The Very Rev Dr John Chalmers urges congregations to resist a natural presbyterian urge to disagree in forging a new path for the future.

FEATURE

Photo: iStock

TERRY Deary and Martin Brown are the brains behind the Horrible Histories series. Their books have made history both accessible and interesting to the young readers that they seek to attract. I’ve often wondered about asking them to write and illustrate a history of the Church of Scotland – I’m not sure how many readers it would attract, but it would certainly fall into their genre of writing!

Never let anyone tell you that history is not important, it most certainly is; it shapes who we are, it lays the foundations upon which we build and it forms the distinguishing marks of our culture. Tertullian noted that the distinguishing mark of the early church was the quality of their love for one another and that they seemed willing to die for each other. The history which has shaped the present-day Church of Scotland does not have as its most obvious characteristic such deep roots in love for those who belong to the same community of faith. Our past is deeply scarred by disagreement, separation and secession and that kind of stuff has become lodged in our psyche, providing an ideal breeding ground for conflict and making it hard for us to know how to live with our differences. The Rev Dr Finlay Macdonald’s new book From Reform to Renewal offers an insight into some of the divisions which have scarred our past, but perhaps it is a comment made by Principal John Cunningham of St Mary’s College in St Andrews which best sums up the character which has blighted the Church in Scotland for too long. Writing just a few years after the Disruption which gave birth to the Free Church of Scotland, he says: “Never perhaps, in the history of any Church has so great a voluntary sacrifice been made for so slender a principle – but yet not too slender for the Scottish Ecclesiastical conscience to apprehend and exalt it into a question of life and death.”

Disputation is in our DNA, Bonnie Fechters, as my grannie might have called them, have populated our church and imbued our life and practice. Taken together our intra-and interdenominational splits gave birth in Scotland to a church which was oversupplied with buildings, over-managed from the centre and over-occupied with self-preservation. It was inconceivable that any nation could sustain so much plant, so many projects and so many stipends for any length of time and so, towards the end of the 19th century, began the long slow process of unification and consolidation. This process, however, was one for which we were both ill-prepared and ill-suited.

The first move towards reunion began with the two great voluntary churches of the 19th century - the Free Church (formed in 1843) and the United Presbyterian Church (formed in 1847) negotiating to form what, in 1900, became known as the United Free Church. The Free Church and the United Presbyterian Church, both born out of their desire for disestablishment, were surely a perfect match; but what should have been a straightforward amalgamation gave rise to one of the fiercest legal battles in Scottish history. Years of dispute had to be settled by a special parliamentary commission, whose Commissioners, the Lords Elgin, Kinnear and Anstruther, noted in the course of their work, the disdain that the opposing parties had for one another. Tertullian must have been spinning in his grave at this shameful chapter of our history.

In the early years of the 20th century it was time for the newly amalgamated United Free Church and the Church of Scotland to complete the process of healing the divisions of the 19th century. This, however, was no simple process. The finest minds of church and law were exercised for some two decades working through the fine detail which led to the remaking of the present-day Church of Scotland. The 1929 reunion was welcomed in a great public fanfare held in the temporarily converted Edinburgh Corporation bus garage in Leith; but a few years after this momentous union John Burleigh, pre-eminent Professor of Scottish church history and Moderator of the General Assembly in 1960 wrote about the price we might pay in the practical outworking of repairing the damage of the centuries. In his Church History of Scotland and he says: “It is one thing to unite denominations, and quite another to unite congregations which are proud of their traditions and tenacious of their rights. Presbyterianism has always fostered strong congregational life. It is easy to be critical of parochialism or congregationalism in this sense and to demand thorough rationalisation. But grave spiritual damage may be done if this problem is not handled with patience, sympathy and Christian insight.”

He was right in his assessment. In what is almost a mere codicil to his Church History of Scotland, he notes that in the first 30 years of the Union 700 local unions and readjustments had been effected. That represents an average of 23 per year and that rate has never slowed-up. Given our natural propensity for resisting change and our inherited predisposition for dispute we have paid no small price in the process of restructuring the church. If you want to know what some of the best minds of the church have been doing over the last century then you don’t need to look much further than the vast list of readjustments which bear witness to the unfinished business of the 1929 union. I don’t know how it could have been avoided but I do know that it has cost us in time, talent and money and it has cost us in a general drift away from the local church. Now, perhaps, the hardest pill to swallow is that the process of consolidation and restructuring for the future is far from finished.

The point, however, of this potted history is to encourage us to stop and think about how we must resist the patterns of behaviour which have beset us in the past and adopt a new and more positive attitude to building and planning for the future. Sadly, in these past few years, as we have tackled our differences in relation to sensitive theological issues and in relation to congregational disputes the bonnie fechter surfaces with alarming regularity. It’s time for a change.

Urgent change is needed in almost every part of our church life. The structure of our version of Presbyterianism is groaning under the weight of too much bureaucracy.

Presbytery reform is still a crucial requirement. The ministry of the local church needs a new reformation. Even our confession and expression of faith needs radically reframed.

“Urgent change is needed in almost every part of our church life. The structure of our version of Presbyterianism is groaning under the weight of too much bureaucracy.

It was Albert Einstein who famously said, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” This Titanic of a church may well be sailing very close to its iceberg and I wonder if instead of trading the same old arguments we are any closer to listening to and learning from one another. I wonder if we might have grown up enough to realise that there are no knock-out blows on matters of so-called “great principle”. I wonder if we can learn from our horrible history and build a more inclusive, accepting, understanding and loving community of faith