Right Here, Right Now – My Review of the General Assembly 2024

Let me start with a confession. I know we have a Great High Priest we can privately confess our sins to, but I also believe in being accountable to my brothers AND sisters and publicly redressing any wrongs. And so, my confession is that even though I am summing up yet another Presbyterian Church in Ireland General Assembly¹, I only managed to attend approximately five hours of it in person. My excuse is that I had other things to do, like life, and dropping one daughter to her GCSE Chemistry, and picking up another from her tennis class, and a “that’s the end of school forever” celebration for a third, and then two weeks ago, I realised that all of the Saturday schedule clashed with my bimonthly visit to the hairdresser. “The Moderator won’t notice you’re there,” said someone when I shared my which-one-should-I-attend dilemma which wasn’t really a dilemma at all if you catch my drift. And whilst at one time, I may have felt a little low in the denominational pecking order because of what my yellow ‘others’ lanyard doesn’t entitle me to do i.e. vote, meaning being physically there is actually quite pointless, I now feel it is a symbol, a visual representation of my otherness and it highlights to ministers and elders who wear their blue and red ones so proudly round their necks that I stand apart, uncalled, a member of this secular society they seem so afraid of.

Whilst one of the main changes to the General Assembly format this year was not installing the incoming moderator until the Friday afternoon so the outgoing one could apply all the knowledge he had learned over the last year, one of my changes to my General Assembly format was to stay on the Glider² until it passed Assembly Buildings so I could get a quick preview of the goings-on at the front door. This may or may not have been a good idea as I was quite disconcerted by the length of the queue of men all wearing the same blue shirt. I am not sure how well the new formatting has worked in terms of conducting the business, but the word squeezed has been used on the street and it did seem like there were some key items missing like the Under 30 Fringe Event and the meet-and-greet with widows and their families and a much-needed coffee break during the morning session. When we reached the end of the Congregational Life and Witness session, where the very important Present initiative about what it means to be church, right here, right now, (sadly not featuring Fatboy Slim³) was hijacked by a regurgitation of a debate from last year on intellectual disabilities, I couldn’t help thinking I could have flown to Malaga in the time I’d been compressed into my seat in the gallery and this would have been a much more acceptable reason for the cramp in my leg.

And I don’t know if it was anything to do with his theme for his year in office, but I think the ‘first moderator from the Republic of Ireland to be elected in almost a quarter of a century’ has grown in confidence although he still isn’t aware that his microphone can be picked up very clearly on the livestream no matter how much he leans over and puts his hand round his mouth and whispers in the Clerk’s ear. “Did you anticipate this?” he said in relation to yet another “let’s move to the cards” vote. “Swings and roundabouts, crazy! Oh and thanks for that other thing Trevor….”. And I feel like we can’t leave it there. We need to know what this other thing is.

Interpretation was a key feature this year. The visiting delegate from Guatemala had brought his translator and in all the speeches, he was the only one to mention the very underutilised second coming. There were jokes about the difficulties of understanding the Cork accent and comments about the pronunciation of the names of guests from Poland, Malawi and Nepal with the Irish delegates invited to step forward first because their names were easier to say. And I reckoned that if we are to be a truly intercultural church and cross boundaries with Christ, we could start by learning rather than stumbling over names and we definitely should not be asking people to pronounce them themselves. Taking inclusion one step further, it may also be appropriate to be cognisant of the fact that some of those with yellow lanyards told they shouldn’t be sitting on the ground floor are there because upstairs is not accessible. And if I’m going to be really pedantic, it may have been exceptionally obvious to those present in the building what day proceedings would commence in 2025 but those of us viewing from home could not see the show of hands and now we’re not sure if we should turn up on Tuesday or Wednesday in the second week of June next year? But for me, it was interpreting what everyone was talking about that became a major issue. Perhaps this is a disadvantage of my otherness. I have not signed the Westminster Confession and therefore I cannot read between the lines. It seemed that most of the speeches were about determining who was the cleverest wordsmith. At times, it was like sitting in the corner at a party only attended by lexicographers and semanticists. I am none the wiser as to the subtle difference between expressing and promoting an opinion or whether THE COMPROMISE has intended or unintended consequences and whether conscience equals church law or trumps it and what undermining the church looks like and why people are so obsessed with the radio when social media has been about for at least twenty years. And I was grateful to the person who at least acknowledged their obliqueness and admitted they were referring to the ordination of women because no one else had mentioned this.

