 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Introduction:
Not Of This World
Derek Poole
Comment:
Is You Is or Is You Ain't?
Joyce Greenaway
Truth
to Live
David Hewitt
Evangelicalism
at its Best
Patrick Mitchel
Not
of this World...A Personal Reflection
Glenn Jordan
Review
1: An Exercise in Self-Reflection
Derek Tidball
How
Often Should We Forgive?
Alan Wilson
Review
2: An Exercise in Propaganda
Wallace Thompson
Review
3: I am not an Evangelical...
Malachi O'Doherty
Faith
and Practice - Maurice Kinkead
Ruth Hutchinson
FAITH
AND PRACTICE – MAURICE KINKEAD
Maurice Kinkead is Chief Executive of the Greater East Belfast Partnership.
He is the subject of the third interview in a series that seeks to explore
the connections between faith and practice in the workplace.
I suppose I started life as a teenager, because I can’t really remember very much before that, and because I had quite a difficult teenage period from about fourteen to seventeen. I suppose most people do. I had a very difficult time adjusting, growing up as a teenager, and gave everybody else around me a pretty difficult time. One thing I recall is that religion was probably a completely irrelevant nonentity at that stage. When I was living in Newcastle, the person who was probably my closest friend was a Catholic guy. We went to what were called coffee bars, run by various groups of people. That’s probably when I first started thinking seriously about religion, because up to then it had just been something that I didn’t want anything to do with. So then, having made the decision not to be at all religious I suppose I felt a bit freer to listen to people talking about religion, because it wasn’t something that I had to do. Coming to Faith
I wasn’t very successful at school. Basically my education deteriorated year on year, and I eventually just left school and went to London. It was around the time of the bombing in Oxford Street (Belfast). I remember ringing home to my mother. I was probably quite homesick, and was thinking that she could have been killed in that bomb. I definitely took a decision then that my life was a bit of a mess, going nowhere, really getting nothing out of it, no sense of satisfaction. Maybe all this stuff I’d been pushing away to the back of my mind about God and Jesus and a sense of right and wrong was actually true. Through all of this I came to some kind of faith. I found a Methodist Church and the minister introduced me to Young Life Campaign. A man there took me to Speakers’ Corner. When I look back at this now it looks so ridiculous, including (some times) when he wasn’t around and I went a few times on my own. I was about eighteen, heading off with a wee stepladder, and standing up in the middle of Hyde Park Speakers’ Corner. It had all the headcases of the day, it was great craic. Two things from that time are still quite important to me. It definitely stopped me getting further into what was becoming an incredible morass and it gave me, maybe for the first time, a conscious sense of values, that there were things in life that were valuable. Faith and Theology
I started to think a bit about what I actually wanted to do, and eventually made a decision to go to the Irish Baptist College with a view of working full time in some kind of Christian work and ministry. I really wasn’t all that clear exactly what I wanted to do, except I suppose I felt at that stage that I had some kind of organising leadership ability or skill. I felt that I wanted to do something to make a difference, not just make an impact. I stayed at the college a long time. A couple of things struck me when I went to college. One was that the longer I stayed there the more uncertain I became about things. There were different ways of looking at things. I suppose that’s part of being educated, and I know there are people who think that’s dangerous. I found it quite refreshing, although it was a big struggle at times, because I think I was always looking for some kind of certainty in my faith, and yet the more I thought about my faith the more uncertain I became. Sometimes that was frightening, and sometimes it was actually quite liberating, and that is part of a tension I probably still feel. Culture Shock
I was in Strandtown Baptist Church as a kind of student pastor, and went to a meeting in the YMCA in East Belfast. I realised I’d spent most of my adult life either in a college or in a church. I wondered what it was like out there, where there are people who don’t actually share your faith, and so I decided to go along to volunteer in the youth club. That was the most direct culture shock I have ever had. It was just like an entirely different world. I asked myself, “What, if anything, has all that I’ve spent the last number of years learning in theological college got to do with these young people here?” And probably the answer was “Absolutely nothing”. These young people had values, talked to me about things that were important to them. There were kids in there who, when you got to know them, were decent, pleasant kids with whom you can build up a trust, but they’re just brushed aside. In our community, our society, they don’t count. They don’t have any qualifications, they don’t get any jobs. Nobody wants them around the place, nobody wants to live beside them, wants to sit on the bus beside them, nobody wants to go anywhere near them, and what has the church got to say about that, what has the gospel got to say about that? Incarnation
