The Church of Ireland, Urban Poverty, and the Cost of Withdrawal

Introduction: Staying Put, but Drifting Away

With over 450 parishes and around 1100 places of worship, there is no doubt that the Church of Ireland (COI) remains physically present across our Island, and in many of the most challenging communities within our cities and towns. In fact, in many of the most deprived urban communities across the island, our buildings are among the most consistent presences and perhaps among the few remaining public spaces. Travel through inner-city Belfast, Dublin, Cork, Limerick, and Galway, and you will come across many COI buildings that remain among the oldest institutions in their neighbourhoods, often as the foundation stone of a new community. Our churches are woven into the physical landscape, shape the area’s feel, and are part of the area’s collective memory. Yet, sadly, we are becoming but a memory for many who live around our church buildings today – the Church is no longer experienced as a familiar or accessible part of everyday life, and is perhaps thought to be a relic of an age forgotten.

This paper begins with an uncomfortable but necessary observation. In many working-class urban areas, the Church of Ireland has not disappeared; rather, it has become increasingly fragile, marginal, and, in some cases, functionally absent. Indeed, I have experienced this firsthand: when I arrived in North Belfast, some of my first community contacts were with people who thought the church had been closed for a long time. Our doors may remain open, and services continue. Still, participation is thin, confidence is low, and the relationship between parish and place has weakened, especially as we have moved into patterns of maintenance rather than presence. What remains is often presence without participation, continuity without connection, inward rhythms without outward connection.

I confess my vested interest in this missional context that has emerged from sustained pastoral ministry in North Belfast over the last few years, within the parish of St Paul’s and St Barnabas. We are not in isolation: rather, North Belfast reflects a broader pattern that can be traced across urban centres in Ireland. The question is not simply “why attendance has declined,” but rather, in seeking to understand the why behind the what, we must consider broadly three things:

1. Who are our parishes now practically for?
2. Who are they, and our structures are quietly excluded by the shape of their life together?
3. What does sustained presence and life look like both ontologically and missionally?
   

North Belfast: Poverty as a Daily Reality

I use North Belfast as an example because I have experience there, and it serves as a microcosm of the realities in many of our cities where the Church is present. Considering North Belfast as an example, there are things to be aware of that help to understand both the area and the challenges of Urban Ministry. Firstly, Inner North Belfast* is formally designated as a Neighbourhood Renewal Area*, a classification reserved for communities that are experiencing the most severe and persistent forms of deprivation, but are marked by significant opportunity. Additionally, it is essential to be fully aware of the extent of what is meant by deprivation in the report: it reflects concentrated disadvantage across income, employment, health, education, and living environment domains.¹ Thus, sadly, this disadvantage takes many forms:

• Levels of long-term illness and disability are significantly higher than the Northern Ireland average.
• Educational attainment remains markedly lower.
• Additionally, a substantial proportion of adults hold no formal qualifications.
• Poor access to housing and the quality of housing tend to be poor
• High level of social isolation and tension due to anti-social behaviour.
• Additionally, there are disproportionate numbers of Betting agencies, off-licenses, and other establishments that affect the challenges communities face.
  

These figures describe the everyday social context in which St Paul’s and St Barnabas are located. The church does not sit beside deprivation but within it. The parish boundary encompasses communities where financial insecurity is normalised (the unemployment rate is 50% above the average for the city), where poor health is widespread and the resources to help it are stretched, where addiction is a lived struggle, and where people feel the weight of chronic stress because of the limited opportunities available to them.

Recent studies indicate that approximately 17 per cent of people in Northern Ireland live in poverty, with child poverty rising to around 24 per cent. Yet, in the context of Belfast North, the child poverty rate is estimated to be 31%, and in Belfast West it sits around 33%.² Add to that consideration that the majority of children in poverty now live in households where at least one adult is in work, what you see is a fully picture of the daily norm is to simply survive in working class communities; this is not about indvididual fault, it goes deeper than that – there is a structural nature to this deprivation.³ A Structural reality that affects every part of an individual’s life and income as they live day to day. This is a reality that the church has not often grasped when thinking about our presence in these communities or the structures we put in place to sustain our worship. We must ask:

“What does it mean to have sustained presence amid need?”

Is the response of the church to add to the burden of those who struggle by our normative expectation that local churches pay for local ministry or willingly enter into agreements that cover the cost of clerical provision, while diluting their presence. Do we expect local people to meet the burden of worship, ministry, and mission in the increasing complexity of their locale? Or might we reimagine the call of the wider Church to play a part in supporting and sustaining the life of the church in communities where the need is greatest, and resources are stretched? Because these are not simply stats from North Belfast: they are stories of ordinary people in extraordinary places of opportunity across our urban centres – they are people we know.

