7 mins
Scotland 2020
Church of Scotland
THERE is no getting away from it: the story of the Church of Scotland in numbers from 2000-2020 makes brutal reading for anyone with the good of the Church at heart. In the year 2000, the Church could claim a membership of just over 607,000 (which was already less than half of its 1950s peak). The blue book to the 2019 General Assembly reported the total on the rolls as 325,695. It doesn’t get any better if we widen the definition from formal membership: as we reported last month, the percentage of the population expressing allegiance to the Church of Scotland dropped from 42% at the 2001 census to 22% in the 2018 Scottish Household Survey.
Anyone connected to the Church will be familiar with the results of declining membership: ever-increasing unions and linkages, closing buildings, fewer ministers resulting in more and longer vacancies. Income from congregational giving, which until recently had remained remarkably steady through the declining membership, has now started to fall as well.
But there are other, possibly less tangible but more positive developments over the last 20 years. In 2001 the Church welcomed and accepted the Church Without Walls report, which called for it to ‘return the ministry of the Gospel to the people of God’; with flexible structures enabling each congregation ‘to shape a vision for the church in their own area’.
It may not have happened as quickly as some would like, but there are signs that this change in culture is beginning to happen. It can be seen in the Fresh Expressions of church, which are popping up in areas as diverse as Glasgow, Aberdeen, Dundee, Kilmarnock, Argyll and Stornoway. The last decade has also seen the widespread emergence of Messy Church, and the church’s experiments with pioneer ministries – to the farming community in Ayrshire, the artistic community in Glasgow, in housing estates and universities.
Lesley Hamilton-Messer, Church Without Walls team leader at the Church of Scotland office, says: “While the Church Without Walls report inspired and encouraged, generally we failed to implement the level of reforms needed to make it a reality. Last year, a generation on, the acceptance of the Fergusson Commission (on structural change) and the Radical Action Plan indicates that we are now ready to make those changes.” David McCarthy, the Church of Scotland’s Fresh Expressions development worker, says: “We are in a different place than we were at the beginning of the millennium, in terms of our understanding, appreciation and engagement with what is termed Fresh Expressions of church. We are thinking about the reality of the church in our culture, and I think there is a noticeable move away from fear of decline being the motivation, towards an awareness of the love of God and how that impels us to share the good news of the Gospel, in our places and in our contexts.” The new mixed economy has also found expression in the variety of worship available in the Church of Scotland. While the traditional hymn sandwich remains the dominant format, Phill Mellstrom, worship development worker, says that there are a few trends that have impacted worship since the millennium. “CCM (contemporary Christian music) has grown and become ever more dominant in some circles, and there is a real impact from places that record and release their own music.
“It’s probably a millennial tendency for people to look for worship to be more experiential or participative. There has been increase in models like Café Church and using creative prayer stations, that feel more relaxed and conversational, as well as trends like new monasticism which look beyond the Sunday gathering to a rhythm of life.
“People are also asking questions about what worship practice and the sacraments could look like in gatherings that are more inter-generational. There’s lots of experimenting going on in different ways, and it will be interesting to see how this continues to influence both new worshipping communities and existing mainline church.” It’s possibly easy to forget that the technological and communications landscape has changed utterly in the last 20 years. When Big Ben struck the millennium, most of us hadn’t heard of broadband. Google was less than two years old and Facebook, Twitter and YouTube were all half a decade away. The idea of most churches having their own website (or at least Facebook page), and of many of them streaming services live, would have been the stuff of science fiction to most of us.
Probably the Church’s most notable response to this is Sanctuary First, the digital ministry led by the Very Rev Albert Bogle. Building on Mr Bogle’s earlier work as a parish minister, this is now a fullfledged pioneer ministry which explores the possibilities of the internet as mission tool for traditional churches and as a resource for existing churchgoers, but also in creating new faith communities online.
Its most recent report states: “At a time when the inherited formulas of church and community find themselves being challenged, Sanctuary First has been growing at an unprecedented rate, highlighting the interest that still exists among people of faith to engage in a worshipping community.” Of course it is impossible to consider the history of the Church of Scotland in the early 21st century without acknowledging the ructions over human sexuality. In 2006, presbyteries rejected proposals for ministers to be allowed to bless same-sex relationships. Just over a decade later, although the official doctrine of the Church remains unchanged, attitudes have changed to the extent that churches are permitted to call ministers in a same-sex relationship, and this year’s General Assembly is expected to consider allowing ministers to conduct same-sex marriages. The debate has been long and painful, and the Church has lost both ministers and members over the issue, but fears of a full-scale schism have proved unfounded.
Art
Iain Campbell, portrait painter and affiliate artist with UNESCO Refugee Integration through Languages and the Arts, and former artist in residence at St George’s Tron Church.
I graduated from the Glasgow School of Art (GSA) in 1997, and it’s interesting to think about what has come and gone since then. It might be easy for people not to realise the huge, global success that some Scottish artists have. Obviously, there’s the big names like Peter Howson and Alison Watt, whose works sell for tens of thousands of pounds, but also if you look like at the Turner Prize, five graduates from the GSA have won the Prize since the turn of the Millennium, which is an incredible success story for our beloved institution, which has seen the devastating effect of two fires within the past few years.
Art galleries are more popular than ever, with the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh and Glasgow’s Kelvingrove Museum and Art Gallery as two of the most popular visitor attractions in Scotland. Boundaries have been blurred between high and low art since the year 2000.
Award-winning comic-book artist Frank Quitely had a huge retrospective of his work at Kelvingrove in 2017, which is a huge shift in what is acceptable in our grand cultural institutions! Similarly, I remember early Banksy graffiti being removed from around Glasgow city centre in the 1990s. Now, a Banksy mural in the Arches underneath Central Station is being carefully restored.
Graffiti artists in Glasgow are now regularly commissioned to create huge murals, seen extensively during the 2014 Commonwealth Games, and more recently with three huge paintings of Billy Connolly on the gable ends of buildings, designed by John Byrne, Rachael Maclean and Jack Vettriano and painted by Glasgow mural regular Rogue-One (aka Bobby McNamara).
My favourite murals in Glasgow are by Australian artist Smug (Sam Bates). His contemporary versions of St Enoch and St Mungo are much loved in the city. Often, people in church have an expectation that wider society won’t be interested in Christianity, but in my experience that couldn’t be further from the truth. As well as Smug’s murals, Peter Howson has created an incredible amount of religious work, and David Mach’s 2011 project with Scottish Bible Society was another example of a well-known artist creating biblical work.
Within the Church of Scotland, art has begun to venture beyond stained glass. As well as the work that I created in St George’s Tron between 2015 and 2019, the Rev Peter Gardner is the pioneer minister to Glasgow’s creative arts community, and with his wife, Heidi, creates site-specific installation art together as Gardner and Gardner.
Scotland is a place where art and artists can really thrive because people in Scotland really love art. It would be wonderful to see more Church of Scotland congregations consider how they can engage their communities with thought-provoking art that catches their imagination.
This article appears in the April 2020 Issue of Life and Work
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