Review The
Something different...
This year’s General Assembly was different. Opened by one Moderator on a Thursday morning, it was closed by his successor on the Saturday, having been installed on Friday afternoon. In between, around 100 resolutions – concerning the mundane and not so mundane that will affect the
General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland
20-22 June 2024
life and ministry of PCI down the years – were passed during 21 hours of debate across 24 sessions. So, in keeping with doing things differently – welcome to The Review, a new publication that really does what it says on the tin. While we can’t review all that happened between 20-22 June in Belfast, we hope this will provide an informative and useful snapshot of just some of what took place.
Moderator’s call to evangelism In his last official act, outgoing Moderator, Dr Sam Mawhinney, led the new Service of Installation for his successor, Rev Dr Richard Murray of Drumreagh Presbyterian Church, near Ballymoney in County Antrim. On a hot Friday afternoon in a packed Assembly Hall, before 21 of PCI’s 28 surviving former moderators, members of Assembly and the public along with civic guests, which included His Majesty’s Deputy Lord Lieutenant for Belfast and the city’s Lord Mayor, Dr Murray became the 179th person to hold the denomination’s highest office since 1840.
Before unveiling his theme for the year, ‘Mighty to Save’ Dr Murray paid tribute to his predecessor. Having studied at Union Theological College together, the Moderator told the Assembly, “back then I don’t think either of us could have foreseen an occasion like this, and yet in the providence of God, here we are.” In his address Dr Murray laid out what he thought was one of the major problems facing the Christian church - and it wasn’t its contraction, but connection. “How to connect the good news of what God has done for us in the person and work of Jesus Christ with a world that is at best uninterested, and at worst hostile?”
He spoke of the Apostle Paul’s letter to the believers in Corinth saying that Paul “had a mission, compelled by the love of Christ to go to Corinth.” Talking of mission, he remembered that even the Church of England in 1990 had what it called ‘A decade of evangelism’, “…but at least they had a vision. ‘For without a vision the people perish’, Could we not designate even a year of evangelism?” Dr Murray asked. “…We have to go outside the four walls. As someone has put it – ‘if we don’t evangelise, we fossilise’…in Corinth Paul discovered [that] God is mighty to save.” You can read all of Dr Murray’s address by clicking here.