through the grille. Ruth had spotted her Orangeman, conversing animatedly with a nun: ‘Their noses were right up against the grille, and both of them were chatting away. It turned out both of them had been born in Derry, and in the discovery of the one beloved birthplace all difference had gone out the window. I just stood there and thought: I am witnessing a little miracle of reconciliation.’
Ruth was the first woman ordained in PCI, in 1976.13 By the time of this encounter, she had been in her congregation for nearly fourteen years. This little miracle could not have happened on day one.
I do not think any of the denominations were as prophetic or courageous as they could have been during the Troubles. I can understand on one level, especially for clergy who were married and had families. To step out would have been horrendously difficult. But if we couldn’t do it, what right have we to ask anybody else to do it? We are meant to be in leadership, you know.
As a young woman, Ruth had been inspired by Rev. Ray Davey, a Presbyterian chaplain at Queen’s who founded the ecumenical Corrymeela community in 1965. She believed passionately that Christians of all denominations should work together. But she knew this wouldn’t happen overnight. In her first post as an assistant minister in Larne, a predominantly Protestant town, she attended an inter-church clergy meeting. ‘Where are all the priests?’ she asked the other ministers, all Protestant. ‘There was a silence, and they then resumed their conversation as if I hadn’t asked anything.’
When Ruth was called to her own congregation, she helped start a praise group among the Protestant churches on the estate. The praise group used songs and prayers inspired by the charismatic movement, which had also made in-roads in Catholicism. She was delighted when some Catholics began to attend. She talked, listened, prayed with people, slowly building relationships. Protestant and Catholic women from the praise group set up a prayer group. Then they set up a clergy group. Then the clergy wanted to exchange pulpits. Ruth asked her elders to vote on whether a priest could preach in their pulpit. Fifteen of the twenty agreed. She didn’t go ahead with it, because she wanted everyone on board. A few months later all twenty said yes. ‘These steps were big for them.’
Ruth knew that not everyone in the estate was happy with her approach. But she earned the respect of the paramilitaries. Although not churchgoers, some of the paramilitaries asked for her support in times of distress. Ruth did not turn them away. ‘Obviously not everybody would have been happy with what the majority of the committed people in our congregation were doing. But nobody left us to join the Free Presbyterians. They all stayed with it.’
It would have been easier to focus only on her own flock, tending just to their needs. For Ruth, that would not have been what it meant to live out her faith. ‘In times of adversity and threat people look to external rules and regulations and batten down the hatches rather than stepping out. Maybe another word for faith is risk.’
‘After that I got very unhappy phone calls.’
Barry was minister in a border town. The windows of his church were blown out repeatedly in bomb blasts. He buried members of his congregation. Some members belonged to the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) and the Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR). They told him that IRA men taunted them in the town, letting them know that they knew who had killed their families and colleagues. On one occasion, he was asked to take the funeral of a loyalist paramilitary who was nominally associated with his congregation.
I said, ‘Certainly, I’ll do the funeral gladly, but not if there is paramilitary presence.’ A half hour later there was another call to say that I had not been invited to take the service, and on no account was I to take the service. So, another clergyman with known political associations came and took the service. There were about fifteen buses parked at the roadside which had transported paramilitaries from Belfast and elsewhere. During the funeral it was said from the pulpit that it was a disgrace that the man’s own minister refused to take the service. After that I got very unhappy phone calls, threatening phone calls.
While Barry’s wife Sandra remembered the tensions in the town, she also remembered those who quietly built relationships with each other. Women started prayer groups. One evening, a Catholic woman walked into a meeting. There was an Orangeman present, who regarded her suspiciously. Barry recalled,
By the time the Catholic woman had finished praying, the Orangeman had no doubt whatsoever that she was a Christian. You couldn’t have prayed the prayer she did if you hadn’t been. It was quite the transformation to see his face when he saw she came into enemy territory and prayed as she did. It did him a world of good!
‘There were often gun battles on the road, riots outside the church.’
Husband and wife Patton and Marlene Taylor both served as Presbyterian ministers during the Troubles. In 1985, Marlene was the first mother ordained in PCI. Patton, from Scotland, had been ministering since 1977 in Duncairn Presbyterian in North Belfast. The local Protestant population had largely fled. The church looked directly over the republican New Lodge area. There was an army barracks across the street. Most members of the congregation commuted from the suburbs. The manse was adjacent to the church and Patton and Marlene lived there with their five children. Patton said,
I consciously chose to go there because it was a Presbyterian church in the middle of what was now a republican area. There were all kinds of issues around that but I went – perhaps with a certain naiveté but also with some conviction. I felt that a church in that situation ought to have some witness in the immediate local community.
Duncairn Presbyterian worked with the nearby Antrim Road Baptist Church to set up summer schemes for children and teenagers. Many Catholic children attended. These activities grew into the 174 Trust, which employed youth workers and hosted short-term volunteers from Northern Ireland and around the world. Tony Macauley’s memoir, Little House on the Peace Line, tells the story of that ministry from a youth worker’s perspective.14 Patton said, ‘There were often gun battles on the road, riots outside the church, petrol bombs flying. We had a period where the congregation had a contract with a local glazier to come in Mondays and fix the windows that had been broken in the manse that week.’
Marlene ministered in Cooke Centenary Presbyterian on the Ormeau Road in South Belfast. ‘For me, that was a release to get out of the manse and to go to a community that was more mixed.’ There were still Troubles-related deaths in the area. The local clergy fellowship took it in turns to visit the bereaved, going together in Catholic–Protestant pairs. Marlene said, ‘We felt it was important to keep a visible presence on the road for a kind of stability. We wouldn’t meet behind closed doors. We would meet in a café, or a community centre, and be seen walking down the road and being together.’ Marlene journeyed back and forth across the city through army checkpoints. ‘It was particularly difficult to get back into the manse again in the evenings to feed my baby. I had to literally go and face the army to negotiate to get in. If they didn’t let me in, I would get in by some way. That was how strong the feeling was that I had to get back in to feed that child.’
The Duncairn ministers and youth workers met every morning to pray. The Taylors hosted evening prayers in their home for their family and the volunteers who lived with them. People in their congregations offered varying degrees of support. Marlene said, ‘I think if we hadn’t had that group of committed people in the church whom we could have contacted day or night, we wouldn’t have made it. We didn’t feel supported by the Presbyterian Church as such. No one centrally contacted us during tense periods, and that was hard.’
‘The call to ministry was very much about peacemaking.’
Abigail became a minister because she wanted to contribute to peace. ‘For me the call to ministry was very much about peacemaking. If the church wasn’t going to be doing something about that, then who was going to be doing it?’ She grew up in a tense border town where
