THE new moderator of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland is the Rev Harry Allen, a 62 year old minister from Coleraine, Co Derry, who is on the church's conservative evangelical wing and generally does not support joint worship with Catholics.
Fourteen of the church's 21 presbyteries, the group of churches which is Presbyterianism's basic unit of government, voted for Mr Allen. Two of them voted for the Rev Douglas Armstrong, a strongly ecumenical minister from Greenisland, Co Antrim, and for the Rev Maynard Cathcart, from Derry City. The Rev Gordon Gray, the Rev Robert Johnston and the Rev Derek Poots each received one vote.
Mr Allen will succeed Dr John Ross, who is ecumenically inclined, during the church's general assembly in June, and will serve for one year.
The moderator elect comes from a working class Church of Ireland background in Portadown, Co Armagh, where his mother worked as a spinner and his father as a lorry driver. He became a Presbyterian at 17, and shortly afterwards decided to go for the ministry.
He served his apprenticeship as an electrician, before studying for the ministry at Magee College, Derry; Trinity College Dublin; the church's own Assembly's College in Belfast; and New College, Edinburgh.
He was assistant minister at Dundonald in east Belfast, and minister at Garvagh, Co Derry, before being appointed minister at New Row, Coleraine, in 1979.
As a conservative evangelical, Mr Allen emphasises the theological differences which preclude him from joining in worship with Catholics. A church source said yesterday that these would be based on a belief that by engaging in "formal acts of worship" with Catholics, Presbyterians might be giving credibility to official Catholic doctrines on key issues like salvation and the sacraments which they believe are fundamentally incorrect.
In choosing Mr Allen, the Presbyterian ministers and elders, who are its electoral college, have kept to the unspoken church tradition of recent decades of alternating an ecumenist and an anti ecumenical conservative as moderator.