Thus, for the Church, this context is not incidental: it is our mission, call, and our priority. The weight of poverty shapes how people experience institutions, authority, language, and time. That means the challenges of the local area shape how people relate to church, and the way we do it – form, liturgy, weekly rhythms, as well as affecting confidence, attention, and trust in our witness. Yet, our institutions and the structures that maintain our presence and mission struggle to comprehend the world in which many people inhabit; our institutions are shaped by many inherited assumptions within our understanding of everyday life and the parish life that we assume is normative. Simply put, they are riddled with bias* in their assumptions of stability, literacy, and cultural familiarity* that do not reflect the lived reality of communities such as inner-city Dublin, Galway, Derry/Londonderry and Belfast.

Regeneration, Presence, and the Illusion of Continuity

The relocation of Ulster University to Belfast’s inner city was widely celebrated as a moment of renewal of the town and, in particular, North Belfast. Significant investment followed, and the physical landscape of the area changed rapidly, in a considerable time of renewal for the City. Yet recent studies on the effects of renewal on those who call the area home paint a mixed picture, with a clear conclusion: the renewal of place does not necessarily lead to social renewal. Consider the paper “Back to the City,” which examined the broader effects of Ulster’s move into the urban centre of Belfast on the local community of York Road. It acknowledges that without sustained relational and community investment, regeneration risks bypassing existing residents. Thus, leading to gentrification and entrenching inequality rather than alleviating it, and perhaps leading to a decline in the standard of living due to rising local costs.⁴

It is not dramatic to say that Regeneration can improve the appearance of a community while hollowing out its heart. The same danger now faces our approach in the parts of our cities as a denomination. The Church of Ireland has often equated physical presence with effectiveness; that is, as long as we can maintain buildings and keep them open for some form of worship, we are doing enough and maintaining a meaningful presence. Yet, we ignore the apparent disenfranchisement that has set in our urban centres between the Church and the communities we think we are serving. Our buildings remain open, but only at times that suit us. The buildings are open, but many people are closed off to them as they pass them by. Why? because trust has weakened and in many places the church is no longer even a consideration for the presence, never mind a living memory of the past.⁵

Consider the given example of St Paul’s and St Barnabas,s where 4000 people live within walking distance in the Castle Ward. Yet, for many in the surrounding streets, the Church no longer forms part of their social or spiritual imagination – it is absent from their lives, even in times of need. This is rarely the result of hostility; there are some who have felt let down by the institutional church, but it has more simply become a case of relevance or a sense of unwelcome, that the Church is no longer for people like them.⁶ Not because it is unwelcoming but because its rhythms, language, and expectations feel distant from everyday life, time has changed:

“The civic culture in its truest sense, which had existed prior to the conflict, had been formed around networks of families, churches, trade unions, schools and youth groups. It was these networks which by the mid-1970s were becoming obsolete.”⁷

Thus, in Belfast (and for different reasons across our cities), where it was once central to the community and civic identity, the church has been surpassed, even though “their absence continues to blight the Protestant working class in the current political era.”⁸

Not an Exception, but a Pattern

Belfast perhaps stands as one of the most complicated cities in the world when it comes to demographics and presence. Yet, what is visible in North Belfast does not stand in isolation; comparable patterns can be traced across Ireland and the United Kingdom in the Urban Centers. This has been highlighted by recent Census-based profiles of Dublin’s North Inner City that reveal a stark picture of high levels of deprivation, poor health outcomes, and low educational attainment, alongside significant linguistic and cultural diversity driven by migration – similar to the context described of North Belfast.⁹

This is not a recent development, in her paper from several decades ago, Holland observed that institutional churches in Ireland were increasingly experienced as remote and distant from working-class communities across the Island.¹⁰ Our default is to assume it is something of a contextual challenge or disenfranchisement over Churchmanship and belief; yet, Holland’s study was clear it was not because of theological disagreement, but disengagement.¹¹ Why? because the Church no longer seemed to inhabit the same social world as those who were meant to be cared for in the locale.¹² Our buildings and presence represent different worlds that the Parish they are intended to care for. Time has moved on since Holland’s writing, and the challenge has only been exacerbated:: across Belfast, Dublin, Galway, Derry, Limerick and other cities and towns, the Church of Ireland faces not simply declining attendance, but a thinning of shared life, cultural input, and mutual recognition between parish and place.

