The Rev Katharine Meyer has finished her term of service at the Abbey Presbyterian Church, Parnell Square, Dublin.
Ms Meyer's earlier years were spent in the US. She is a graduate of Swarthmore and Yale. After an assistantship in Belmont, Belfast, she was inducted eight years ago as community minister for Abbey and part-time chaplain to Trinity College, Dublin City University and the Dublin Institute of Technology.
She was co-chairwoman and supervisor of the Dolebusters branch at 5 Gardiner Row, Dublin. From small beginnings this service to the unemployed has grown immensely with the influx of refugees and asylum-seekers. Each week about 500 people seek assistance, advice and instruction at Gardiner Row.
Ms Meyer also organised a day nursery at Abbey with Ms Jennifer Fulton. Mothers, many of them single, were able to leave their children here confidently and go to work. The nursery became one of the most efficient and caring organisations of its kind in the city.
At Abbey Church Ms Meyer encouraged ecumenism and promoted an Open Church Scheme, whereby the church was opened on weekdays to welcome warmly locals, tourists and passersby. Abbey Church paid tribute to her work in the congregation recently.
Ms Meyer will now serve as full-time chaplain to the Dublin universities.
The young cleric, with a lifetime of Bible study, teaching and preaching ahead of him, will seek the most up-to-date references for understanding and interpreting the meaning of the Bible. He will wish for commentaries that are outstanding in their clarity and presentation.
General essays on the literary and cultural contexts of the entire Bible, as well as introduction to the major sections of it, will also be appreciated by him. He will seek commentaries on each book and chapter and important verses, and if these are provided by 83 world experts from such universities as Yale, Princeton and Harvard, he will be assured of their reliability.
He need look no further than The Revised Edition of HarperCollins Bible Commentary, 1203pp, £34.99stg. This volume belongs in the minister's study, church library, day school and public library, in fact, anywhere there is a Bible.
The many Dublin friends of the Rev Dr M. Kennedy will be saddened to learn of his death a short time ago in a Northern nursing home.
Born in 1915 in Dublin into a family who worshipped in Adelaide Road Presbyterian Church, he was educated in Cheltenham College, England, before returning to study and receive a first moderatorship in history at Trinity College Dublin.
He prepared for the ministry of the Presbyterian Church in New College, Edinburgh; the Presbyterian College, Belfast; and, for a brief time, in Strasbourg. He gained a Doctorate in Philosophy at Queen's University Belfast and, for his distinguished service in India, received a Doctorate in Divinity (honoris causa) from the Presbyterian Theological Faculty. In 1942, during the second World War, he was accepted for foreign mission service in India. Initially, he saw service with the YMCA in north Africa and Egypt. But his life's work was mainly in Bombay.
He taught history and was warden and chaplain at Wilson College, Bombay. Donald was intimately associated with the negotiations leading to the formation of the United Church of North India, becoming the secretary of the Union Committee and a bishop of that church, an unusual role for a Presbyterian.
Donald wrote and privately published a biography of Alexander Rudolf Vinet, a French-speaking Swiss theologian who emphasised confirmation of traditional doctrines by personal experience; otherwise, he deprecated, if not rejected, them.
Donald was a committed ecumenist and emphasised that ecumenism and evangelicalism were parts of a seamless whole of faith and practice.
He is survived by his wife, Isobel, whom he married in 1952 while on furlough from India.