Getting the message over

“EVERY act of worship – the whole thing – is an act of unity. It requires a sense of powerful, strong liturgy, of language; every element of the service should interact with every other piece to make a beautifully crafted whole.” Iain Mitchell, QC, is a man in demand, not just for his extensive and varied legal expertise, but for his sermons as a Reader in the Church of Scotland. He was also, until recently, a member of the SRT (Society, Religion and Technology) project, invited by the former Church and Society Council to come on board.

As well as being invited to preach in churches around Scotland, he has also been asked, and preached, at the Anglican Church in Rome, St John the Baptist, Notting Hill, the Church of Scotland in Paris and the Lutheran Church in Bratislavia.

“I was born in the Simpson Maternity Hospital in Edinburgh though brought up in Perth. My mother was a housewife and my dad was a dyer and cleaner (and a semiprofessional musician!) who had many jobs around Britain before settling back home in Perth.

Even as a child, preaching appealed to Iain.

“Aged about three or four, I used to pull a dining room chair into the centre of the room, drape a tea towel over the back, and deliver ‘sermons’ to my parents’ “I wanted to be a minister and was very drawn to it. I was never one of those people who didn’t know what they wanted to be.

“My ambitions were with me early on – I wanted to be a minister, an advocate and prime minister!” “I did the normal things in these days, going to Sunday School and the Youth Fellowship, and became a regular attender at church, but perhaps as more of a duty than a pleasure.” After achieving, (to his surprise), the Dux in English at Perth Academy, Iain went to Edinburgh University to study law, the fi rst person on either side of his family to go to university.

“I have always been a passionate believer in equality of opportunity, the Scottish saying ‘a lad of pairts’ meaning you can get on if you have the ability, and I worked hard to make the most of what talents I’ve been given. That’s why I’m on the governing Board of a UK charity, the Positive Transformation Initiative, which is dedicated to widening opportunity for all.

“No one should be held back by their circumstances. When I walk though an old graveyard, Grey’s Elegy comes back to me – I see the graves of unsung people, those who lived their lives perhaps not achieving all that they could be.

“There are all sorts of ways that people might be discarded – in some countries, they might be the wrong sex, or the wrong social status, or they’re just not ‘people like us’”.

“We’re lucky in Scotland. The opportunity is there if you take it. I didn’t go to any private schools; I went through the state system.” Iain doesn’t look like your idea of a Queen’s Counsel. He wears several earrings, has long hair and a sculpted beard, cut to a very narrow trim on his chin.

Is the slightly Gothic look some kind of statement? Iain laughs. “Who wants to look like everyone else? To follow the crowd? When I was at university, and the other students wore jeans and tee shirts, I would wear a three-piece suit and tie, with a fl ower in my buttonhole and an umbrella in my hand! “And now, when I’m in a fi eld of work where suits and ties are the norm, though I conform to a large degree, I still like to have some individuality. It’s very important to be comfortable in your own skin.” At university, Iain pursued one of his other ambitions with enthusiasm – the world of politics.

“I was very active in the Conservative Club and enjoyed all kinds of debates and was the President of the Diagnostic Society of Edinburgh, one of the oldest Edinburgh University societies, founded in 1816, and was heavily involved in EU debates.

“I loved debating, and the weekly debates were always enormous fun.

“I still have strong ties with the Scottish Conservatives, and indeed, was their honorary secretary for 10 years.

“I stood fi ve times for Westminster, twice for the Scottish Parliament and once for the European Parliament, but I think my ambition to be Prime Minister might have passed me by!” he says.

“As my career started to grow I realised I loved the law and enjoyed working in it.

It was interesting and challenging, and as well as being able to use my talents to help people who couldn’t help themselves, I discovered I had arrived into practice at a time when the world was about to undergo a huge technological change and I was very drawn to fi nding out about that.” intellectually

”I have always been a passionate believer in equality of opportunity, the Scottish saying ‘a lad of pairts’ meaning you can get on if you have the ability, and I worked hard to make the most of what talents I’ve been given.

Iain was called to the Bar in 1976, and worked steadily for years, mainly in civil law.

“I never really got into criminal law, but I worked the whole range of civil law.

“My father died in 1990, and two years later I took silk, becoming a QC. I was still politically very active in the 90s and became a temporary sheriff a year or two later. In the late 90s the role of temporary sheriff was abolished. My work was getting to the point where I was too busy to give it my full attention anyway.

“In any event, I was fi nding the cut and thrust of the bar too much fun to want to give it up. It was a challenge to be in a position actually to change the law, such as the time I persuaded the House of Lords that both Scots and English Law recognise a servitude of parking – a right which, under the right circumstances, a property owner can have to park on his or her neighbour’s property.

“I was also developing a niche practice in Scotland in suing banks for selling complex fi nancial instruments, and I was starting to get interest from English clients, but I was frustrated that, because I was a ‘foreign lawyer’ I could not take their cases before the English courts.

“Richard Keane, later the Lord Advocate, suggested I apply to the English Bar as well.

After much consideration and to-ing and fro-ing, I went for it, and was pleased to be accepted.

“After that, I’ve been very busy on both sides of the border,” he says.

Another big infl uence on his practice dates back to the 1980s when personal computers were beginning to come on the market and Iain, ever keen to learn, became interested in what these new technologies could do.

