The Word is Life

  The new Presbyterian Moderator, Rev Dr Ivan Patterson, will be installed following the opening of the church’s General Assembly in Belfast on Monday. Dr Patterson, 62, has been minister of Newcastle Presbyterian Church in County Down for the last 20 years and succeeds outgoing moderator Dr Norman Hamilton. He was ordained in 1980 and [...]

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“We have the Bible, but we don’t read it very much”

Next Tuesday at the General Assembly, Norman Hamilton will complete his year as Moderator of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland and will hand over to Rev Ivan Patterson of Newcastle Presbyterian Church. The year quickly passes, but Norman found the time to spend a morning with us at the Wycliffe office in Belfast. Read about [...]

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Presbyterian Moderator visits Wycliffe’s Belfast office

Starting with some excellent scones and coffee, we had several hours of stimulating conversation on the growing partnership between Wycliffe Bible Translators and the Presbyterian Church in Ireland. We touched on how teens and young adults understand mission: how different is their understanding to that of the older generation in terms of prayer and support? [...]

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The Whole Story in Five Acts

During the Christmas holiday, I have been reading the Bible study resource The Whole Story in Five Acts that has recently become available on the Wycliffe Bible Translators UK website. When we invited Stafford Carson, the then Moderator of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, to the  Wycliffe office in Belfast on 28 April 2010, I [...]

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Churches and Mission Agencies

One of the questions which increasingly concerns me in my ‘day job’ with Wycliffe Bible Translators is how churches and mission agencies should work together. This is obviously extremely important to an organisation such as ours which can only exist as long as churches continue to provide resources for the agency. This question is increasingly my [...]

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Wycliffe Engage Team on PCI website

Clare Orr, a member of Newtownbreda (St John’s) Presbyterian Church, leaves on 2nd July to join a Wycliffe Engage Team going to Indonesia, where they will spend a month with a local Bible translation organisation on the island of Kalimantan. I am pleased to see our partnership between Wycliffe Bible Translators and the Presbyterian Church [...]

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Me + Biblefresh @ PCI General Assembly

Yes, I was actually there… … and I’m very thankful for my old schoolmate from long ago, Joe Cassells, Clerk of Session in his Coleraine church, for taking the photo of me last Tuesday afternoon. Joe, we now have clear historical evidence for the archive. The General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland is [...]

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Presbyterian Moderator visits Wycliffe Office

What made my visit to Wycliffe Bible Translators so energising and interesting was the way the Wycliffe members understand the Bible as story.Their strap line is “The Bible: the Story everybody needs”, and they are enthusiastic about bringing that story to everyone.  And Wycliffe have set themselves the audacious goal of preparing a Bible translation [...]

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