70 mins
LETTERS
Church Needs To Change
We would like to express our sincere thanks to the Very Rev Dr John Chalmers for his challenging and inspiring series in Life and Work where he calls upon the Church of Scotland to modernise and make radical change or else face ‘drifting into irrelevance and obscurity’.
We are women who bring along our young children to church on a weekly basis and involve our families in all aspects of church life. We have such a strong desire to see the Church of Scotland flourish and grow and therefore we meet on a weekly basis to pray for the church, minister and Kirk Session. We are always open to how God may lead us and we have had the privilege of being involved in a women’s ministry that really is flourishing and growing.
Whilst there are many important activities within the Church, the reality is that our “traditional Sunday worship” is becoming less and less connected to modern day living.
This coincides with the continual decline in church membership.
Where are all the under 40s? Where are all the teenagers and children? The reality is that the traditional service is “alien” to people our age, young people and children who may never have had any experience in church.
We have both been brought up in the Church of Scotland and are passionate about seeing the Church fulfil the purposes God intended, however as we look back over the last 20 to 30 years we have to question why so much has remained the same when there has been so little growth over the years. In fact, we see so much loss.
We believe this must break God’s heart and it breaks our hearts when we think of the families with children who no longer attend.
The traditional Sunday morning service appeals to many of a certain age and I am sure meets the spiritual needs of these regular churchgoers, however it does not seem to meet the spiritual needs of younger generations. So what do we do?
We must allow God to lead us down a new path and we must be prepared to step out of our comfort zone (and yes that’s hard for all of us). We must see the importance of music and how God is clearly using modern worship music as a channel to speak to us and in particular to engage with younger generations.
Our own children aged from three to eight years love modern worship yet have to experience this at home in front of the television watching YouTube. They are engaged and sing along….so if this attracts and engages younger generations why then are we so reluctant in ‘church’ to learn new songs and explore modern worship styles?
We need to be a church for all generations and be creative about how we engage with all ages.
Cartoon: Bill McArthur
We also need to acknowledge that families who have children with particular needs and difficulties – physical, emotional, social, or behavioural find that the traditional church environment and structure is a challenge and some avoid worship because of this.
We need church to be a place where everyone is included.
If we do not radically change our Sunday worship then we really do fear that the Church of Scotland may not have a flourishing future and that is a huge burden we feel God has put on our heart.
BUT we also believe God is stirring our hearts and giving many a clear message of hope and the need to be bold in the years ahead as we allow God to re-build HIS church HIS way.
Elaine Hough and Stacey Morrison, Ayr
Commandment Comment
Regarding the letter from J Michael Buchanan (January 2018) I see no need whatsoever to tinker with our Lord’s commandments. I refer to Mark 12: 30 to 31 ‘Love the Lord your God with all your Heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ and ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’
This latter covers all we need to live in this secular world.
For example, if we are not exercising careful stewardship of our world we are not ‘loving our neighbours’, who are all on whom our actions impinge.
What is needed is for everyone to realise that ‘neighbour’ does not mean only those who live next door.
Michael Elliott, Dunblane
Confession Debate Plea
When someone professes faith, our Church asks him or her to make simple but important promises. These are about the essentials of Christian belief and life.
New members are not invited to a theological examination, but they are asked to profess enough for us to be as sure as we can be that they are off to a good start in the Christian life.
There is much for them to learn about following our Lord Jesus. In time, the Church through its courts, committees and councils will want to assess, commission and ordain members to lead, teach and evangelise.
We all need a confession of faith that spells out, in more detail than is provided by our membership promises or by the creeds, what we are to believe about God and declare to others about the Christian life.
Recent letters show that diff ering, contradictory opinions about belief are held within our Church. Correspondents disagreed about atonement, election, and salvation. In particular, the Westminster Confession of Faith was questioned.
The Church of Scotland is a confessional Church. Our Confession of Faith has an historic place amongst us. The Articles Declaratory of the Constitution of the Church of Scotland assert that, as our principle subordinate standard, the Confession contains ‘the sum and substance of the Faith of the Reformed Church.’
The value of our Confession is that it enables us to decide who is able to guide and teach our congregations. Our Confession is an evangelistic document, declaring the Church’s understanding of the Gospel, along with its implications. It also serves as a standard when it proves necessary for the Church to apply discipline. Perhaps the present Confession has served its historic purpose, and the time for a replacement may have come, but we would need to have a comparably substantial Confession that declares a reformed understanding of the Gospel. The straightforward command to love God and our neighbours needs to be fleshed out, biblically and contextually.
We must discuss the status of our Confession. Not to do so is damaging to the discipleship and evangelistic needs of the Kirk.
Louis Kinsey (Rev), Bridge of Don, Aberdeen
Review Thoughts
As author of the recently published work, ‘The Chair of Verity: political preaching and pulpit censure in eighteenth-century Scotland’, I write to thank the Editor for her generous review (January edition).
May I be permitted, however, to make these comments which may assist your readers to make up their minds whether at least they might feel motivated to read it courtesy of their local libraries? That said I entirely take the point that the relatively high purchase price – now unfortunately all too common in the world of academic publishing - might well deter the general reader.
First, as a lifelong member of the Church of Scotland, erstwhile elder and session clerk - as well as having been a one-time member of the church’s own Education Committee and other bodies, I am, I freely confess, just a little miff ed that your reviewer fails to point out that my book is dedicated to ‘the ministers, office-bearers and members of the congregation, past and present, of Netherlee Parish Church, Glasgow, where Evelyn [my wife] and I have listened contentedly to the chair of verity since 1962.’
