What is the resurrection to mean to a church which today seems intent on witnessing only to fear and tetchiness?

Certainly if we are to take the Gospel accounts seriously, the principal impact of the Easter events was to turn frightened and disillusioned men and women into those who were utterly fearless and united in their conviction that Christ was among them and now more powerful than ever.

From trembling behind closed doors, they moved into a new mode of courage and openness.

There is a remarkable scene in T.S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral where the Archbishop, Thomas a Becket, is urged to take safety in the cathedral and to bar the doors against the men who have orders to kill him.

He refuses. "Unbar the doors", he calls. "Throw open the doors. I will not have the house of prayer, the church of Christ, the sanctuary, turned into a fortress. The church shall be open, even to our enemies. Open the door." In Ireland, and within all our churches, we have sought not so much to open doors as to batten down the hatches. Yet the vocation of any church is to provide the hope and the welcome that an open door offers.

Whether we speak of the church as a building or an organism, it is to be a place where one is always welcome for oneself, not for what others expect one to be. After all, Christ welcomed not only the outsider, the ostracised and the doubter. In the Garden of Gethsemane he even welcomed those who came to do him active harm.

In this Easter season, we of the church must learn, and with penitence, to admit that we belong to a church which for many people, and particularly a hard-headed younger generation, is fussily answering questions that are just not being asked.

We have stopped addressing the basic questions as to whether there is any meaning to our existence; whether Christ makes any difference to a human life; whether Christianity makes demands for radical justice upon all of us; or, indeed, whether religion is not simply a hypocritical escape from uncomfortable reality.

What men and women see as "the church" in Ireland today is a self-satisfied comfortable institution, addicted in equal proportions to manipulation and to domination. If the church is to serve God by serving His world, as it is called to do, it can only begin to accomplish that when its primary concern is to live for the outsider, not to exclude him or her by regulation, indifference or prejudice.

Paradoxically, the only way any Christian community can serve its existing members spiritually is when it turns its face outwards, forgets about its own survival and seeks to share good news with those who wish only to find hope and love and direction in their lives.

But unless we in the church can bear to accept the reality of how we appear to those on the outside, those who are not the aficionados, we can never even begin to turn the church in the direction of God's hope for it at the dawn of the third Christian millennium.

Unless the outsider - lapsed, searching, or merely curious - has a reason to enter the open door of love and acceptance, it is we who have failed, because all we will have presented through our structures, our ministry, our worship and our welcome is a bolted door rather than the open-heartedness of God's loving welcome to all.

But an open door does more than allow people to enter. It also allows light to enter from outside. The church must be open to the scrutiny and the risks that fresh ideas can bring to it from beyond its walls.

Under the scrutiny of those who are our friends, or our enemies, we might see the absurdity of so much of our petty divisions, the pathetic folly of our family bickering about who is using the family Bible properly, or who is a real sister.

Of course there are core beliefs that are non-negotiable if the word "Christian" is to retain any meaning. But we must never forget that the earliest Christian creed of which we have any record was a simple and unadorned acclamation "Jesus is Lord".

The Easter faith begins with a stone rolled back from the door of a cave. But Jesus was not to be found shivering and muttering to himself inside the cold walls of a tomb. Would that the same could be said of the Irish church.

Richard Clarke is Church of Ireland Bishop of Meath and Kildare. His book And Is It True? was recently published by Dominican Publications