The Presbyterian Moderator Dr. Ken Newell, will visit Maynooth this weekend to open a new Resource Centre and Christian Bookshop on the Main Street. The project is the initiative of the local Presbyterian community and their minister Rev. Keith McCrory.
As part of a weeklong visit to the Dublin & Munster Presbytery, Dr. Newell will visit Maynooth and speak at an inter-church service there on Saturday 9th October at 7pm in Maynooth Post Primary School, off the Moyglare Road, where members of other local churches will be participating.
The fledgling Presbyterian congregation at Maynooth is a daughter church of Lucan, ten miles away down the Liffey Valley. Rev. Keith McCrory and some of the Lucan members who live in Maynooth were commissioned to establish the new church in 2003. The church at Lucan was serving a community of 200,000 and as minister Rev. Trevor Morrow explains, it was simply bursting at the seams,
"Aside from the physical problems of fitting everyone in, the Lucan congregation was becoming too big to function as a community. When the elders, together with Presbytery, the Board of Mission in Ireland and Union Commission, considered this exciting situation the best option was to form a daughter church established with a nucleus of members who were already living in the new location but going to Lucan."
Maynooth was chosen for a number of reasons, not least the growing student population at the National University of Ireland in the town and the established credibility in the area of the nearby Lucan congregation. Rev. Keith McCrory highlights the effect that the church, which meets in the primary school, has had on the community,
"People are reassured by knowing we are part of a bigger and well established and respected church. We can build on that and develop an effective witness by getting close to people, living among them, working alongside them and making personal contact." He is pleased that the Moderator's visit will "provide those in the town a rare opportunity to meet the leader of the Presbyterian Church."
Issued by Sarah Harding, Presbyterian Information Services. Info@PresbyterianIreland.org
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