her world view was Christian, and founded on the resurrection and the Gospel, and that came through so wonderfully. That was a massive sense of hope to give to people in our culture and in our country at this time.”

The moderator said he was conscious that he was there representing Presbyterians right across the island of Ireland.

“So I do my best to keep my inner thoughts and emotions to myself but, to be honest, the sense of praise and worship was overwhelming. The trumpeters and everything in that building is very powerful – it touches your spirit deeply.”

“I live in the moment, because that is the only way to go through these times, because they are quite surreal at times when you realise that you are just a few feet from the King, and from the coffin of the late Queen”.