The desire of immigrants to have their own churches could inhibit their integration into Irish society, the former moderator of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, the Rev Dr Trevor Morrow, warned yesterday.
Dr Morrow told the agm of the Irish Council of Churches (ICC) in Dublin that there is a "dilemma" facing congregations who wished to be accommodating to immigrant Christians in that helping them set up their own churches may be encouraging ghettoisation.
Dr Morrow, who has a ministry at Lucan, Co Dublin, said there was a difficult practical question where emergent ethnic churches are concerned.
Pastor Fritz-Gert Mayer, of the Lutheran Church in Ireland, spoke of the difficulty faced in facilitating the desire of different Lutheran cultural groups in Ireland to have services in their own languages. They are from countries such as Sweden, Latvia, and Poland.
"They don't like mixed language [ services]. It is not enough," he said.
The Rev Bill Mullally, of the Methodist Church in Ireland, who serves in Lucan and Tallaght, said that immigrants integrated in schools but in rural Ireland particularly there was a tendency to adopt a "this is the way we do it" approach with immigrants.
He instanced how, at Clontarf Methodist Church in Dublin, instead of taking up a collection, people had adopted the African style of leaving offerings in a plate on a table. There was, he said, "something sacrificial about laying your offering before God".
The former president of the Methodist Church in Ireland, the Rev Ken Wilson, from Bray, asked of inter-church communion. "Can we go further?"
The president of the ICC, Mrs Gillian Kingston, said the churches were "in big trouble ecumenically".
They should do all things together "except those which in conscience we cannot do", she said. Fr Joe Coyne, parish priest at Lucan, said that lay people "cannot understand why we don't do more together".