HAVE THE benefits brought to the Republic of Ireland by the Celtic Tiger been at the expense of family life and parental care?
So asks the president of the Methodist Church, the Rev Roy Cooper.
He says he has heard that apartments are now being built in some parts of Europe which have no dining area.
Here in Ireland there is no family table in an increasing number of homes, no place where the family can sit around together and do things as they did in the past, he argues.
He was in Carlow recently visiting a Methodist congregation there and was told by one member how he is awoken at 6am every morning by the thunder of traffic heading for Dublin.
“Sunday is a dead day for those people,” he says.
He feels also that “maybe the word ‘church’ alienated people. They claim to he spiritual but do not believe in organised religion.”
He notes how the African synod of bishops had recently discussed using the phrase ‘family of God’ instead of ‘church’.
“Many people don’t really care,” Dr Cooper adds. “They think it [religion] is a load of rubbish. They live life for the here and now. You will see more cars outside a supermarket on Sundays than outside a church.”
Still, there continues to be a lot of misery and hardship, with the Church doing its best to help people. “Despite the upturn, the rising tide has not raised all boats.” And that tide now appeared to be ebbing.
He was talking to a west of Ireland man recently, who had grown up in poverty and, anticipating more stringent times ahead, had remarked: ‘I know I can live on less, but I’m not sure the young can.’
Dr Cooper comments that most young people had known only prosperity. “Many knew little of The Troubles either, unlike those who came through the 1960s.”
All the traditional churches seem to be missing out on what he terms “the X generation”, those aged between 25 and 40. Yet these same people seem to be attracted to community-type, charismatic movements.
Possibly by the music, the visuals, the language, possibly a combination of all of those? He can’t say.
Regardless, they are a generation that all the churches have to go after. They need to be presented with “a fresh experience of church”.
He speaks of Anglican and Methodist missions to young people in Britain where they met the young through surfing and skate boarding.
He was on a visit to Albania recently and the great majority of the attendance at a service in Tirana were young people.
“What we are trying to do, in the words of the Wesleyan hymn, is ‘to serve the present age, my calling to fulfil’,” he says. They had to find a way of “touching the unchurched”.
He estimates that there are approximately 67,000 Methodists on the island of Ireland with the great majority, or approximately 55,000, in Northern Ireland.
Such numbers are not always evident in congregations, though immigrants and asylum seekers had added a new vibrancy to some older Methodist communities in Clontarf, the Dublin central mission, Athlone, Carlow, Killarney, Kilkenny.
Quite a number of Methodists in the Republic live in rural areas such as west Cork and north Tipperary. He remembers that, as a minister in the Republic, he had six churches in his circuit where on some Sundays the attendance might be as low as five or six and the average age was 75.
He is worried about the growing levels of violence in cities on the island.
In Belfast and Derry, he feels this might have roots in the vacuum which followed the ending of paramilitary violence and which was being filled by (sometimes similar) criminal elements.
Although body counts are nowhere at Dublin or Limerick levels in Belfast and Derry, there is deep anxiety he says over the “plague” of violence in those cities too.
There is also the problem of youth suicide, especially involving young men, all over the island. You would almost get the impression that it was the most impressive way to go, with dramatic funerals, and sometimes other copy-cat deaths to follow. It was, he feels “a very severe way to get attention”.
In general, he feels that inter- church relations are improving.
He notes that the four main churches would be sharing a common place of worship at Adamstown in Dublin, as an example, and the participation of Cardinal Seán Brady in the Maundy Thursday service with the other church leaders and Queen Elizabeth at the Church of Ireland St Patrick’s Cathedral in Armagh recently.
He met the new Catholic Bishop of Ossory, Dr Séamus Freeman, recently who pointed out to him that they shared the Bible and a common language.
Dr Cooper wonders, however, how much of this improvement in ecumenical relations was trickling down to the man or woman in the pew.