The Underneath: New Podcast Series Digs Deep into Evangelicalism in Northern Ireland…

‘People who like Billy Graham.’ That’s how one academic jokingly defined the term ‘evangelical’ to me in a recent conversation for The Underneath podcast. And, having spent the past year carrying out interviews with a huge range of people in religious Northern Ireland, this light-hearted definition may well be the most accurate one I’ve come across. From Edwin Poots’ views on the age of the earth, to the multi-million-pound new church builds in Ballymena, to the four hundred thousand Northern …

Read more…

Future Ireland / Irish Unification: An Evangelical View

The Unification Agenda At the time of writing, questions about unification are more topical than ever. Brexit has polarised our population, and this in its turn has added significant impetus to the unity debate. Supporters of unification have rightly read this as an opportunity, and proposals for border polls abound. Emotions across the population run high, with most people seeming to sit on either extreme of a continuum that runs between elation and dread. So how do we pick our …

Read more…

What can Evangelicals learn from #repealthe8th

It was the closing celebration at New Wine in Sligo last summer, one of Ireland’s largest gatherings of Evangelical Christians. If you’re familiar with these events, the final evening is a vibrant celebration with bible teaching and vibrant praise and worship, with the aim of sending the masses out affirmed and emboldened in their faith. Arriving slightly late for the final event I walked past a table laden with hundreds of anti-abortion books. These were to be given free to …

Read more…

Evangelical Journeys – choice and change in a Northern Ireland religious subculture

Cover of Evangelical Journeys - by Claire Mitchell and Gladys Ganiel

Over the last decade, Claire Mitchell and Gladys Ganiel (no stranger to this parish) have interviewed ninety five self-declared evangelicals in Northern Ireland to build up a picture of their dominant spiritual journeys and the individual choices that have determined the routes they have followed. The analysis of these interviews has recently been published by UCD Press in a fascinating book Evangelical Journeys. The authors spoke about their book in an In Conversation event at Contemporary Christianity in Belfast back …

Read more…