Abstract: For fifty years ICMA has been an agency of agencies and a network of networks. But the story of ICMA is very much the story of people who have felt called to work among seafarers and fishers and their families in the name of Jesus Christ. This call has brought Christians from various churches and backgrounds to the sea shores and docksides and sometimes out onto the oceans themselves. The work of mission and ministry among seafarers is as old as the church itself but since the early nineteenth century this work has taken an organised and continuous form with the emergence of agencies and ministries dedicated to serve seafarers and fishers. Those who came together in Rotterdam in 1969 from a cross section of the agencies and ministries working among seafarers around the world at that time felt a pervasive sense of God’s providence at work among them. They felt their eyes were opened to recognise their common calling and the need for a common organisation to facilitate collaboration, connections and communications between their own organisations and to represent the work of Christian maritime ministry within the shipping industry and outside of it.
Author: The Very Rev. Paul G. Mooney is Dean of Ferns Cathedral in Ferns, Ireland. He has served as Chaplain to the Mission to Seafarers in Busan, Korea, Antwerp, Belgium and Vlissingen, The Netherlands. In 2007, he became Chaplain at Seoul Anglican Cathedral, a post he held until his appointment as Dean of Ferns. Mooney was awarded a Doctor of Theology from the Protestant Faculty of Theology in Brussels, Belgium in 2002 and is author of Maritime Mission: History, Developments, A New Perspective (2005).
