A controversy over the methods of a Presbyterian minister in Dublin will be taken a stage further next week, writes Patsy McGarry.
February 14th has been set as the date for a judicial commission of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland to hear an appeal against a decision not to remove a minister from his Dublin post.
Formal complaints against the Rev Gary Millar (39), seeking his removal from his Malahide and Howth post, were rejected by the church's Dublin and Munster presbytery last December.
This decision is being appealed to the church's judicial commission, which may only address the procedures employed by the Dublin and Munster presbytery in its inquiry and whether these were correct.
Since 2000, when Dr Millar arrived from Belfast, numbers attending services in both Howth and Malahide are said to have increased significantly. But, as with so much else in this dispute, there is no agreement on this either. There are suggestions that as many as 25 families have been lost to the congregation in Howth alone since his arrival, while an increase in Malahide is attributed to people from abroad coming to work in Ireland.
Newer members are also, in the main, younger. These people are unequivocal in their enthusiasm for Dr Millar.
No one from either side of the debate was willing to talk to The Irish Times on the record. And Dr Millar himself said he did not feel free to comment at all.
Dr Millar's ministry has included the introduction of a type of service which is very much focused on young families, with up to 10 minutes at the beginning of each service devoted to children. He is also said to favour a more evangelical, Bible-based approach to preaching and ecumenism than did his predecessor, the Rev Bill O'Neill.
One man in Malahide described Dr Millar's services as "very welcoming." He found the minister "refreshing and challenging", "quite enlightened" as a man, and "an extraordinary worker". This man, who has been a member of the congregation for three years, said he had travelled extensively and that Dr Millar was one of the best he had encountered.
"He is an excellent minister," he said. He admired in particular his ability to meet people at all levels in his presentation of the Bible.
A woman with a young family, who attends services at Malahide but who has also been to services in Howth, was of a similar view. She liked the fact that Dr Millar's services were "very family orientated". She also liked the strong community feeling at services and other church-related events Dr Millar organised.
But some older members of the congregation have equally strong and opposite views. They take exception to what they see as the manner in which they are being sidelined in favour of newer members. It has been suggested that some church elders in the congregation have been manoeuvred out of position in favour of others.
Others speak of feeling alienated by what they describe as Dr Millar's evangelistic zeal, with its emphasis on "an extreme form of fundamentalism", as one man put it. One older man The Irish Times spoke to said this "evangelism" was a feature of "the current wave of new ministers allocated to the South" (from Northern Ireland). They were "dragging the church backwards into the 19th century".
Another man said this "new wave" of ministers "are all from the North and have no feeling for the rather different climate this side of the Border". He felt they were contributing to "a growth in pietism rather than fundamentalism".
He claimed members of the Howth/Malahide congregation were becoming "distraught, disillusioned, upset" and some were "being forced to leave", while attendance by a largely transient population was being encouraged.
He said many of these transients hailed from churches abroad that were very narrow in their outlook.
They provided "a brief but false impression of numbers that is seized upon by some of these newer ministers as a sign of their 'success' and they disregard the numbers that they are losing".
He appealed to the church authorities "to listen to their congregations and restore the values so cherished and nurtured over the many decades of Presbyterianism in Ireland, thus allowing the church to grow and prosper in fellowship with their fellow Christians".