Secondly, I respectfully point out that it is entirely misleading to suppose that the substantial research I carried out over several years for this book - and, also, for its predecessor volume, ‘The Lost World of John Witherspoon’ [Aberdeen University Press, 2014] – was based on ‘the newspapers of the day’. Both the extensive bibliographies and the cover blurbs relating to both works clearly show the extent to which I used primary sources that included Church and legal records, as well as other original (mostly unpublished) materials, not to mention numerous little-known contemporary printed sources.
That is all simply to put the record straight. Let me again thank ‘Life and Work’ for reviewing my latest work and, more generally, for having made the eff ort to draw books like mine to a wider reading public.
Dr Ronald Lyndsay Crawford FRHistS, Visiting Professor in History, University of Strathclyde
Gospel Debate
It seems that the main issue in the correspondence regarding the essence of the gospel is the substitutionary atonement. Did Jesus Christ die on the cross to pay the price for my sin or not? Some of your correspondents evidently don’t believe that He did and one regards it as a “chilling” concept.
I would have to say that it takes a few mighty leaps in plausibility to believe that the Bible does not clearly teach that the death of Jesus Christ was a death like no other and that He gave up His life on the cross as a sacrifice to pay for the sins of many.
Heather McMillan states that the nature of God is truly a mystery but the glory of the Christian faith is that He has spoken in many and various ways and ultimately revealed Himself through His Son.
Even more amazingly He says that He will come and take up residence in the hearts of His people by His Holy Spirit. The purpose of the cross was to provide a way for sinful mankind to regain fellowship with God, to know His presence in our lives and to relate to Him and speak to Him as a son or daughter with a Father.
To answer one of Mr Hellier’s points, Jesus Himself and the scriptures make plain that Jesus is the unique saviour and the only way to God the Father. That is why He commands His disciples to go out into all the world and preach the gospel. That is why many of our great Scottish missionaries risked life and limb to take the Christian message of salvation to the farthest corners of the earth because the world is dying to hear the gospel message of sins forgiven and new life in Christ.
1 Corinthians 15:3 tells us that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures and it is a matter of wonderful joy, often mingled with tears, that we can sing “bearing shame and scoffing rude, in my place condemned He stood, sealed my pardon with His blood, hallelujah what a Saviour!”
Alex Glen Elder, Sandyford Henderson Church, Glasgow.
I was most interested to read in the December issue of Life and Work the letter of Mr George A Chalmers regarding my letter in the October issue of the magazine.
Mr Chalmers has taken from my letter a meaning I had not intended.
It is up to Mr Glen, Mr Chalmers and other believers in the substitutionary theory of the Atonement what they believe.
All I am saying is that I believe that the Gospels are open to other interpretations. I defy anyone who reads the Gospels with an open mind to come to any conclusion other than that Christ very directly and immediately challenged the Judaic orthodoxy of his time in such a way that the priests of the Temple felt that they had no option but to destroy Him if they were to retain their privileged positions. There is nothing trivial or demeaning about this: Christ took His opponents head-on, an approach supported by his Father. This was not a mere political dispute, but rather a challenge to the ways the Pharisees and Sadducees had corrupted the worship of God so as to prevent the Jewish people worshipping God in spirit and in truth.
Christ’s ministry clearly demonstrated what real worship was; how sin was not consistent with a right relationship between people and their God. As far as I am concerned the ‘spring of gladness’ that is the gift of God is the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.
The meaning of the Crucifixion is for me the absolute inefficacy of the attempt by the priestly power group to destroy Christ and his message, demonstrated in His Resurrection.
I cannot believe in one inerrant interpretation of Scripture.
I do believe that it is the duty of Christians to look into Scripture for meanings consistent with the loving God that Christ represented to us in word and action throughout his earthly ministry: ‘He that has seen Me has seen the Father’.
John R Hume, Glasgow
Salt Spreading
To slip or to salt, that is the question.
Even though I am relatively young and strong, I find the icy weather challenging when it comes to walking. Slipping on the ice is no fun and we all know people who have suff ered bad injuries from falls on ice.
As I was navigating the ice the other day, it occurred to me, that if I just had a tub of salt, I could scatter it on the icy bits of pavement and thereby reduce the risk of slipping. My local supermarket sells tubs of salt for 40p.
Of course, if everyone carried a tub of salt and scattered as they walked, then the cumulative eff ect may well make walking on the pavements so much safer. Scattering the good salt on the land may well be an easy way to save ourselves and others from slipping.
Just a thought.
Ruth Unsworth (Rev), St Andrews, Fife
Collar power
As a minister entered a hospital recently, he was met by a man seeking spiritual guidance. If the minister had not been wearing his clerical collar, the man would have walked past him.
This happened recently.
Long ago an abbot involved a young monk to accompany him on a witnessing trip to the local town one day. They walked about and spoke to many people but did not preach. As they made their way back to the monastery that evening the young monk remarked on the fact that they had not spoken God’s word that day.
‘My son’, said the abbot, ‘ We were wearing our robes and everyone knew who we are and whom we serve. Make no mistake, we witnessed for the Lord today.’
Sad to say, a number of Church of Scotland clergy seldom wear their clerical collar in this day and age.
Some ministers in poorer areas may claim that they ‘dress down’ to identify with their parishioners.
Unfortunately, in so doing they miss an opportunity to witness for the Lord. Not only ministers.
There was a time when Boys’ Brigade members wore their buttonhole badge wherever they went. When asked what the badge meant, they would take the opportunity to say that they were members of a Christian youth organisation.
Yes, it is good to let people know whose we are and whom we serve.
William Findlay, Bishopbriggs, Glasgow
This article appears in the March 2018 Issue of Life and Work
If you would like to view other issues of Life and Work, you can see the full archive
here.