The president of the Methodist Church, Rev David Kerr, will today visit members in Dun Laoghaire, Bray, and Wicklow town.
Continuing his mid-term tour of Dublin and the east coast area, he met lay preachers and clergy in Christ Church, Leeson Park, last night. Earlier he visited members in Tallaght. Yesterday morning he was a guest of the Lord Mayor of Dublin, Mr Joe Doyle, at the Mansion House. He returns to Belfast tomorrow.
In his sermon at the annual covenant service in Christ Church, Leeson Park, the Rev Kerr said the Churches on this island had been "reluctant to seek and to affirm the common ground, preferring to highlight the differences and disagreements which exist between us".
He felt that people North and South had lived for too long "as if we were living with neighbours from hell. The Northern unionist views with ill-concealed horror any closer relationship with the Free State, while many in the Republic would wish the six counties would just float off into the Atlantic."
The churches, he said, "have been happy to live with our own caricatures of each other and glad of any word or action which confirms those caricatures . . .
"We have been quick to defend our own position and attack that of others; slow to listen to each other and slow to attempt to understand where each tradition is coming from."
As an example he referred to the highlighting of "the hurt of some and sorrow of others" on the publication of the Catholic bishops' One Bread One Body document on communion, while at the same time ignoring "the broad acceptance of the Revised Common Lectionary first used in Advent 1998".
What a difference it would make if people could see each other not as neighbours from hell but as neighbours from heaven, he said.
Criticising the widening gap between rich and poor on the island, he said it was being treated with complacency by many people. Little or no attempt had been made to understand the hopes and fears of the poor.
Similarly with minority communities, with us "sympathising with the plight of the Travelling community but refusing to have them settle in our back yard; [and] feeling compassion for the refugee and the asylum-seeker but standing silently by as they are deported from our midst".