We may grasp that presence is essential, and in a way work to maintain it. Yet, as attendance has declined, it is our presence in urban-impoverished areas that has been hit hardest.¹³ Sadly, in some of our cities, north and south, historical patterns of parish amalgamation and church closure have meant that the Church of Ireland is no longer physically present at all.¹⁴ This is not about dismissing the fact that many local decisions were made with consideration of local realities and pastoral necessity, but we must now wrestle with the cumulative effect that such decisions have had on our life, worship, and witness across our cities. A reduced ecclesial footprint in precisely those communities now experiencing the greatest social pressure, added to increased pressure on the parishes that remain functional in those communities because they cover wider areas with few resources to meet need and do ministry, and the skills often required for the charity side of the church to function.

The importance of physical location has long been recognised within the Anglican Church across the world – the parish is our definition of the geographical boundaries of care. Thus, we cannot under estimate the importance of parish presence in areas of deprivation in order to provide the best of our care. One author argues it is the parish church that represents one of the most local and accessible expressions of the institutional Church’s life in densely populated areas, particularly where public provision has become thin or invisible across government services, and access to community spaces is limited, and the church and buildings provide more in terms of services.¹⁵ In working-class contexts, where social mobility is very limited (people will not drive to church), trust is relational, and institutional engagement is often cautious, our visibility and accessibility matter deeply. Place is not incidental; it is identity, it is being. Thus, it must be considered in how we approach ministry in urban centres: A church that remains located within a neighbourhood, sharing its rhythms and vulnerabilities, carries a different weight from one that serves the area (and many others) at a distance. Yet proximity alone is not enough, if presence is not accompanied by forms of worship, leadership, participation, and resources that make sense within the lived realities of working-class life, then even the most visible parish church can become a symbol of absence rather than belonging.

Cultural Drift and the Shape of Church Life

One of the less acknowledged factors in this story is the gradual embedding of middle-class norms within Church life, and middle-class assumptions as to what the life of the church should look like: “The church is run by middle-class people for middle-class people, and it thinks, operates and communicates in middle-class ways, almost without realising it. The gospel is viewed from a middle-class perspective and is framed in ways that appeal to middle-class people and answer the questions they have.”¹⁶ This is not a moral judgement but a cultural observation, that is highlighted by the fact that middle-class culture is the norm in the Anglican church: over time, worship patterns, governance structures, and leadership expectations have come to presume educational confidence, verbal fluency, and familiarity with institutional settings.¹⁷

Rev Andrew. Thompson argues that much Protestant worship and formation has been shaped by Enlightenment assumptions that privilege cognitive understanding and verbal articulation, often at the expense of embodied and participatory practice.¹⁸ Such assumed models function well in educated, middle-class contexts, a truth perhaps highlighted by higher average church attendance among the middle class.¹⁹ Yet, such models struggle to engage those whose lives are shaped by poverty, trauma, or limited formal education, not because those people do not wish to be involved but because the means of worship do not share the Christian story in a way that can be meaningfully engaged.²⁰

Earlier sociological research has reached similar conclusions as Thompson’s work; A. J. McAuley noted that working-class culture tends to value participation, concreteness, and action over abstraction, and warned that worship which is overly verbal, dense, and formal risks alienating those it seeks to include.²¹ Thus, the middle-class norms of our churches have only heightened alienation and decline in urban areas as other forces have risen to replace them in cities across the island, like Belfast, where, as the influence of the church declined, it was replaced by other more nefarious things.²²

This is not about taste or preference; this is about our duty of care to all people. A duty of care that must lead the church to consider how it is both accessible in terms of presence and worship, and in a way that honours the dignity of the Imago Dei in all people. Thus, when church life assumes a level of literacy and cultural fluency in liturgical forms and Sunday rhythms that many do not possess, it becomes exclusionary in effect. Added to that when we begin to redefine accessible presence through the lens of middle-class mobility we only increase the disenfranchisement that many feel with our denomination, even when inclusion is sincerely intended, and mission desired.