I am indebted to the BBC and their Sunday Sequence programme for giving five minutes or so to a review of the GA and allowing Alan Meban to provide his main takeaways, so I didn’t have to study all the recordings. There were three that stood out for him - baptism of children of unmarried couples, dissent, and reconfiguration of ministry. It was a surprise, he said, that the memorial requesting the establishment of a task group to look at the theology around this baptismal issue went through, but it could have been the secret Sunday afternoon water-sprinklings and the angry relatives that captured the mood of the house and I reckoned we needed more analysis of the mood because if I were to sum it up, it would be a mixture of ennui and nostalgia but then I may have watched Inside Out 2 recently. When it came to reconfiguration of ministry, radical was the sticking point yet again and they needed the lexicographers and the semanticists back to have a go at defining radical as long as it didn’t mean forgetting about small church because it’s all about covenant community regardless of size. And it seems dissent will never ever go away but then if it’s done conscientiously with grace and humility, it should be ok. And to Alan’s list, I will add some ‘smaller’ stories like the sadness at the sale of the Lucan Centre, and the campaign to reinstate evening services because we all need a bit more spiritual nourishment and apparently that can only be done inside a church building, and the recommendation to watch the actress Liz Carr’s powerful documentary ‘Better Off Dead?’⁴ when considering how to respond to euthanasia because surely it is a calling on the church to focus on assisted living as an alternative to assisted dying.

There were times when I was simply desperate for some clear instructions because I don’t think this is a denomination that is equipped to do nuance. “Our generation is hungry - hungry for love, for beauty, for meaning. The ‘dust of death’ covers all,” said the new moderator quoting Francis Schaeffer but he left out the bit about being hungry for stable morals and law. The only instruction I heard was “don’t touch the microphone” which as ‘an other’ isn’t something I’m likely to do and I decided there should be consequences, intended ones, like an electric shock if you even so much as consider pulling it towards you and this should also extend to those who hog it because sometimes you’d think only a dozen people had turned up because it’s always the same faces appearing on the platform.

But I enjoyed the glimpses of humanity like the ex-Moderator’s mum making pots of raspberry jam for everyone who had their hundredth birthday and the rather jolly resolution to rename Markethill after 104 years and the two Ronnies Trevors saying goodnight and the jelly babies versus the cool mints and the devotion of the tellers who all deserved effort badges for hanging around and leaping into action at short notice.

And somewhere in the middle of the notes I had made, I found the number 1379 and I looked at it for a long time and wondered why it was there and whether it referred to some major statistic or maybe the number of new ministers they needed to fill all those vacancies and I knew it wasn’t about Union because that’s a figure of 3,000,000 and then I realised it was the code for the toilet in Starbucks.

And if I could suggest a theme for a future moderator, it would be ‘love one another’ (including the others and the carpark operators because delays are not their fault) as it was obvious that respect has been somewhat absent, and that unity minus this key ingredient is a bit of a sham, and that lament is a practice of healing and there is much to heal from, and I found another quote which had slipped into my notes whilst I was multi-tasking. “If you can give them your time and you can listen without trying to fix them, that’s gold dust”. But even though it was fairly similar to what was said about how we seem to disagree with each other without actually talking or listening to one another, this wasn’t uttered by either of the Moderators but by Jill Halfpenny on Woman’s Hour. But I was glad to hear that the new communications strategy will be based around James Chapter 1…

“My dear brothers and sisters, take note of this: Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry”.

P.S. I must finish with another confession. Don’t tell anyone but I still have my lanyard…

For previous accounts of General Assemblies, see:

and

1. If you are accidentally reading this and wondering what on earth this is - I could give you two explanations. One comes from a man on the street navigating his way round the queue. He described it as “the Presbyterians are having their conference”. The Presbyterians themselves would describe the General Assembly as the church’s governing body and a meeting of its sovereign and highest courts (whatever that means).

2. Big bus that travels through Belfast.

3. Right Here, Right Now

4. Better Off Dead?