Church bidding to reverse falling congregation trend

Church bidding to reverse falling congregation trend

29 February 2012

THE minister and members of Downpatrick Presbyterian Church are taking radical steps to halt a decline in numbers attending services.

The Fountain Street church is unused most Sundays and instead services are now taking place in the adjoining church hall.

The Rev. Harry Robinson, church minister, hopes the move will “help to recover the real meaning of faith and church.”

“People have asked me what is going on Downpatrick Presbyterian Church and why we would vacate a perfectly good church building,” Mr. Robinson said.

“Believe it or not, I could best explain by going back 66 years to a cell in the notorious Flossenburg concentration camp. There, awaiting death, was a brilliant and brave Pastor named Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

“He was agonising over what had gone so badly wrong with the German national church, which had given its support to the Nazi regime. Among his conclusions was that its leaders and members had confused religion with Christianity. From his cell, shortly before his execution, he pleaded for ‘religionless Christianity’.”

Mr. Robinson said that 66 years after Pastor Bonhoeffer, he and his fellow leaders at Downpatrick Presbyterian Church were also agonising over the future of their own church.

He said the church was declining and was making no impact on the community around it. He even feared that closure was on the distant horizon.

“We therefore wondered if our terminal illness was caused by the same disease that Bonhoeffer diagnosed 66 years ago. Could we have confused religion with Christianity? They are, after all, so similar. They both go to church, sing hymns, say prayers and believe in Jesus. But at their core they are critically different. Religion is all about me, Christianity is all about Him.”

“We agreed that we needed to set me aside, in order to be more loyal to Him. And we needed to do more than talk about it. We needed to do it. And since Jesus taught that where we worship is unimportant, we set aside our personal preference of meeting in our church building and began meeting in the hall to explore the true meaning of church and be more accessible to the community around us.”

Mr. Robinson added: “We are only a few months into our venture, but it has already proved to be the hardest and the best thing we have done in a long while.”