Presbyterian General Assembly The newly elected deputy clerk of the Presbyterian General Assembly, the Rev Harry Robinson, warned yesterday of "potential meltdown" for the church.
Church members were brought face to face with reality seeing so many young people voting with their feet, young marrieds contentedly giving up on the church and watching the Catholic ethos of the South and the conservative ethos of the North being suddenly swept away, he said.
The Rev Robinson announced to the General Assembly in Belfast details of a special "Get a Life" residential conference to be held in the University of Ulster in Coleraine from August 9th-12th.
He said it was "critically important" that people attend the conference where they could "look square in the face at this massive challenge looming before us".
The Irish Government and the former Taoiseach, Mr John Bruton, were thanked at the General Assembly for their help in assisting the church in dealings with the EU. The Rev Dr Sam Hutchinson said that when the Employment Directive was being drafted three years ago, the Irish alone stood out courageously "for Christian interests and against enormous pressure from other states."
He said next on the Europe agenda where the churches were concerned may be the (legal) status of ministers of religion.
"Of course in our internal church procedures, ministers should be treated with fairness and natural justice, but we do not issue contracts of employment.
"Could a minister then take his case to an employment tribunal, where issues would be judged by purely secular standards? However, Brussels may now legislate, not just for 'employees' but for 'workers' or occupations generally, a much wider category," he said.
Dr Hutchinson also said the undue influence of secularist France was all too evident in the draft Constitution for Europe.
"It pays respects to ancient Greece and Rome and the philosophical currents of the Enlightenment. There is one passing reference to the cultural, religious and humanist inheritance of Europe, but in a bout of selective amnesia the Judeo-Christian heritage is never mentioned," he said.
In yesterday's editions, a paragraph from a speech by the Rev Dr John Dunlop to the General Assembly on Wednesday was cut.
As reported it read:
He suggested that if current inquiries (in the North) continued and calls for more inquiries were met, "we may end up with the extraordinary situation - some would say a ludicrous situation - of having prisoners released, 'on the runs' back in society and people closely associated with terrorism in the Government and maybe having responsibility for security, while police officers are in court and maybe in prison.
"While each policy pursued may have internal logic, does anyone anywhere sit back and ask what the cumulative effect on the body politic may be of succumbing to the demands of one pressure group or another?"