Integrated Education

Integrated education – ‘forward-looking and inclusive’??????

Mervyn Storey, chairman of the Assembly’s Education Committee has responded to his leader’s proposal for integrated education as ‘forward-looking and inclusive’. This sort of comment from a DUP Free Presbyterian is indicative of the duplicity and hypocrisy that is presently associated with Paisleyism. Of all people, Mr Storey should know better than to make such an outlandish comment as this; he knows perfectly well what the position of his party and church had been with regard to separation. He is bound to have heard his former moderator preach against association and union with the Church of Rome; he must have heard of the doctrine of separation preached in his church; he must be aware that his own church runs an independent Christian school; and now he supports his leader’s proposals for integrated education.

As a former licensed minister in the Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster, I can well remember how that Independent Christian Education was high on the agenda; this was so when the new curriculum was introduced; there was a perspective amongst Free Presbyterians, that their children must have an education based on the principles and standards of the Word of God. Has Paisleyism turned away so far from these once cherished principles that Mr Storey can publicly support integrated education?

As if is was not bad enough to support such a proposal as Mr Robinson has made; it is exceedingly much worse when the proposal is supported by Secularist argument; Mr Robinson said, ‘What I do object to is the state providing and funding church schools’. These comments do have a Secular connotation, of separating church and state, or to be more specific, distancing the Word of God from government and ultimately from society as well.

Mr Storey describes opponents of integrated education as ‘backward-looking and predictable’; therefore as ‘backward-looking’ I do remember what Paisleyism once stood for; furthermore it is ‘predictable’ that any evangelical Protestant would resist and condemn such an ungodly proposal for integrated education.

Rev Mervyn Cotton (Heb13:6)