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Editorial
Alwyn Thomson
Comment:
Politics: serving God and doing good!
Ethel White
From
the Director: Cultivating the common ground
David W Porter
ECONI
Statement: Confidence in God
October 2002
Postbag: Letters to the Editor
Why
vote?
Alison Laird
Communities
of hope
Lord Alderdice
Transformation 2003: Killing for God?
View
from the south
Patrick Mitchel
Church
& state
Esmond
Birnie MLA
Taking
the plunge
John Kyle
Faith
in politics
Interview: Rt Hon Paul Murphy MP
Your
kingdom come
Heather Morrow
ECONI
Statement: Forum for Peace & Reconciliation
January 2003
Bible
study series: Faith in the future
David
W Porter
Through
a glass, darkly
Changing Women, Changing Worlds Conference
Review:
A night in November by Marie Jones
Noel
McCune
Book
Reviews
Alwyn Thomson
For
God and His Glory Alone:
Study 3: Reconciliation
For
God and His Glory Alone:
Study 4: Peace
STAFF NEWS
Introducing Naomi
Boyd and Ben Walker
Naomi Boyd and Ben Walker both started with ECONI before Christmas. They
got together to provide you with this exclusive mutual interview…
N: Ben you haven’t worked with ECONI for long and we don’t see you about much. Why is that?
B: Well, I’m only in one morning a week.
N: One morning a week?! Are you workshy?
B: Slightly, but that’s beside the point. I’m actually at Belfast Bible College doing a Masters in Theology and I started working with ECONI in mid September doing a sort of placement for a few hours a week. As a reasonably ignorant Englishman, it gives me a great chance to understand Northern Ireland a bit better.
N: So what do you do here?
B: I’m working on an Action Pack project which I can’t tell you too much about at the moment as it is top secret but I don’t think I will give the game away too much if I tell you it involves looking at ECONI’s biblical principles and how to make them real and applied for us in Northern Ireland.
N: OK, great! So what about your MTh? What are you doing and what brought you here?
B: Well, I’m looking at the place of the Old Testament in 21st Century Mission. Previously I completed a degree in Philosophy and Theology, and since then I have worked for an Education Board, and for an Anglican Church in London. My wife, Ruth, is from Belfast, and we decided to come over here in the summer, so I could study at BBC. But what about you Naomi? You haven’t been working with ECONI for very long either!
N: Well, I started working with ECONI in November as the Administrative Assistant, I work in the Support Services Department under the direction of Bill Ellison the Support Services Manager. We’re the current holders of the ECONI Staff Team Christmas Quiz trophy!
B: Congratulations! What were you doing beforehand?
N: Eating our Christmas meal together.
B: No, I mean before working here at ECONI
N: Oh, sorry – well, I was a member of the PCI Year Team and did youth work in 3 locations throughout Ireland for a year. I worked for FamilyBooks and then went to Belfast Bible College for a year and completed a Certificate in Biblical Studies and Counselling with Youth Ministry. Since that I’ve worked for the Belfast Education and Library Board, and finally I’ve spent two years with Scripture Union in a similar role before taking the job with ECONI.
B: So with all your administrative experience, you’ll help to keep things organised here…?
N: I can but try….
Louise Currie
In January we said farewell to Louise who left ECONI after eighteen months
working as Funding Co-ordinator. Louise’s skills and creativity shone
through in her fundraising role where she met fundraising challenges,
especially in the Annual Appeals. We will miss Louise and all that she
brought to her work and relationships in ECONI and wish her well in her
new job with Larne Borough Council.
Stephen Graham
Stephen spent 20 months with ECONI as Research Assistant on the Embodying
Forgiveness Project which came to a close at the end of March. Before
he left to take up his new job at the Royal Courts of Justice Stephen
wrote his own reflection on forgiveness which is printed here:
Learning to Dream
Forgiveness
Our two forgiveness conferences are over. The speakers are silent. The
papers from the conferences are published. In addition, our series of
fifteen forgiveness papers is now complete. We have explored what forgiveness
means, how it relates to justice, reconciliation, truth, memory, repentance,
guilt, politics, church, and inter-personal relationships. What do we
do next?
The past two years have been quite a journey for me as I have managed CCCI’s Embodying Forgiveness project. In the recent past I had begun to adopt quite a jaundiced outlook on the world, adopting Nietzsche’s phrase to myself, “meaningless, meaningless, everything is meaningless.” Things once held to be important faded into insignificance and pointlessness. Idealism became a real bane, a fake world inhabited only by non-realist dreamers.
Towards the end of the project I was incredibly busy with several forgiveness papers to prepare for printing. Because she had constantly seen me with a paper in my hand, Amy Ornée, our Learning Assistant, commented, “You must dream forgiveness!”
This phrase struck me just as I was coming back from the printer’s on the train. “You must dream forgiveness.” There in a simple remark was a central gospel calling – “You must dream forgiveness.”
“Dream” is a word we apply either to a far out fantasy, something beyond the real world, or to something that is almost impossible, yet still possible nonetheless – a vision of how things could be, albeit only with great effort. Martin Luther King Jr. had a dream – not a far out fantasy, but a vision worth working towards – something seemingly impossible to many, but which was a practical possibility to strive for. His dream was a vision of what really could be – even though the odds were heavily stacked against it. It is possible. It is worth living and dying for. The road on which this dream is to be pursued is a tough one. But, ultimately it is a dream worth having.
Likewise, forgiveness is such a dream. In many cases we may not be able to see just how forgiveness is possible. And yet, Jesus calls us to live lives of forgiveness. Therein lies the tension with which we must live: We are called to forgive but forgiving sometimes seems impossible. Human experience, thankfully, often testifies to the possibility of forgiveness in circumstances in which we may be tempted to relegate forgiveness to the realm of fantasy. Christ himself lived and taught us to dream forgiveness – to take this dream, this ideal, and make it a practical philosophy of life, a vision to be pursued.
People sneered at the dreams of Ghandi, Tutu, King and even Christ. But, with perseverance, such men continued to dream and mountains were moved.
Whether or not forgiveness is a far out fantasy, beyond the real world or a challenging vision that can become a real and practical reality really depends on us: “We must dream forgiveness.”
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