This is sad to see, and our hearts go out to Rev Katherine Meyer and all those faithful servants who have been casualties of grey suited consecrated homophobia.
In 2018, Presbyterian Church in Ireland passed a motion barring same-sex couples from communicant membership and refused to baptise their children.
At the time, the Evangelical Alliance defended them, with Peter Lynas repeatedly claiming that this was ”only a clarification” of the church’s position.
Six years later, and not content with their purge of LGBT+ people of faith, PCI inquisitors are now hounding out ministers who dare to even offer friendship or pastoral support to the LGBT+ community.
Ireland’s largest protestant denomination, supported by NI’s largest evangelical body, have simply written off an entire demographic of faith seekers, and are now persecuting even those trying to mitigate the damage done.
All this, while almost the whole of the rest of Northern Ireland Christendom looks on in awkward silence.
To the cacophony of a thousand roosters crowing, the collective churches huddle round fires of self righteousness, blandly bleating that they “just don’t know the man!”
For what it’s worth, we continue to stand in love, solidarity and support with our LGBT+ brothers and sisters across Ireland – and we condemn the ongoing, unchristian and harmful actions of PCI in the strongest possible terms.
For those seeking the actual path of Christ, please see inclusivefaith.lgbt for a list of the few affirming and inclusive faith spaces in Northern Ireland.
To the other two and a half thousand NI churches and their leaders still looking on in the silence of freshly washed hands, remember the words from James’ epistle “if anyone, then, knows the good they ought to do and doesn’t do it, it is sin for them.”
To everyone else, don’t be silent. Hold your churches and faith leaders to account. Ask them why they aren’t speaking out against the wider church’s persecution of LGBT+ Christians.
This affects all of us, and we can’t wait for “top down” change when the institution has become self corrupted. It’s up to ordinary, everyday Christians to actually take up their crosses and show the higher echelons of clericalism what solidarity with the marginalised really looks like.
Father forgive them, even though they know exactly what they do.
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