My story

The men threw themselves on the floor. There it was again: the sound of gunfire close by. This was no ordinary church leaders meeting! This was Belfast, Northern Ireland in the late 1970’s.

Bombs, bullets and death were a daily occurrence in our society, as the I.R.A. blew up hotels, bus stations, crowded restaurants and pubs and planted explosives in the cars of policemen, politicians and prominent national figures including a bomb in the holiday boat of Lord Mountbatten the uncle of the Queen.

Protestant Para-military organisations retaliated, by murdering innocent Catholics found in the wrong area at the wrong time, committing terrible atrocities. Protestants were also at great risk in Catholic areas. In the middle of all this “Belfast Christian Family” was born, two thirds protestant and one third Roman Catholic.

My husband David and I married in January 1969, the year ‘the troubles’ began in Northern Ireland. David was ordained as a minister in an evangelical church and our home was an apartment above our little church in Belfast.

Then God began to baptise people in the Holy Spirit. People in our congregation had ‘words of knowledge’ and prophetic ‘pictures’ for each other.

“I see the steering wheel of a car with a leopard skin glove on it,” someone said,

“And the Lord is saying that you are about to buy a second-hand car, but the man selling it is not to be trusted, (can a leopard change its spots?) And you are not to buy it.

One of the ladies leapt to her feet. “That’s for me that’s for me!” she cried.

Other people were miraculously healed of physical illnesses. Our own baby daughter Avril was healed of a congenital hip condition.

The condition had been diagnosed at birth and she was fitted with a ‘brace’ that held her hips in position. “She will have to wear this brace for at least a year” they said.

We prayed and after prayer we knew that God had healed our baby but we continued to use the brace. At the next hospital appointment the doctors did further x-rays and scratched their heads. The consultant said,

“Well I don’t know what has happened but her condition no longer shows on her x-rays.” We knew what had happened! God had healed her!

Soon the bishops in our denomination began to take notice and to be upset.“This is not ‘our image’ they said. “We think you would be happier with the Pentecostals”

And so we were given the ‘right boot of fellowship.’ In those days being ‘Charismatic’ was not the acceptable thing that it is today. Our daughter was three months old at this time. With the job went our livelihood and our home.

We knew that we were not Pentecostal in doctrine and could not join a Pentecostal church so now we found ourselves out of fellowship with nowhere to go.

But God had his own plans!

The Lord had begun to speak to David about ‘church’ from the Book of Acts. Things like the early Christians living in community, meeting in each others homes, and us all being members of the Body of Christ, where every believer has gifting and a part to play in ministry.So we spent the next four years ‘making tents’ like St. Paul had done to earn a living as God taught us about these things. We also discovered that there were other Christians in England who were being taught the same things by the Holy Spirit.

God provided a brand new council house for us in Carickfergus, where our second daughter Joanne was born, and others began to join us in the little group that met in our home.

At the beginning of 1974 the Lord called us to move back into the city of Belfast taking our fledgling ‘house church’ with us, the first one in Ireland. God once again miraculously provided for us, giving us a large house in Ravenhill Park at the ridiculously low rent of ten pounds per week.

The Belfast we moved back to however was very different from the one we had left in 1970.

By this time Rioting in the city had escalated and rubber bullets and tear gas began to be used by the army on people who were using petrol bombs and nail bombs against them.

The IRA had shot dead the first British soldiers to be killed in the troubles. There was a high level of violence; shootings and bombings from both Loyalists and Republicans became a daily occurrence. This was the city we moved back to with our two young daughters.

The first thing that happened after we moved was we discovered that friends of ours from our old church days were living just down the street. They were continuing to meet with others from the group who had been baptised in the spirit, even though we had been out of touch with them for a number of years.

The Lord spoke to all of us and said that they were like sheep without a shepherd and David was like a shepherd without sheep. So with great joy we came together again. We began to meet in our new home and very soon even more people joined us.

About this time, David heard Arthur Wallis, a great pioneer of the Charismatic Renewal. He said “Find out what God is doing in your generation and do it with all your heart”. So my husband enquired of the Lord.

“What are you doing in my generation Lord?” To his great surprise the answer came.

“I am baptising Roman Catholics in the Holy Spirit.” This was worrying news for us. We had both been born on the Shankill Road, a Protestant stronghold in Belfast. We had never mixed with Roman Catholics and we were in the middle of a Civil War.

Now God was asking us to ‘cross the divide’. We began to attend ‘joint’ charismatic meetings at Queens University Church in the centre of Belfast. I will never forget shaking hands for the first time with a Roman Catholic brother. It was a huge step for me coming from my protestant background but God was on the move.

He quickly convicted us of the religious bigotry and prejudice that was a part of our blood-line, handed down from generation to generation; the superiority and racial pride that is at the heart of all prejudgment of people of a different colour, race or religion from our own.

We truly repented and found ourselves forgiven, cleansed and enjoying wonderful fellowship with our Spirit-filled Catholic brothers and sisters. Hugging nuns was wonderful!

One of the main characteristics of Catholic Renewal was the ‘charismatic prayer group.’ These had sprung up all over the country.

About this time we met up with some people from a prayer group across the city, in a strong Republican area. God quickly brought us together. As we enjoyed fellowship we began to explore ways that our two groups could come together more regularly.

We found that the secret was to emphasise the truths and practices that united us and agree to differ about the others. Some of these things were political as well as scriptural.

One of the big issues was the Eucharist (communion,) but the sixty or so people from a Protestant background continued to break bread together while our thirty or so Catholic brothers and sisters continued to attend mass and observe their obligations to their church. We all met together on Sunday and in small groups throughout the week.

Part of the practical arrangements involved things like ‘bussing’ people across the city to meet together in each other’s areas. The joint leaders team also met together in both Catholic and Protestant homes. They often came home late as they had to wait until it was safe to travel.

We prayed a lot for their protection in those days. The Lord reserves a special blessing for his children who meet together in unity across divides and we enjoyed happy hours of fellowship and fun together. So Belfast Christian Family was born.

We shared together in our weddings, infant baptisms, infant dedications, adult baptisms and even a few funerals. We shared picnics, lunches, and holiday conferences together. We were also involved in planning and running big Charismatic Conferences in the large Presbyterian hall in the centre of Belfast.

We enjoyed speakers such as Ralph Martin from Ann Arbor, Jean Darnell and Francis McNutt, and enjoyed lively spirit lead worship.

I would like to say that those days were all fun and fellowship, but everyday life in Belfast took its toll on all of us with much grief, many loses and serious pastoral issues to work through with people as the stresses of Civil War continued.

These pressures included the loss of loved ones through terrorism, men for whom the strain of serving in the security forces became too much and some people with a history in the Para-military organisations who were trying to extricate themselves from their violent past.

By 1980 I myself had four young children, (Ian was born in 1975 and Sarah in 1980), a busy church and a husband in full time ministry. We left Belfast with our family in 1981 as God called us to work in England.

I had lost a number of close family members either directly or indirectly through the ‘troubles’. God sustained me however, and eventually healed me from the low-level depression I had lived with for ten years during the 70’s.

David and I have continued to work with Catholic Renewal for almost forty years now and he is a regular speaker at ‘Celebrate’ an annual conference in Devon and at other conferences around the country and abroad. He has recently followed the leading of the Lord to become a member of the Roman Catholic Church.

The Charismatic Renewal and fellowship with Roman Catholic brothers and sisters has brought a wealth of joy to me that I would never have known in my narrow Ulster Protestant experience of God and the unity that God gives us is extremely precious. I feel greatly privileged to have been a part of that Unity.