Why is this of interest? It's the end of the line for a congregation which began in 1862 and for most of its life met in Merrion Hall in the heart of Dublin. At its peak it needed seating for 2,500 and 80 Sunday School volunteers. And, this being Dublin, there's a U2 connection.
Among the children raised there into his teenage years was Guggi, one of Bono's best friends and now a celebrated Irish painter. Bono himself sometimes attended services.
On the Virgin Prunes website there's an interview with Guggi which has these pars:
'Born in 1959, one of 10 children in the Rowen household, Guggi grew up in one of the rarer things in suburban Dublin, a fundamentalist Christian family. Raised in the Church of Ireland, his father had as a young man become a member of the Plymouth Brethren, attending meetings in Merrion Hall in the city centre, where Guggi and his siblings were later brought to worship.
“My father was a strict disciplinarian,” says Guggi. “When we lived under his roof we lived by his rules and there was no questioning that. It went on for what seemed a very long time, until I could afford to set up home elsewhere, which I did at the age of 17.
“The way I was brought up was unhip but I can’t fault it. There isn’t anything I was taught then that I don’t believe now. I still have a strong Christian faith, though I’m a bad example of what a Christian should be, sometimes the worst example you could meet.”'
The hall is now a restaurant and hotel. Guggi's five sons are Moses, Noah, Eliah, Caleb and Gideon.
Merrion struggled as families migrated to the suburbs and less rigid expressions of evangelicalism flourished. But it was a landmark of a theologically Protestant Irish Christianity which vigorously avoided party-politics.
The Brethren movement is numerically tiny but notable for the drive and imagination of the people who pass through it. Prominent ex-Brethren include Emergent pioneer Brian McLaren, Sojourners founder Jim Wallis, post-evangelical guru Dave Tomlinson, UK charismatic giants Gerald Coates and Roger Forster and the hugely popular US humorist Garrison Keillor.
3 comments:
I'm linking this post on the U2 Sermons blog - bravo for remarking this.
I was born in '59 too (in B'ham England)
My dad was a Brethren elder and part of Merrion Hall when he lived in Dublin (where he was from). He talked of it with fondness. I get the impression it was full of spiritual life...as was the Brethren assembly we were part of in the 60's...come the 70's some of the life seemed to die, and I left in '72 at 13.
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