The congregation of the New River Unitarian-Universalist church supporttheir jovial minister. Patrick Smyth met them in Beckley,West Virginia
THE wooden-boarded two-storey house, with deck, which serves as home to the New River Unitarian-Universalist congregation is typical of many homes in this old mining town.
Down the street, lined with as many other, grander churches as there are pubs in an Irish town, is Mountain State University. Beyond the university lies the centre of this recession-hit town situated in the coalfields which for so long brought wealth and hard graft to West Virginia.
The congregation - all 14 of them yesterday - meets in the house's front room. They are amused by the furore surrounding their jovial minister, the Rev George Exoo, and protective of him.
A local TV crew has turned up and is firmly told that it cannot film the service, while the Irish Times and Associated Press representatives get a lecture on the need to give people a fair hearing.
But there is little doubt from both the conversation before, over coffee, and during the collective debate - heckling encouraged - that the members of the congregation support his unofficial part-time work as head of Compassionate Chaplaincy.
Ed Brown says that the minister is filling an important void in assisting people in real pain.
The church, which draws its roots from the Judaeo-Christian tradition, but now embraces many of the great religions and even non-believers, places a major emphasis on personal choice.
"Whose life is it anyway, yours or the church's?" asks Brady English in response to suggestions that suicide is a sin.
He insists that it is not a question of saying to someone who has made the choice that suicide is morally right. "There's a differnce between saying something is OK. But it's your choice. We are not here to make a decision for people," he says.
Dr Exoo's predecessor as local minister, the Rev Beverly Kinraide, says George "does not go looking for people". She explains: "They call George when they have nowhere else to turn to."
As the service proceeds, the discussion turns theological.
Thomas Kinraide cites the Catholic theologian Dick Westly, who argues that if life is genuinely a gift from God, then it must be something that can also be discarded.
Beverly Kinraide argues that, as humans, we are all going to die eventually.
The argument is about prolonging - not losing - a life. It is also important to put emphasis on the quality of life people lead, she argues.
The president of the congregation, Burchell Pierce, attacks the "hypocrisy" of the media in focusing on the death of one woman who was presumed to have been in enormous pain while it failed to notice an epidemic of suicides, some invol-ving children as young as eight years of age, in the American-Indian nation.