“Things were still done with either hand-written ledgers or using punched card machines, but I realised that things like accounts were crying out for computerisation.

“I worked with a developer to create a system to keep track of advocates’ fees and, in the days before hard drives, these had to be kept on fl oppy discs. As other advocates became aware of my ‘system’ they began to ask me about it, and I gained a slightly undeserved reputation for being a bit of a computer buff .

“I began to study up about them and drifted in to technical writing, attending some conferences and getting involved in the Scottish Society for Computers and Law, which I now chair. When the Internet became a thing, I was invited to speak at a conference organised by the British- German Jurists’ Association about the regulation of the internet.

“I didn’t want to betray my ignorance of the the legal regulations surrounding the internet, so I really made myself familiar with it, the pros and potential cons, and then spoke about the possibility of excessive regulation, the sociological and ethical issues of the internet. Really, all the issues we’re struggling with now.

“Quite quickly I became involved in a lot of IT law and I specialise largely in that now in both Scotland and England. I’m now on the IT Panel of the Bar Council of England & Wales and the IT Committee of the CCBE, the Council of Bars and Law Societies of Europe, in Brussels, and chair its Surveillance Working Party, as a result of which I co-authored an amicus curiae brief in a case brought by Microsoft before the United States Supreme Court that dealt with confl icts between US and European laws. Of course, I couldn’t appear in front of the US Supreme Court, but to have been directly involved in the case was fascinating.

“I’ve also done a lot of legal writing – my proudest boast is being published by Oxford University Press – and lecturing in various universities including Münster, Copenhagen and Cambridge.”

Portrait of Iain

Iain preaching in church

It was in the late 90s that Iain’s faith ‘clicked’.

“I had recently moved house and was attending a new church which had a sense of positivity about it. I realised that I was enjoying church on a Sunday, and I began to realise that I was thinking more and more of my early ambition to be a minister.

“I couldn’t ignore it, I realised it was a ‘call’ and I attended an enquirers’ conference. I was very interested in being a minister, but I did some calculations and realised that, if I followed that route, by the time I was qualifi ed, I’d be too old to be a minister, so instead of a pastoral call, I looked towards a call to preach.

“I qualifi ed as a reader and became a corresponding member of presbytery.

But my reputation had preceded me, and the moment I set foot in presbytery, I was approached to get involved in helping organise an ultimately successful campaign to persuade MSPs to stop planned legislation which would have led to churches being charged water rates.

I fi nd that there is a close connection between my role as a reader and my career at the bar. Both involve the use of language for a greater good.

“I’m also on the Ethical and Spiritual Development Panel of the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists in the City of London, and that has given me a route into things like the Church of England and the House of Lords. I have turned away from politics and found myself drawn into church politics, but there is a huge diff erence between them.

I go back to my earlier comment about being able to help people, be involved with charitable bodies and helping them improve things for those who wouldn’t otherwise be able to access opportunities and one of the main diff erences is that at least you get the impression that people are grateful for your help! “I attend North Queensferry Parish Church and enjoy it enormously.

My earlier involvement with the Church and Society Council and the SRT led to involvement in a whole lot of interesting projects, including contributing to papers which have been endorsed by the General Assembly such as The Internet - In Whose Image? – I chaired the group which wrote that one – Surveillance and Social Justice – that was a good fi t with the work I do in Brussels – Sport and Religion and Neurobiology: Free Will and Moral Responsibility, which led to my friend Professor Barrie Smith and me selling out a venue at the Edinburgh Science Festival.

“The world is full of wonderful things to explore, and you should never lock yourself inside tight boundaries.” Iain has found a great satisfaction in his role as Reader.

“I especially enjoy being a reader.

I know a lot of people who are ministers in churches both throughout Scotland and elsewhere, so I pop up and preach the odd sermon from the Borders, Glasgow, St Andrews, London – just all sorts of places.

And sometimes I’m invited to preach to other churches, not just in the UK but in other countries.

“I always believed that if you have a qualifi cation, enthusiasm and an interest, then you follow it. When the door opens and the opportunity presents itself, you go through it. It’s very fulfi lling.

“When I’m preaching a sermon, I will always try to ensure that the whole thing should join together. It’s like a poem, a poetic act of worship.

“I will always have three readings: Old Testament, Epistle and Gospel, and all of these, together with the hymns and prayers should be pulled together in the sermon.

”I always believed that if you have a qualification, enthusiasm and an interest, then you follow it. When the door opens and the opportunity presents itself, you go through it. It’s very fulfilling.

“I’m not too keen on those people who get up and emote all over the place. They feel it’s scriptural, but for me, scriptural is actively interacting with what the Bible says and bringing out all of the complex interplay amongst the Lectionary readings, the prayers, carefully chosen hymns and the sermon. It should be a coherent whole, engaging with the text of Scripture and describing a liturgical arc.

“That’s not to say you need an extensive knowledge of the Bible to understand my sermons, or that I don’t include everyone – I fi nd a sense of humour is a very appropriate way to get the message over to people. And I think that getting the message over is actually what scriptural teaching is really about.”

This article appears in the February 2021 Issue of Life and Work

Click here to view the article in the magazine.

To view other articles in this issue Click here.

If you would like to view other issues of Life and Work, you can see the full archive here.