A leading Scottish theologian has called for widespread reforms in the Church of Scotland, if it is to arrest the decline in membership.

Among the Rev Dr Doug Gay’s proposals were radical changes to minister and elder recruitment, the management of church finances and wholesale reform of presbytery and central structures.

Dr Gay, principal of Trinity College at the University of Glasgow, made the proposals during the Chalmers Lectures in Edinburgh in February.

Opening the series of three lectures, he warned that the Church was the fastest declining denomination in the UK, and said it required spiritual and liturgical renewal, missional refocusing and institutional reform.

Emphasising the need to both rethink and reform the Presbyterian structures of the Church of Scotland, he said: “Ours is not the only game in town, nor should it rest on the conceit that it is the original and the best…. If we are going to reform it, we need to reclaim it, re-evaluate it and rethink it.”

In the second, focussing on ministry and money, he said a series of strategies was required to address ministry recruitment and outlined measures involving both the eldership and ordained ministry.

He said the Church today had ‘to go further than we have gone until now, seeking a way forward that will not divide or destabilise the Church and will not leave our existing elders or ministers devalued’.

He called for the creation of commissioned elders, serving for only three years, rather than for life and emphasised the need to recruit a new generation of younger elders between now and 2030.

Addressing the ministry shortage, he said that the Church could ask people to give their last ten years of working life to the Church and consider offering some form of financial payment. Another option might be to make a formal approach to the Presbyterian Church (USA), which he said currently has a good supply of ministers and ordinands, and ask for them to come to Scotland for a five year period. The third option to consider was to make a ‘fresh appeal’ to women and emphasise the needs for their gifts to be fully represented in the Church of Scotland.

He called in particular for elders to be given permission to preach, baptise and preside at communion, drawing on the model of ‘commissioned ruling elders’ within the US church, but suggested calling them instead ‘commissioned local ministers’, who would be overseen by ordained ministers.

Outlining a series of ideas for managing congregational income, he said: “While there is real commitment to the principles of financial solidarity, there is also disquiet and discontent across the Church.”

Among the proposals he laid out were the need to support wealthier, successful congregations to allow them to continue to flourish; restate commitment to priority area parishes but not draw so many staff to them from a diminishing pool and to consider urging congregations to seek matched funding.

He said there was also a need to ‘stop micromanaging so much of congregational spend at presbytery level’.

His proposals for church structure included reducing the number of Scottish presbyteries by nearly three quarters, from 43 to 12. The new, larger bodies would be given ‘substantial devolved financial responsibility for deploying and resourcing ministry within their bounds’.

At the centre, he proposed that the four main councils should be combined into one Church of Scotland Mission Agency. There would be separate arrangements for CrossReach, the Church’s social care arm.

He also called for the church’s administration to move out of its offices at 121 George Street, which he described as ‘the key symbolic focus of what we need to move on from’.

Dr Gay paid tribute to the people who serve and staff the existing councils, saying: “I have many friends who work at 121, whose work and witness, whose dedication, gifts and vision I admire greatly.”

But he argued: “In any major institutional reform… some things will have to be done, which will prove to be very difficult for some of the individuals affected, but which are done in the hope that they will be for the good of the institution as a whole.”

However, he added that any reform, with the consequent upheaval, should only be carried out if it met three tests: it would better enable the mission of the Church, it commended itself to the mind of the Church, and it could be done in a way which maintained the peace and unity of the Church.

“It is far more important that we love one another, than that we improve our institutional architecture,” he said.

The full text of the lectures can be viewed at www.churchofscotland.org.uk/news_and_events/news/recent/lecture_series_ends_with_prophecy_for_the_kirk