Glenn Patterson
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Walberberg Seminar 2006: Home? |
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Not even the summer months are slow for the East Belfast Community News. Summertime is marching time, the time of bonfires planned and improvised and of confrontations along (a popular summer term) the secretarian interfaces. It is no news, then, though it takes up column after column, that east Belfast does not imagine itself a single, hamonious community.
For all that, the paper is not without its own silly-season moments. Among the sillier in the midsummer of 2000 was the feature on the Presbyterian minister who had once been a junior manager with a leading Northern Irish bank, though he had left banking in the earlier nineties and at the time of the feature had been minister to his church, a mile and a half east of the city centre, for close on eighteen months.
Under the predicatble heading "From Savings Accounts to Saving Souls", the reverend Ken Avery (34), jooks out from behind a stack of collection plates, smiling the smile of those coaxed into such poses by community newspapers the world over - uncertain, but keen to oblige - wearing his clerical collar attached to top a light-coloured short-sleeved shirt. It's a light-coloured short-sleeved sort of piece all round. The minister admits he has yet to get used to being the Reverend as opposed to plain Ken Avery - to his friends he has always been even plainer Avery - and later confides (eyes, says the paper, twinkling) that he has never been a great one for quoting chunks of the Bible, beyond the obvious, of course, Genesis 1:1, John 3:16.
It was this last comment that prompted a call the following Monday to the local lunchtime phone-in programme by an adherent to the variant - he would have claimed purer - form of Presbyterianism.
What kind of man, the caller wanted to know, so badly he could nearly not get the question out, what kind of a minister is it makes jokes about not remembering the Scriptures, the word of God as handed down? Did Christ himself not say in Matthew thirteen and twenty-two....
Exerpt from "That which was"
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