Trauma, Conflict, and the Northern Irish Context

In Northern Ireland, these dynamics are intensified by the legacy of the Troubles.²³ North Belfast remains shaped by high peace walls, and unseen territorial boundaries; then there is the unresolved trauma that defines identity within its streets, and the understanding of place.²⁴ These realities continue to influence patterns of trust, movement, and institutional engagement, leading to significant social challenges and inequalities in health, wealth, employment, and education.²⁵ Added to that the generational Trauma that shapes the lives of generations who have not known the troubles directly, and it means you have heightened anxiety and mistrust and complicated ideas around participation in wider civic life, nevermind the life of the church.²⁶

Yet in this city, church structures and worship practices have often failed to engage with the reality of their context, and understandably so, as they cared for those who attended and dealt with their own internal community traumas. Yet, now we must reckon with trauma as a formative force in terms of local identity and understanding. Even amid heightened decline, there has been an assumption that inherited forms can simply carry on unchanged, even as the social ground has shifted in undeniable ways. The result is that those most affected by conflict and deprivation are often those least able to engage with church life as it is currently configured in the communities that are most desperately in need of the hope of Christ and the peace of the Gospel. Furthermore, in contexts like Belfast as it emerges from the troubles into a more vibrant future, and certain places feel left behind, this only exacerbates the trauma narrative, the displacement identity, and the struggle of our churches, which find themselves unable to understand both what the world has become and what it once was.²⁷

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Migration and Compounded Barriers

The history of Belfast is unique, but the challenges it faces now are mirrored across all of our island cities. Communities that feel the weight of Poverty, stretched social support, and housing pressures as areas are gentrified and house prices rise. It is these urban centres that require the most resources, but often have access to the least. Thus, our churches in these parts of our cities that have struggled under the weight of need and opportunity because of poverty and trauma are now seeing migration reshape the social fabric of urban places and the parishes within them. Complex areas are becoming rapidly more complex as declining churches see growth from International populations who have come to study, work, or seek refuge. This is something to be celebrated, but also acknowledged as a factor that can increase the complexity of presence and mission in urban areas. Consider again North Belfast, where in the last few years churches have seen growth in attendance from refugees and migrant families from South Sudan, Nigeria, Eritrea, Sudan, Ukraine, and Hong Kong, as new cultures begin to shape local and church culture in ways that. Many arrive with deep and resilient faith commitments, often shaped by participatory, embodied, and communal worship traditions. At the same time, English is often a second or third language, and familiarity with Anglican liturgical rhythms and contextual norms cannot be assumed, may be misunderstood, and can lead to frustration.

This is not unique to Belfast in Dublin’s North Inner City; census data points to a similar pattern of demographic change and cultural reshaping of urban areas. Recent profiles indicate that in some small areas over 30 per cent of residents were born outside Ireland, with significant communities from Eastern Europe, Africa, and South Asia now settled in neighbourhoods already marked by long-term deprivation.²⁸ Complex areas are becoming increasingly more complex, and our churches that already face the highest strain on resources are stretched further. Thus, in these communities that face high levels of unemployment, poor health outcomes, and educational disadvantage, they must now wrestle with a further drain on public services and navigate challenges around integration. Our urban parishes have become contexts where migration and poverty intersect rather than exist separately,²⁹ and the church can be a space where difference can cross for the first time and understanding grows, because the church is one of the few neutral community spaces left. ³⁰

Where migration intersects with deprivation, the barriers to participation in church and civic life multiply. Language is only one factor; there are additional challenges around cultural expectations of worship praxis, understandings of authority, time, and participation, which differ widely. We have become comfortable with our way of being in church, and the idea of change is often uncomfortable. Yet, in such settings, the Church’s reliance on dense text, rapid verbal responses, and assumed familiarity with structure can quietly exclude those who are otherwise deeply open to faith and keen to bring life to our churches and communities. Added to that the challenge of the man books that shape participation: Green prayer book, Red Hyman, Purple Thanks and Praise, the White mission praise, that which is comfortable and normal to many of us can be overwhelming and isolating to those who are seeking Christian community, whether they are local or from afar. Pastoral care has often been generous and responsive, particularly in moments of crisis or transition, by the local Church and the ministers who have lead them; however, core ecclesial practices have been slower to adapt to the new missionary realities. Worship remains heavily verbal and structurally complex, and newcomers may be warmly welcomed without being meaningfully incorporated into the shared life and leadership of the Church. It is assumed that anyone who comes will be formed in the same way as the generations before.

Research from both Northern Ireland and the Republic suggests that migrant communities in deprived urban areas often experience a double marginalisation, socially and institutionally, even where there is goodwill on all sides.³¹ For the Church, this raises a critical challenge about our awareness and intentionality: Hospitality without participation, and welcome without formation, can unwittingly reinforce the sense that church is something people attend rather than a community to which they belong, regardless of whether they have lived in that locale for generations or moved only in recent times.