I couldn’t possibly go into full time ministry in the church. I wasn’t prepared to be the kind of person that I felt people wanted me to be. I couldn’t have any integrity as a minister in a church. I wasn’t prepared to pretend to be the strong person that people expected me to be. And I certainly wasn’t prepared to expect my family to be the kind of family that people expected the minister’s family to be. So I took the job with Frontier Youth Trust because it was with a different kind of people. I’d begun to think that if church isn’t relevant to these people then it’s not relevant at all. There isn’t anything else worth doing if you can’t actually work with people whom society has pushed to the side. At this stage I developed my theology along the lines of incarnation, the idea of God coming among people, and often among people whom other people didn’t bother with. The one single theme for me was around the idea of justice. I had always thought of righteousness as being linked into things that one’s not supposed to do, rather than linking it into the things that one should do. Actually justice and righteousness were exactly the same thing and if anything, theology was based not so much on the Bible as on the character of God. The character of God is probably all the theology I have, seeing that things are right and fair. Living in the world
Moving from FYT into the Bridge was just a slight change of structure. I was working with both young people and old people. One of the saddest things I’ve seen is the number of elderly people who live in disadvantaged communities and who have very, very little. If the church is doing anything in the community it has to be addressing issues of unfairness and injustice wherever they are found. I believe that the main value of the church is that it’s a place that gives people some support to live in the world, rather than somewhere to go to get out of the world. Within the church we’re not in any way responding as we should to social disadvantage. People are nervous that somehow working in the community will stop them doing what they’re really supposed to do i.e. preach the gospel. I don’t think that preaching the gospel is more important than caring for the well being of people. To me ministry is doing what you think God wants you to do. Community
The work of the Partnership is basically an attempt to bring together all players who have an interest in the regeneration of a disadvantaged community like inner East Belfast. I’m living and working in a community that has left lots of people from age eleven onwards feeling ‘dumped’. Some children are born into a family who are well educated, who value education, who give them support, who work with them. Other kids are born into families where there has been little interest in education for a couple of generations. Both these children are exactly the same in God’s sight, but they’re not the same in the community. There are people who can jump from one to the other, but by and large the Partnership is about trying to address the kind of structured and multiple disadvantage you find here. I would like to think that we as churches and people could somehow value folk the way God values them. Churches and Community
A number of churches, certainly within Protestant East Belfast play a big part in providing services within the community, but there are issues around who to do it with. They often want just to do it themselves. They don’t even do it with each other as churches sometimes, and they have great difficulties doing it with people in the community. Sectarianism is an issue around the interface areas here, but there’s a lot of work going on. I must say the churches are not in the forefront of that, it’s primarily on-the-ground community workers. Most of the clergy are living away outside the area all together. School teachers don’t live in those areas. Bank managers don’t live in those areas. Social workers don’t live in those areas. So there’s a leadership issue around that. One of the things we need to do is build the capacity of local communities to be able to take on leadership themselves. There’s a real learning curve there for churches, because churches tend to think logically. They have a gospel, which they need to give out to people who don’t have it, so that they can benefit from it and they use that kind of thinking for all that they do. They’re doing things for people all the time. But in fact if you keep doing things for people you leave them where they are, you create dependency, and then of course you’re not there whenever they need you. Conclusion
I would like to see people working together as partners to achieve something, not just working to achieve partnership, because just being a partner doesn’t mean anything. Social inclusion is about creating a society where people feel they are included and can make a contribution, and where they are valued. ECONI wants to thank Maurice Kinkead for his willing participation in the interview, and wishes him continued success as he continues to help build communities in East Belfast. Ruth Hutchinson
Assistant Editor
 |
||
 |
 |
|