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Time for Change

Wednesday November 22 2017

In the second of a series examining the reforms needed in the Church of Scotland, the Very Rev Dr John Chalmers says the Church must learn from its history of dispute and separation.

Terry Deary and Martin Brown are the brains behind the Horrible Histories series, which has made history both accessible and interesting to young readers. I’ve often wondered about asking them to write 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!

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.

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.”

The 1929 reunion was welcomed in a great public fanfare; but a few years later John Burleigh, pre-eminent Professor of Scottish church history and Moderator of the General Assembly in 1960, wrote in his Church History of Scotland: “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. Burleigh 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.

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.

The point 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.

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.

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.

Previous: A Living Church

This is an abridged version of a feature from November's Life and Work. Subscribe here.

The Very Rev Dr John Chalmers was Principal Clerk to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland from 2010-17, and Moderator of the General Assembly in 2014.