In this context, migration does not simply present the Church with a challenge of inclusion and welcome. It asks a deeper ontological question about our way of being/doing; It exposes deeper assumptions about who worship is designed for, how faith is communicated, and what kind of participation is considered normative. If our Church is serious about remaining present in working-class urban communities across the island, then migration must be understood not as an additional pastoral concern, but as a lens through which the adequacy of existing ecclesial and liturgical forms is tested and moved to something that allows greater participation and formation in Christ to occur with people from every tribe, tongue, and nation.

Poverty as an Ecclesial Question

At this point, it should be clear that poverty is not simply a social issue for the Church to address from the outside. This is not merely a challenge about playing our part in urban regeneration or the public good. It is something far deeper than that; it is a question about our identity, desire, and way of being – It is an ecclesial question that reaches into the very shape of the Church’s life, worship, leadership, and self-understanding of how to be in places we struggle to understand.³² Poverty is not just about a lack of material resources; It shapes how people experience their time, authority, language, belonging, and existence.³³ Furthermore, it influences whether people feel confident enough to speak in public, to read aloud, to pray extemporaneously, or to step forward into visible roles, or if the church even wants them to speak in public, pray, or lead. Our churches that face the most intense demand for resources and the least access to them, and are improvised in their mission and call by the failing of the structures around them in a way that determines who feels at home in church, and who feels they are merely passing through a space designed for someone else.³⁴

Research on deprivation consistently highlights how poverty narrows horizons and limits participation, not through lack of interest but because of lived fatigue via the daily struggle of life; anxiety and mental health challenges; and reduced confidence in an increasingly complex world.³⁵ In such contexts, faith is often carried quietly and relationally; it is embedded in habit and practice rather than articulated through confident verbal expression or public display – but it is no less valid. Thus, again, we must ponder the challenge of what it means to be present faithfully in areas that understand life differently. This is not about the jettisoning of our liturgical riches and norms; the Gospel as we have received it has been passed down in the lived doctrines of our liturgies. They teach our faith.³⁶ Yet, Thompson notes the different ways in which faith is sustained in working-class areas, through embodied practices and communal rhythms.³⁷ Rather than through abstract theological explanation, and simply speaking to the mind with truth.³⁸ It is not that one way is preferable, it is that the context must shape our mode and that churches which privilege articulation over participation risk misunderstanding the nature of belief itself and the praxis of formation.³⁹

The word of God speaks plainly to this reality; throughout the Narrative of our redemption, we see a God who meets people within the constraints of their lives rather than requiring them to transcend those constraints before belonging. In Grace, he comes to where we are, and in mercy moves us from there – the incarnation. Jesus’ own ministry is marked by incarnational-attentiveness to those whose society sought to limit or ignore: the poor, the sick, those considered unclean by the law; all that was pushed to the edges of religious life, where those in whom the Gospel had the most profound effect, and those who God used to build his church. Perhaps if we want to see an ecclesiastical renewal across our island, we must first be willing to see and invest in the work of the Kingdom in places that are easier to ignore. Consider the Letter of James as he warned the church about showing favouritism to those who appear confident or respectable, while sidelining the poor.⁴⁰ Words written long ago that remain as challenging and relevant as ever, not just at the local level but at the institutional level – is the form, governance, and structure showing favouritism to the respectable while quietly disregarding the challenging areas of our cities because of the challenges of poverty? Because we would rather store up early treasures now than in heaven. Additionally, Paul’s insistence that the body of Christ depends precisely on those members deemed weaker or less honourable should challenge any ecclesial life that quietly privileges competence over need, and our understanding of the wider church to help in the work of ministry and presence in our urban centres. The challenge belongs to the local church, but the burden of the city belongs to us all.

Yet much of the Church of Ireland’s inherited ecclesial life continues to presume a level of literacy, confidence, and cultural fluency that many people shaped by poverty do not possess, nor will they ever. Our Worship is often dense, fast, and heavily verbal, and often certain styles and ways of dressing are unspoken but expected. Add to that our Leadership pathways tend to favour those comfortable with meetings, paperwork, and public speaking and educated to a certain level. Thus, in the life of our church, participation can feel conditional on knowing the rules, the responses, and the rhythms in advance. The result is not rejection of faith, but withdrawal from active participation in our way of being present. Perhaps, some might engage elsewhere, but the reality is that people will often engage nowhere. Some will attend sporadically, remain on the edges, or disengage altogether, not because they do not believe, but because they do not feel competent or recognised within the Church’s dominant forms.⁴¹

