Concern about the ethics of investing its funds in arms manufacturing companies was expressed at the Presbyterian General Assembly in Belfast yesterday.
The Rev Ian McDowell, a retired minister, urged the church's trustees "to include armaments in their list of areas in which they will not invest". Currently the church prevents its trustees from investing funds in companies significantly involved in the tobacco, gambling, and drinks business.
Mr McDowell pointed to the incongruity of the church sending missionaries to Indonesia "to assure the people there that God loves each and every one of them", while at the same time investing in a UK arms industry which has sold armaments "to this [Indonesian] government which it has used to massacre thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of people in East Timor. If we profit from these and similar sales we are hypocrites", he said.
Sir Eric McDowell, proposer of the trustees' report, said the issue of ethical and environmentally sensitive investment "reflected the great problem that has to be faced".
The primary legal responsibility of the trustees was to the beneficiaries of the funds, he said, and they could not "act according to our own personal whims or wishes".
They had, for instance, forestalled further investment in Camelot, which runs the British national lottery, but had been warned by advisers that the more they restricted the investments the more difficult it was to achieve the desired return.
In their report the trustees said they would "continue to seek to be sensitive to the mind and will of the church as a whole". They said "the whole of the trade in armaments is not unethical insofar as arms production and sale is essential to the security and protection of the state".
Sir Eric said the church's general investment fund was worth £26.9 million at the end of last year, compared to £22 million at the end of 1996. The ministers' pension fund was £32.7 million at the end of last year, up from £26.4 million at the end of 1996. The assembly voted to receive the report.
Anxiety about the future, and frustration at how problems were being dealt with, dominated a debate on strategy for mission.
"It is a salutary thing to reach an age when you realise there is a whole generation below you which you do not fully understand and which you cannot wholly communicate with," said convener the Rev Alistair Kennedy. But he thanked God that there were "young people who carry the same faith". He said the church's strategy for mission committee was encouraging new approaches and new thinking. These included prioritising mission areas and socalled `church planting'.
"It is quite simply [the case] that if today's unchurched are to be brought in, it will in many cases not be into our existing congregations. The culture gap is too great," said Mr Kennedy.
He appealed to the assembly "to accept the necessity in this generation of considering new ways of building the church".
Opposing the new proposals, Mr Jack McKee, of Whitehead, said what was needed instead was to "concentrate on a mission to our young, for if we cannot reach and influence them, our church is finished".
The assembly overwhelmingly approved the proposals.
