The Moderator of the United Reformed Church General Assembly, has expressed sadness after the Presbyterian Church in Ireland (PCI) voted to loosen its ties with the United Reformed Church and the Church of Scotland.

On Wednesday 6 June, during its meeting in Belfast, the PCI General Assembly voted 255 to 171 to accept the recommendation of the doctrine committee’s ‘Relationships with other denominations’ task group which was to ‘… no longer accept invitations to the Moderator of the General Assembly, or any other formal delegation, to attend the General Assemblies of the Church of Scotland and the United Reformed Church and no longer issue invitations to those two denominations to attend the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland’.

During the week the PCI also adopted a new policy that means anyone in a same-sex relationship cannot become a full member of its denomination and their children cannot be baptised.

After four years of training, Jo Patterson, a Church Related Community Work student, reflects on the experiences that she has been ‘blessed to witness’.

According to Jo, there are obvious places where people would expect to find God; a common place being ‘when we come together to worship in song, prayer and sometimes in ritual or liturgy’.

But, she asks: ‘What if we arrive carrying burdens, weighed down by grief, pain or sorrow?’

A 50-year-old partnership that celebrated an ending and marked a transition in 2011 was reignited today (Monday 11 June), at United Reformed Church House in London.

The Revd John Proctor, General Secretary of the URC, and Mr Alan Yates, Moderator of the General Assembly, met with the Rt Revd Dr Seth Agidi, Moderator of the Evangelical Presbyterian Church, Ghana (EPCG), the Revd Dr Emmanuel Amey, Clerk of the EPCG General Assembly, the Revd Frank Anipa, minister of EPCG’s Milton Keynes/Luton parish, and the Revd Derrick Sena Dzandu-Hedidor, who began his ministry in the EPCG and is now Clerk of the URC’s Southern Synod, to reaffirm a longstanding relationship and sign a new partnership agreement between the two churches.