This raises a deeper theological concern and a missional challenge. One that reminds me of a scene from CS Lewis’ Screwtape Letters that speaks of a time long ago with imagery that should still haunt the church today, as the devil Screwtape writes to his nephew, Wormwood:

“One of our great allies at present is the Church itself. Do not misunderstand me. I do not mean the Church as we see her spread, but through all time and space and rooted in eternity…. All your patient sees is the half-finished, sham Gothic erection on the new building estate. When he goes inside, he sees the local grocer with rather an oily expression on his face bustling up to offer him one shiny little book containing a liturgy which neither of them understands, and one shabby little book containing corrupt texts of a number of religious lyrics, mostly bad, and in very small print.”⁴²

We have become our own enemy in the work God has called us to in new estates and urban contexts because we chose to cling to ritual without understanding its life, and in a way that limits participation to simple attendance. Thus, when participation in the Church implicitly requires social and cultural capital, the Church risks mistaking familiarity for faithfulness and dismissing those uncomfortable with the things we have become comfortable with. Practices that feel normal and appropriate to those already formed within the Church can become barriers to those on the margins because they are not given room to understand. This is not about abandoning our form, nor ignoring the truth it teaches, it is about realising the danger of assuming that Continuity of form can be mistaken for the continuity of mission, even as the gap between Church and community widens. Holland’s observation that churches can remain institutionally intact while becoming socially distant from working-class communities remains a sobering warning to the reality that we have been witnessing in our cities for many years.⁴³ even now, as we will soon reach a threshold at which incremental adjustment or reorganisation will no longer be sufficient. That is to say, our current trajectories in urban centres suggest a system approaching failure unless substantive changes occur.

If deprivation is not taken seriously as an ecclesial reality and missional challenge for the whole church, the Church will continue to shape its life around those most able to navigate its systems rather than those it is called to serve. This does not require abandoning Anglican identity or theological depth; yet, it requires recognising that the gospel is always received within particular social conditions, and that the Church has a responsibility to examine how its worship and structures mediate, or obscure, grace and the good news. The question is not whether the Church values the poor; this has never been in doubt. Much good has been done in our cities and is currently being lived out by many churches and members. Yet, this is a question about presence and being, about whether our common life makes space for those who do not naturally fit to participate fully and with dignity that they might know Christ, and whether our institutional structures and governance will work with those in the most challenging places to give them the resources they need to not simply survive, but to adapt thrive and bring Gospel life with distinct anglican flavour.

Seen in this light, questions about worship and liturgy are not secondary or technical matters; it is something far more beautiful – they are pastoral, missional and theological questions about visibility, participation, and formation. Liturgy is one of the primary places where people learn the basics of the faith and what it means to live out the faith, often unconsciously. Our liturgies and the forms they take help people to grasp whether they belong and whether their presence matters: to know they are loved by God. If the Church is to be a credible and incarnational presence of the Gospel in working-class urban contexts, it will need to reflect carefully on how we use our space to serve our communities and point to Jesus, and whether our liturgical rhythms, language, and pace either open doors or quietly close them. Such reflection is not about novelty or experimentation for its own sake; It is about whether the Church’s worship enables the poor to encounter God without first having to overcome unnecessary barriers, as they grasp the love God has for them, and the Kingdom they are called to serve.

Conclusion: From Maintenance to Renewal

In his presidential Address to the General Synod of 2025, the Archbishop of Armagh remarked: “It varies from place to place and it does look like rural and county–town religion have held up much better than inner city and suburban religion.”⁴⁴ It was not a throwaway comment, but a recognition that The Church of Ireland stands at a critical moment in its relationship with working-class urban communities and our missional presence in cities across the Island. As we have already seen in Northern Ireland alone, tens of thousands of people live in neighbourhoods ranked among the most deprived, with high levels of long-term illness, low educational attainment, and limited social mobility.⁴⁵ Furthermore, we have seen how similar patterns exist across Dublin and other Irish cities.⁴⁶

If current trends continue, the Church risks not only declining participation but diminishing presence, or perhaps no presence at all. In some areas, that process is already underway, so now the challenge is whether the Church will respond with retrenchment, or with renewed imagination and hope about what God might do through us if we resource the local church in this area rather than burden them more and stretch them further.

