Life & Work Magazine
Life & Work Magazine


6 mins

Facing our challenges

Earlier this year, the Rev Dr Doug Gay proposed radical changes in the Church of Scotland. As a new book on these themes is published, he reflects on feedback to his suggestions.

MY BOOK Reforming The Kirk has just reached the shelves, offering a fuller treatment of the themes I addressed in the Chalmers Lectures in February this year.

I wrote the book with some trepidation, but my concerns have been offset by the many positive reactions to the lectures.

I did not expect everyone to agree with me across the board and I was right about that, but reactions to the lectures showed there is an appetite for engaging with the issues. Elders, ministers, deacons and readers wrote to me from across Scotland, some saying they had discussed the lectures in session meetings and presbytery committees. People know we are facing huge challenges between now and 2030.

Many people said they appreciated the tone of the lectures, which I was relieved about, but I have to say that a good deal of humility and restraint is brought on by the realisation of how difficult it is to reform an institution like the Kirk. Some people said ‘I agree with you 99%, but the institution won’t change’. Others said ‘even if it did change, we’ve left it too late’.

I was told that a speaker brought to Scotland this year, when speaking more generally about moves towards renewal, said that change within the church was not enabled by ‘fear, facts or forcing’. I have thought a lot about that comment and come to the conclusion that I both agree and disagree with it. I recognise what he was getting at and I’ll come back to that, but I think these three ‘f’s have a role to play.

On fear: old and venerable institutions can be deeply intransigent, at both local and national levels. They sometimes need to feel themselves on the pivot point, where fear of not changing outweighs fear of change. A little fear sometimes works; it helps to instil urgency, it can help to avert disaster.

On facts: Rabbie Burns famously said ‘facts are chiels that winna ding, An’ downa be disputed’. I am always troubled when there is resistance to statistics in the Kirk, because it’s said they will damage morale, be seized on by the media or give succour to our critics. When institutions, companies or governments try to suppress bad news, it is rarely a sign of health. Facts are for knowing and for facing.

On forcing: here, we have to accept that Presbyterianism is a system that sometimes insists. Sometimes we say, this church has to close, this post will not be renewed, this project will not be funded: and it’s okay that we do that. (It’s painful, it involves loss, there are people who have to be consulted, involved and cared for through the process, but it’s okay and even necessary.) Sometimes the wisdom of the wider church has to prevail.

If that’s where I disagree, I do also concede a lot to what Tod Bolsinger is trying to tell the churches. We need vision more than fear, we need faith to see how facts can change and we need creativity and imagination to enable new choices.

I know that General Assembly 2017 had a lot on its plate but, as I watched on my laptop, I felt some concern that there was not more of a sense of ‘grip’ on some of the biggest issues facing the Kirk. We cannot afford to leave GA 2018 and GA 2019 with that same feeling. If we do not ask for, and receive as a gift from God, the vision, faith and creativity to agree on positive ways to address the big challenges, I fear the facts will force us to address them in more limited and limiting ways.

I am very aware that I was given a privileged platform in the Chalmers Lectures, in which I did not have to persuade anyone but myself, far less agree the text of a report with a whole Council and get the Assembly to vote in favour of it. I have therefore tried hard to listen to those who disagreed with my perspectives, in order to keep on learning and growing in my understanding of the choices facing the church. Six months after the lectures finished, as I publish a book on the same theme, with a continuing sense of humility before daunting challenges, I offer these thoughts:

• I see few signs so far of an appetite within central/national structures to contemplate a reshaping of the scale and shape of the work of the Councils. If no change is the best way forward, it may be that a good case can and should be made for keeping things just as they are? I am not yet hearing anyone make that case.

• I detect some worrying signs of what I would call ‘fantasy ecumenism’, mobilising to resist any challenge to current patterns of sacramental ministry. For now, I continue to believe we should move towards the flexibility enjoyed by the URC, Methodist Church, Baptist Union, PCUSA etc. I will be happy to be proved wrong if we witness a dynamic fusion of ecumenical and missional energies which makes such change seem unnecessary.

“Many people said they appreciated the tone of the lectures, which I was relieved about, but I have to say that a good deal of humility and restraint is brought on by the realisation of how difficult it is to reform an institution like the Kirk.”

• I continue to believe that strengthening regional/presbytery leadership is the best way to develop a strategic missional response to rapid decline. This will not happen without a transfer of functions and resources from the central councils.

• Follow the money.

Scotland has changed markedly since the heyday of the Kirk in the 1950s, and is continuing to change. At a time of great political turbulence, when polling experts, political pundits, academics and journalists have struggled to interpret and predict voter behaviour, some sociological trends seem more consistent.

Will Storrar recently pointed a group of us to Steve Bruce’s observation that, for Scots under 40, religion is no longer an inheritance – it is a choice. However divine sovereignty operated through the mechanisms of Christendom and whatever combination of faithfulness and disobedience the Kirk’s cultural establishment represented, it is a vanishing inheritance today.

We need to ask instead how the mission of God is at work in a secularising post- Christendom and post-Presbyterian Scotland and how we are called to work within that mission. If we are to keep doing that work as Presbyterians, we will need to re-explain what that means to ourselves and to Scotland. If, in this anniversary year of the Reformation, we are to do it as Reformed Christians, we will need to rediscover why that tradition rings true for us and how we can embody and renew it in new and (thank God) more ecumenical times.

Between now and 2030, we have to do five things simultaneously as a national church: close unsustainable churches, manage and pastor declining churches, help some declining churches to grow again, strengthen growing churches and plant new churches. We will have to do that with many fewer ministers than now and almost certainly with less money. No-one knows the right way to do this and there is no one right way. So we have to pray and reflect, we have to talk honestly and graciously to one another, we need to show courage, imagination and creativity, we need an ocean of divine grace and love, we need an outpouring of the Holy Spirit. We need to be reformed.

The Rev Dr Doug Gay is Principal of Trinity College, Glasgow. Reforming the Kirk is available now from Saint Andrew Press.

This article appears in the September 2017 Issue of Life and Work

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This article appears in the September 2017 Issue of Life and Work