I was born into an Irish Roman Catholic family in London. Growing up I played with other Roman Catholic children not just at the RC primary school I attended but also in the street where I lived. As part of a minority religion in a sea of Protestantism and secular humanism our religious identity was important to us.

Every Sunday we would go to mass. Getting into the car to go to mass was nearly always accompanied by arguments about something or other. But then arguments were a normal part of my upbringing. I thought every family managed their interactions that way.

We moved to Ireland when I was 13 back to the homeland where both my parents had been brought up. Our relations were all Roman Catholic and as far as anyone can tell, all our ancestors were also. It was a source of pride to us that we didn’t even acknowledge Norman blood in our ancestry. No we were descended from the true Roman Catholic Celts.

But the Roman Catholic church was dead and there was a lot they didn’t tell us.

Roll forward to May 7th 1980 and I have had a life changing encounter with the Holy Spirit also known as being born again. My life is turned upside down. I immediately stopped using foul language, gave up excessive drinking and started being faithful to my girlfriend who a few months later became my fiancee. The bible became a book I could not get enough of and I loved worship and times of fellowship/ communion with my heavenly Father and others who also had been born again.

I still attended mass mainly for my girlfriend’s sake but spent hours trying to convince her of her need for the same rebirth as I had had. We read the Psalms together and I brought her to meetings of believers. However, it was not to be and she broke off the engagement less than a year after I was born again. I then also fully left the RC church and got baptised.

One of the things that was very important to me in those early days was not to be identified as a “Protestant”. I in no way wanted to be associated with the bigoted Protestantism that was all I really knew about it from what I saw on the TV or was taught in the Roman Catholic schools I attended.

There is also a lot of pride in the RC church. I and others implicitly believed it was the highest form of Christian religion and that all other Christian denominations were lukewarm in comparison. Later on I began to understand things differently but at the time all the Protestant denominations I encountered were just as dead as the RC church I had left.

Thankfully there were enough of us in the Republic of Ireland who were born again and had left the RC church for us to be able to establish a separate identity for ourselves as “Christian”. So we met in small groups from house to house and encouraged one another.

As time has gone by, the titles by which Christian religions recognise or distinguish each other have become less relevant to me. I am increasingly convinced that the God who is in me and in others who have received the same gift of faith does not call me by some denominational name. He has His own name for me that only He knows based on the work that He is doing in my heart.

Baptism is a declaration before principalities and powers that I am Christ’s. It is not a declaration that I belong to a particular denomination. Or at least it ought not to be that. We are baptised into Christ not into Anglicanism, Roman Catholicism or any other group.

I have communion with Jesus and His body because I share the same spirit. Communion in this sense is not the ritual breaking of bread ceremonies that many Christian denominations practice. I like to think of that as an act of corporate remembering of why we are one body. As Jesus said: “Do this in remembrance of Me.” When “communion” is mixed up with the Lord’s supper some mystical elements enter into the practice which leave me uncomfortable.

This and other considerations about what was truth, and what was error, led to my leaving the RC church in 1981 at 21. I am now 66 and have never regretted that decision.

There were perhaps hundreds of people around my age then in the Irish Republic that were facing similar issues. We were nearly all from families that were deeply rooted in the Irish Roman Catholic culture. It can be hard to realise just how much of a hold the Roman Catholic church had on the life of Irish citizens at the time. Since then so much has been unearthed about the abuse so many suffered. At the time though you knew all about its power if you tried to leave it.

I was a commissioned officer in the Irish Defence Forces. I and others who had left the RC church applied to have our religious denomination changed from “Roman Catholic” to “Christian” on our army HR forms (AF 109 I think it was called). It caused an uproar. Around the same time we were accused of being pacifists. The Irish News newspaper carried a front page article saying that the army was being subverted by a religious cult and that 6 officers had resigned their commissions as a result of turning pacifist. All untrue. The impact of the controversy was that excellent officers were passed over for promotion.

Friends of mine lost their jobs, families ostracised others. It cost something to become a Christian in those days. You were slow to lose it once you found life.

(To be continued).