Renewal in these contexts will not come through slogans or programmes alone. At the local level, it requires considering the essence of our presence and the praxis of our worship. A courage to adapt worship that is appropriate for the locale – perhaps that means praxis that is slower, clearer, and more participatory. Furthermore, it will require liturgical forms that rely less on dense text and assumed understanding and more on visible structure, repetition, and explanation. Those are some of the steps that could be taken at the local level. Yet, if we are to truly see local renewal of faith in areas of urban deprivation, it will require changes at the institutional level to support it. It will require centrally produced, adaptable resources that reduce the financial and time burden on parishes serving deprived areas. Additionally, it requires the structures that maintain our worship across the Island to acknowledge their own bias and middle-class assumptions and begin to think again about the city and supporting ministry and mission there, in areas that have drastically changed, and are being slowly abandoned. For us to be presence and not absent in our cities it will require diocesan and national support that recognises that urban ministry is not failing because it is weak, but because it is demanding; that Urban parishes and not able to seize the opportunity but are simply stretched by the needs of those opportunity, thus to take their hand in sharing the load so that the work can go on.

It does not matter the name of the city or the community within it. Our cities present a challenge, and it is our choice if we see that challenge as an opportunity and a call of God. The invitation before the Church of Ireland is to look honestly, and then to decide what kind of presence it is willing to sustain in the places that need it most; If the Church is to take seriously the realities of poverty, trauma, and migration in its urban parishes, then it must allow those realities to question not only its priorities but its practices. Are we willing to do what it takes to not only survive, but to begin to thrive again in our cities and communicate the Good news of Jesus to places that desperately need it in distinctively Anglican ways?

Scripture refuses to enable the Church to define strength in terms of confidence, fluency, or ease of participation. Paul’s reminder that “the members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable” (1 Corinthians 12:22) presses the Church to ask whether its common life truly makes room for those whose lives are most constrained, or finds them a burden too much to bear. Contemporary reflection echoes the same concern. Thompson observes that the Church’s failure among working-class communities has rarely been one of doctrine, but of misunderstanding how faith is sustained in lives marked by exhaustion, limitation, and insecurity.⁴⁷It is not that the church has not cared or tried amid these places and turmoil; it is that the churches have tried and failed, and then, in their own tiredness, moved to simply surviving. Yet, when these insights are held together, it is clear that the question is not whether the Church values the poor in principle, but whether its worship, structures, and rhythms communicate that value in practice. There is much to hope on the ground level as Thomspons encourages: “The Book of Common Prayer provides all the elements for serving working-class Christians and transcends class distinctions, providing it is taught well, engages the body and is presented free from class barriers of taste and language. If we are committed to connecting with working-class people in our churches, we should re-evaluate the treasury of biblically-based, community-building, Christ-honouring, church-edifying tools at our fingertips in the Book of Common Prayer and learn how to use them.”⁴⁸ The challenge is now if we are willing for our institutional structures to aid in this opportunity for reconnection, renewal, and growth by helping to provide the resources churches need in the most demanding areas, when they lack – not in a way that creates dependency but acknowledges shared responsibility of the diocese, and national church in our call to reach our cities and make sure that we are a church that is fully present and knows who is it there for.

