If The Lord in His Mercy really is looking down on Belfast, then a new city centre walking tour will surely have caught His attention.
For while most visitors are steered towards murals and peace walls, the new Church, State and Rebellion tour is asking what happens when faith, politics and power become entangled.
Launched by the Rev. Andrew Irvine, who leads the City Centre Chaplaincy initiative and who previously was director of the East Belfast Mission's groundbreaking Skainos centre - home to the Turas Irish language project, the tour promises to explore the past "to make sense of the present".
Proceeds from the walking tours go towards the running costs of the 40-strong Chaplaincy outreach project which offers support and friendship to the distressed and destitute in the city centre area.
Participating chaplains are assigned their own patch in the city centre where they get to know those most in need. "We also play a key role in disrupting both drug selling and drug taking by our presence," says Andrew, "and our hope is that we can move the people we interact with towards rehab and more substantial support."
Church, State and Rebellion traces Belfast’s story roughly from 1700 to 1800 and reveals Belfast’s churches not as quaint backdrops but as "engines of conflict, reform and, occasionally, reconciliation".
The route revives some familiar names – the United Irishmen, the McCrackens — to history aficionados but also unearths some lesser-known gems of Belfast past including King William of Orange's unusual link to St Mary's Chapel.
Rev Irvine's tour also takes a candid look at the tensions between church and state in 18th Century Belfast and suggests the Ulster Presbyterians who emigrated to North America, fleeing persecution at the hands of the governing Anglicans, wrote the division of church and state into the new US constitution to avoid a repeat of their repression.
For the Rev Irvine, forged in the classic Belfast Methodist school of street ministry, the tours give him a chance to share his fascination with our troubled past — and brings him back to his early educational ambitions. "In my third year at college, I decided to study the role of the churches in the conflict here," he says. "Needless to say, I had no lack of study materials and many years later that subject remains a passion of mine."
And while a Methodist minister doubling as a tour guide might raise some eyebrows, it's just one string to Rev Irvine's multi-faceted bow. For he's also chair of the East Belfast primary school Scoil na Seolta where 23 children, of all denominations and none, are being educated through the medium of Irish. Don't judge a book by its collar, I reminded myself as the Rev responded to my goodbye with "ádh mór".
Anyone interested in taking the two-and-a-half hour city centre tour, which starts from City Hall, can sign up online. Cost is £20 per person with proceeds going to the City Centre Chaplaincy.
