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Although the bombing and killing have stopped in Northern Ireland and a tentative calm prevails, a London-based course in Christianity has brought Protestants and Catholics together as it leads them to deeper faith-and perhaps a lasting peace.

Harry Smith, director of the Christian Renewal Center in Rostrevor, County Down, says that tensions remain despite the cease-fires. “Within the polarized Catholic and Protestant communities, the paramili-taries rule,” he said. And with them, racketeering, drugs and prostitution abound. “Punishment for breaking the rules is a bullet in the knee/ankle or a severe beating with baseball bats.”

The 30-year-long conflict’s roots lie in cultural, political and religious animosities between Catholic Nationalists, who want to join the southern Irish Republic, and Protestant Unionists, who want unity with Great Britain. The 1994 cease-fire by the Irish Republican Army, or extreme Nationalists, led to hopes for a peace agreement between the main Catholic and Protestant political parties in the conflict. An agreement was reached in 1998.

Ireland needs spiritual healing. “My impressions are that nothing has changed since the 1994 cease-fire except that Alpha”-a 10-week introduction to the Christian faith-“is becoming increasingly popular in churches, and that some Protestant and Catholic churches are doing it together,” said Ken Newell, a minister at Fitzroy Presbyterian Church in Belfast.

Smith agrees. “Alpha has been a powerful evangelistic tool in many churches,” he said. “This has perhaps produced more growth than through traditional evangelistic methods.” The Alpha course, first run in Northern Ireland in 1995, has played a significant role in evangelizing Northern Ireland, says David Stanfield, an Alpha coordinator and Presbyterian minister with the interdenominational agency Youth Link. In the last five years more than 150 churches have run Alpha, including Catholic, Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist, Elim Pentecostal, Salvation Army and Anglican. Some courses have been run by Catholics and Protestants together, a sign that Stanfield believes shows they bear no animosity towards one another but have a desire to work together for peace. But Stanfield says all the news isn’t good. He believes the actual increase in church evangelism has more to do with the decline in numbers in mainline churches than with any other factor. “Some of the interdenominational groups who have been doing the Alpha course have seen reconciliation as the main purpose of doing the course, rather than evangelism,” he said.

Evangelism in Northern Ireland remains encumbered by cultural and historical legacies. “Evangelism is not given the priority that it should be given by the churches,” Smith said. “We still have a legacy here, that to evangelize a Catholic is to make them a Protestant, which includes all the cultural baggage which goes with that. All too often we have paraded these people around our pulpits and missions as ‘trophies of grace’ plucked from Rome. I deplore such evangelism.”

Prevalent in Northern Ireland is sectarianism, or “religious racism” in which people are in conflict for no other reason than their Protestant or Catholic backgrounds, but Alpha also is helping to bridge the gap. In Larne, a town noted for its sectarianism, more than 200 people have experienced the life-changing power of Christ by attending an interdenominational Alpha. “Many Protestants may be members of churches but have no or very little personal relationship with Jesus,” Stanfield said. “Most may have come to faith and just need to be renewed.”

In an outreach in Ballyna-hinch, a town near Belfast, a team from Arkansas’ John Brown University joined local churches using Alpha’s youth version, and more than 60 young people made responses of faith. Many of them are now involved in local churches. Terrorists have also come to Christ. “It is a beautiful thing to see-ex-Catholic and Protestant terrorists, who became Christians in prison sharing their faith and embracing each other on a platform together. With God alone it is possible and a tremendous symbol of hope,” Smith said.

A number of ex-IRA members are attending Cursillo, a charismatic Catholic course meeting in west Belfast. “Quite a number of ex-Belfast Provos (IRA terrorists) are now worshiping with them and active in their ranks,” Newell said. Former IRA member Tom Kelly and former Protestant paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force member Jim Tate are now ministering together to spread the message of forgiveness in Northern Ireland and Britain, he said. Smith stresses the importance of evangelism devoid of historic baggage and sectarianism. “Unity is part of the key here-the expensive unity of John 17,” he said. “Repentance and humility for our wrongs, the wounds we have inflicted upon each other in the name of Christ, as churches in contributing to the centuries of pain is, and must continue to be, an important ingredient to anything God wants to do here. This must be a precursor or at least go hand in hand with any attempts to evangelize, especially across the divisions.” Because of the divisions, Northern Ireland’s churches and evangelical community have made unity rather than evangelism their priority. “Many of the historic churches are in a new climate of ecumenism,” Smith said. “If you are a right-wing Protestant/Unionist, then you have no part in this, but otherwise you do, and then you get into the whole issue of proselytizing/sheep-stealing versus respecting each other’s theological/liturgical differences and leave issues, major and minor, well alone ‘for the sake of unity.'”

Smith and other leaders believe that God has put a “missions mandate” on Ireland from the days of St. Patrick-a mandate that God has not canceled. “If this is a genuine God-given burden and insight, then I am of the growing conviction that God is about to pour out His Spirit in a new way in Ireland in the not-too-distant future,” Smith said.

May 4, 2001