1. See Department for Communities, Inner North Belfast Neighbourhood Renewal Area Profile, 2022, 8–14 ↩
2. https://www.jrf.org.uk/poverty-in-northern-ireland-202,5 ↩
3. See the NISRA Report, Poverty in Northern Ireland 2023–25, 5–7 ↩
4. Stephen Johnson & Urmi Sengupta, Back to the City: University Lead Regeneration in Belfast, 9; 12 ↩
5. Gareth McKenna, The Protestant working class in Belfast: education and civic erosion – an alternative analysis, 429. ↩
6. McKenna, The Protestant working class in Belfast, 435. ↩
7. McKenna, The Protestant working class in Belfast, 443. ↩
8. McKenna, The Protestant working class in Belfast, 443. ↩
9. Dublin City Council, North Inner City Network Census Profile 2022, ↩
10. Kity Holland, Is the Church Facing a Crisis, 42-43. ↩
11. Holland, Is the Church Facing a Crisis, 42. ↩
12. Holland, Is the Church Facing a Crisis, 41 ↩
13. Church Action on Poverty, “News Release: Poor Communities Hit Hardest by Church Closures, Study Finds,” Church Action on Poverty, accessed 20 January 2026, https://www.church-poverty.org.uk/news-release-poorgeographical-communities-hit-hardest-by-church-closures-study-finds/ ↩
14. RTÉ Archives. “What to Do with Empty Churches?” RTÉ Archives, December 17, 2018. https://www.rte.ie/archives/2018/1217/1017648-what-to-,do-with-empty-churches/. ↩
15. Esmé Partridge, Restoring the Value of Parishes, 2024, 17 ↩
16. Ian Paul, “Has the Church Forgotten the Working Class?” Psephizo, December 2, 2024, https://www.psephizo.com/reviews/has-the-church-forgotten-the-working-class/ ↩
17. Sharon Jagger and Alex Fry, with Rebecca Tyndall, “Let Justice Roll Down Like Waters”: Exploring the Wellbeing of Working-Class Clergy in the Church of England: A Rally Cry for Change, Living Ministry Focussed Study 4 (London: Church of England, October 2023). 33. ↩
18. Thompson, Christian Formation within Working-Class Communities, 34; 53 ↩
19. Alex D. J. Fry, “Religiosity and Wellbeing in Areas of Socio-Economic Deprivation: The Role of Social Capital and Spiritual Capital in Enabling Resources for Subjective Wellbeing,” Journal of Spirituality in Social Work 43, no. 1 (2024): 1–20, https://doi.org/10.1080/19349637.2023.2261436 ↩
20. Thompson, Christian Formation within Working-Class Communities, 45;53 ↩
21. McAuley, Protestant Liturgy and the Working Classes, 38 ↩
22. McKenna, The Protestant working class in Belfast, 42. ↩
23. McKenna, The Protestant working class in Belfast, 429-430. ↩
24. https://www.belfastinterfaceproject.org/map/cluster-6-duncairn-gardens ↩
25. Dixon, J., Tredoux, C., Sturgeon, B., Hocking, B., Davies, G., Huck, J., Whyatt, D., Jarman, N., & Bryan, D. (2020). ‘When the walls come tumbling down’: The role of intergroup proximity, threat and contact in shaping attitudes towards the removal of Northern Ireland’s peace walls. British Journal of Social Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjso.12370. 3 ↩
26. D. O’Reilly and M. Stevenson, “Mental Health in Northern Ireland: Have ‘the Troubles’ Made It Worse?,” Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health 57, no. 7 (July 2003): 488–492, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12821690/ ↩
27. John Coakley and Michael Gallagher, eds., Northern Ireland after the Troubles: A Society in Transition (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), accessed 20 January 2026, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/276206579_Northern_Ireland_after_the_Troubles_A_Society_in_TransitionSudan. ↩
28. See the Report from Dublin City Council, North Inner City Network Census Profile 2022 ↩
29. See Dinham, A. (2011). Faith, public policy and civil society: Problems, policies and controversies. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 82–101. ↩
30. R. Stephen Warner, “Immigrant Religion in the United States and Western Europe: Bridge or Barrier to Inclusion,” International Migration Review 32, no. 4 (1998): 957–980, accessed 20 January 2026, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/227679563_Immigrant_Religion_in_the_US_and_Western_Europe_Bridge_or_Barrier_to_Inclusion. ↩
31. See, DCC, North Inner City Network Census Profile, 2022 ↩
32. Thompson, Christian Formation within Working-Class Communities, 48 ↩
33. McKenna, The Protestant working class in Belfast, 443 ↩
34. McAuley, Protestant Liturgy and the Working Classes, 38-42 ↩
35. See Department for Communities, Inner North Belfast Neighbourhood Renewal Area Profile, 2022. ↩
36. Thompson, Christian Formation within Working-Clajettisoningss Communities, 29 ↩
37. Thompson, Christian Formation within Working-Class Communities, 32 ↩
38. Thompson, Christian Formation within Working-Class Communities, 37 ↩
39. Thompson, Christian Formation within Working-Class Communities, 43 ↩
40. James 2:1–7 ↩
41. McAuley, Protestant Liturgy and the Working Classes, 39. ↩
42. CS Lewis, The Screwtape Letters. ↩
43. Holland, Is the Church Facing a Crisis, 41. ↩
44. Archbishop John McDowell, “Archbishop of Armagh’s Address to General Synod 2025,” Anglican Ink, May 9, 2025, https://anglican.ink/2025/05/09/archbishop-of-armagh,s-address-to-general-synod-2025/. ↩
45. Department for Communities, Inner North Belfast Neighbourhood Renewal Area Profile, 2022, pp. 3–5 ↩
46. Dublin City Council, North Inner City Evidence Baseline Report, pp. 9–15 ↩
47. Thompson, Christian Formation within Working-Class Communities, 44 ↩
48. Thompson, Christian Formation within Working-Class Communities, 64 ↩