Evangelical Alliance Ireland Celebrates Growth in Evangelism

The Evangelical Alliance Ireland (EAI) today has released figures showing that increasing numbers of Irish people are converting to evangelical Christianity due to its obvious applications to every day life.

The EAI has reported that the number of Irish attending evangelical churches every week had increased to 13,000, and that the number of church communities in the Dublin area has risen to 130. This is a huge increase when it is realised that only 37% of these had existed in 1980, and 25% of these have been set up since just 1995.

A majority of the Evangelical churches have affiliations with the Pentecostal Church, but others also are members of the Baptist, Church of Ireland, Presbyterian and Independent sects, according to Ireland Online newspaper.

A number of churches have even increased to more than 600 attendees in the centre of the city, and most were consistently receiving congregations of more than 100, said Sean Mullen – the national director of EAI. He commented, "We are committed to communicating a perspective on life that is viable and effective, and which can be applied to the complex issues facing Irish society today."

Mullen said that the huge growth in the Evangelical area of the Church had come about due to the power of its message: "It’s a commitment to a message and a way of life as opposed to the commitment to the institution. Evangelism is the idea of a radical commitment, of a lifestyle based on Jesus’ message, that it’s still possible to live that way. We get back to the message of Jesus, that’s the power of it."

The editor of a new booklet "Together We Believe", Patrick Mitchel stated that the booklet had been released to help bond together the evangelical churches and to express what they had in common, regardless of what church they were aligned to – and not to create a new doctrine.

Mitchel said that the central tenets of evangelism were faith in the Bible, a desire to follow Jesus Christ and His teachings, to personally experience a conversion and finally putting the faith into action.

The EAI commented that while the Evangelical Church does indeed have certain doctrinal variations to the Catholic Church, they were very close on moral issues, and it believes that there are many different areas on which the two could work together.

According to Ireland Online, Mullen expressed his belief that there was no hostility towards the Catholic Church in the evangelical movement. The EAI statistics further show that there are almost 700 million evangelicals now worldwide, with a majority being found in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

In Ireland alone 22% of worshippers at evangelical services come from immigrant communities, said the EAI.