‘I, Patrick, a sinner and unlettered, declare myself to be a bishop publicly established in Ireland. I am firmly of the opinion that whatever I am, I have received from God. I live among barbarian foreigners, a stranger and exile of the love of God’

I have just quoted from the first written document in Irish history from the fifth century, Patrick’s explosively angry Letter to Coroticus, a British chieftain who raided and enslaved his Christian converts in Ireland – the first of many diplomatic kerfuffles in the course of the next fifteen centuries!

Like many great Irishmen, Patrick was not Irish at all. 

We can safely say that he was the first Briton to be a bishop in this part of Ireland, but as we know from today’s proceedings, he was not the last.

The issue I would like to focus on today is the essential relationship between the ministry that God so richly blessed all those centuries ago, and the ministry we are asking God to bless today – to wit, Alan Harper’s

You don’t need me to tell you that Alan brings many gifts in the service of this diocese – he has, after all, been archdeacon hereabouts for six years, and rector of St John’s since 1986.

Apart from his pastoral experience and patent intellectual gifts, he spent eight years prior to his ordination as Senior Inspector of Historic Monuments, Archaeological Survey of N.I between 1966 and 1974. He resumed his professional interest in historic monuments when he served as a member of the Historic Monuments Council for N I. It was in recognition of his outstanding services and scholarly achievements that he was awarded the OBE in 1996.

I could go on, at the risk not only of embarrassing someone who is extremely reticent about his abilities, but also of missing the essential point of the liturgy, which rightly focuses not on what he can do for God, but rather on what God can do for him

Let us recall Patrick’s words – I am firmly of the opinion that whatever I am, I have received from God. 

In other words, Patrick knew that at the core of his ministry to the Irish was the call of God. What mattered was not his abilities, but his fidelity to that call

That is why the first question the archbishop will put to Alan is: ‘Do you believe , so far as you know in your own heart, that God has called you to the office and work of a bishop in his Church?’

I have no doubt that Alan has thought about little else since he was elected on 18 December

We are gathered here today essentially to affirm our belief that God has so called him, and to pledge our support to him in his ministry precisely on this ground, not because we think he is professionally qualified to do a good job.

He will need all your prayers as he embarks on a ministry which will exact painful and unpopular decisions, many of which he will be unable to share.

These would be difficult enough even in a stable world, but that is not the kind of world to which he is called

Time was when the role of the church in society was accepted almost as part of the natural order, but we all know that that is no longer the case

Who can doubt that rebuilding trust in a diocese traumatised by three decades of paramilitary atrocity and sectarian bitterness and distrust will test his leadership and the faith of the faithful to the very limit of endurance?

According to the liturgy we celebrate today, your new bishop is ‘called to lead in serving and caring for the people of God and to work with them in the oversight of the church’

Even if such problems did not exist, we are all aware of the huge changes taking place in Irish society, north and south, which have nothing to do with the troubles, and everything to do with the pace of social and economic change – call it globalisation or postmodernity, if you must

Before my appointment last September to the Church of Ireland Theological College, I served for 13 years in a centre city parish in Dublin

It seems to me that the sort of social changes that occurred over an longer period in Britain and continental Europe were somehow compressed into that short period in Dublin, driven partly by the extraordinary pace of economic development, and partly by the profound crisis in the Catholic Church

This is neither the time or place to discourse on the social and spiritual consequences of these profound changes. Suffice it to say that it has impacted powerfully on the challenges facing the ordained ministry 

Time was when inter-church marriages were our major concern – I honestly can’t remember when one of my colleagues last mentioned it – somewhere along the line it has just ceased to be important, because the reality is that couples now make their own decisions as how or where – or, indeed, if at all – they get married

What has emerged is a much more fluid and varied society criss-crossing the old social and religious lines, including numerous immigrants from the UK, continental Europe, Asia and Africa

On the downside there is a huge increase in broken marriages, second relationships, and single-parenthood, to say nothing of spiritual void created by large-scale defection from the established churches

The net result is that a greater contrast to the Ireland envisaged by Eamon De Valera I simply cannot imagine. The only people who still cling to that vision are the representatives of Sinn Fein, whose contributions to the European debate at the National Forum – which I attend as a representative of the Church of Ireland – are regarded with a mixture of amusement and incredulity.

Well, you may say, what has happened to St Patrick and the bishop-elect of Connor?

I may be wrong, but I believe that the Church of Ireland, north and south, faces profound challenges which cannot be met by applying the old solutions.

We are experiencing a fundamental paradigm shift

I have the clear sense that clergy are well aware that our traditional pastoral structures are increasingly out of sync with the new social realities 

In East Germany, before the wall came down, there was substantial support for the church, around which much of the resistance to the communist regime revolved. Once the wall came down, those congregations melted away. Will the coming of peace to N I have much the same effect?

If we are to meet such challenges head-on, we will undoubtedly have to lighten ship

Certainly our sense of who we are and what God calls us to be will have to be more keenly defined than the kind of negative identity – how we are different from Roman Catholics – that has so often been allowed to define our identity in the past, with the appalling consequences so graphically identified by Joseph Liechty and Cecilia Clegg in their recent publication, Moving beyond sectarianism. Such dark ancestral voices have to be identified, faced, and finally outfaced.

The gospel is fundamentally about who we are in the light of the Calgary event, not about who we are not.

No one can describe the geography of the this future landscape, but we can take good heart from the example of Patrick, who brought the light of the gospel to a dark and barbaric Ireland, even as the culture of his homeland, Roman Britain, was disintegrating under the pressure of pagan assaults

We should not forget, too, that his near contemporary, St Augustine, reflecting on the consequences of sack of Rome in 410 AD, was writing his great Christian vision of the future, The city of God, even while Patrick was a slave in Ireland

I bind unto myself the Name,
The strong name of the Trinity;
By invocation of the same,
The Three in One and One in Three.

Of whom all nature hath creation;
Eternal Father, Spirit, Word;
Praise to the Lord of my salvation,
Salvation is of Christ the Lord.

We pray every day the words of Christ, ‘thy will be done on earth as in heaven’

We must believe it.

And because we must believe, we pray today that God’s will will indeed be done in and through the ministry of your new bishop.

Amen