IRELAND’S first atheist church is without a spiritual home after the Dublin branch of the Sunday Assembly, a global movement of godless congregations aimed at bringing together non-believers, floundered after mere months.
Sanderson Jones, a British stand-up comic who founded the international not-for-profit network in London last year with fellow comedian Pippa Evans, said volunteers struggled to devote enough free time to organising monthly gatherings.
About 120 people attended the first “service” at the Little Museum of Dublin on St Stephen’s Green in November, and an assembly in Belfast followed in December. Both were stops on a tour led by Jones and Evans, who set up the first assembly in a deconsecrated church in north London, in an effort to launch the network across Europe and the US.
The Dublin assembly only gathered four times and, according to the Facebook page for the Sunday Assembly in Belfast, monthly gatherings stopped in that city before the summer, with plans to reconvene eventually under a different “brand” eventually.
The Sunday Assembly was designed to deliver a sense of community to the growing body of lapsed Christians in the UK, Ireland and elsewhere. The movement takes the “best bits” from traditional Christian services, omitting the religious trappings.
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In Dublin, where volunteers were organised by the comedian Abie Philbin Bowman, there was poetry, a talk from a scientist, and Jones led the congregation in songs such as With a Little Help From My Friends.
Philbin Bowman was keen to expand the movement to “every town, city and village” that wanted an assembly, but he was not available for comment last week.
“The person who really made it possibly was Abie,” Jones said. “He got a gang of people together and we had a reasonably successful first assembly with 120 people before moving to another venue. I don’t know the specifics of it, but it certainly didn’t keep on growing.
“What we’ve learnt from doing it there and other places is that the assemblies that survive are the ones with a strong core team, not just one or two people, as it’s simply too much work.”
Jones said a new team of volunteers is prepared to revive the Sunday Assembly in Dublin at a new, unspecified date. He added that 27 of the 30 congregations set up last year remain. “They are still running all over the UK, US and Australia — it’s just about finding the right folk to run it,” Jones said.
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“It didn’t fly in Milton Keynes, Glasgow or Vancouver. Try to find a correlation between all these cities; it’s not as if people came along to the assemblies and said, ‘Ah, I would have liked this, but unfortunately I’m living in an old theocracy.’ ”