Looking Back: How do we stand to Scotland as the National Church?

From September 1954

An Assessment of Home Mission

By the Rev WA Smellie, Convenor of the Home Board

In relation to the Church’s mission to the folk of our own country, how do we stand 25 years after the Union?

Perhaps I can speak to this question with some objectivity; my traditions derive from neither side of the house and the whole of my ministry within the period.

    I would say that there is a great deal for which to be thankful. I can recall from the earlier years of my ordination ever so many presbyterial discussions during which prior allegiances were held up (like fair-ground mirrors) to exhibit the mean and distorted proportions of those who didn’t share them.

No one now has any interest in such jealous and childish practices. To-day it is so much an axiom with Presbyters that they all belong to one Church that there is neither surprise of resentment when the authentic virtues of either heritage provide material for rebuke and inspiration.

    The territorial parish has given every congregation a precisely measurable responsibility and eliminated all sorts of deplorable friction. The inestimable worth of the Union can be measured by trying to imagine the chaos and wastage in which we would have found ourselves if, during the present rehousing of the nation, two powerful denominations had been in rivalry over Church Extension.

     It is some sort of real evidence of the merit and finality of the Union that awareness of our unitedness, on this level, has almost entirely receded from the conscious into the subconscious mind. The Union is taken for granted. Perhaps it is too much taken for granted, in the sense that appearance is equated with reality. Closings of the ranks in other spheres are often ordained as the precondition of spectacular advance. And if we were to confine ourselves to the field of Church Extension our Union would certainly claim much ground won.

But what about the other fields? Let us look at the case of my own city. The Third Statistical Account for the City of Perth has the following passage:

  “In 1835 the population of the Parish was 19,601, of whom 11,683 belonged to the Church Of Scotland, 7,101 to other denominations (including 228 Roman Catholics), leaving a remnant of about 900 people claiming no Church connection. In 1951 the population in the area representing the old parish was 36,885 (of whom 8,401 were designated in the census as ‘children under 15’). The Church Of Scotland membership was 13,052; that of other denominations (including 2,500 Roman Catholics) was about 7,500. It will thus be seen that, even when generous allowance is made for those who have not reached the age for entering the full membership of the Church, there were, in the middle of the 20th Century, thousands in the city who could claim no full, official association with the Church.”

    There may be places where allegiance to the Church is stronger; there are surely others where it is much weaker. Perth, I think, may be taken as a fair average of the national state of affairs. The average reveals that, whatever spiritual goods were secured by the Disruption, the consequent multiplication of churches (14 where there had been three or four) was not the prelude to any signal or permanent victories for evangelism.

    Nor have the deficiencies in this regard been made good in the 25 years since the Union. Why? Partly because congregations have paradoxically gone on being independent. They have concentrated on their own defence and edification. They have affirmed no vital maturity of life and purpose. There has been no common agreement that evangelism is a supreme priority, and therefore no attempt to devise any sustained over-all strategy of mission to the city as a whole.

    One big reason for this, in my judgement, is that the Christian community has not been, with any constancy, pungently aware of the existence of the thousands, in their own immediate neighbourhood, who make shift to live without the comfort of the Gospel. Broad and large, I believe that the facts in Perth are valid for the whole country.

     Those of us who find ourselves deeply involved in ‘Tell Scotland’ cannot doubt that the Movement is an authentic movement of the Holy Spirit. Could it not be that, at this anniversary, God is challenging the Church Of Scotland to realise that the time for consolidation is now past and the time for advance is come? – that shortages of men and money and every other symptom of sickness in the Church are all alike evidences that we have, too assiduously, been seeking other things rather than the extension of the kingdom?

    Not long since I heard Dr JS Stewart say that every congregational activity which does nothing to get across God’s care and concern to the wants and needs and sins of the thousands outside the Church should be immediately scrapped. In the light of that saying are we ready to make a radical examination of our whole congregational life - and of our own membership in the Church? At this time of anniversary and thanksgiving it is to such a thorough-going examination that the ‘Tell Scotland’ Movement dares to summon the Church.

NB: The Church of Scotland as reconstituted in 1929 was composed of the formerly existing Church of Scotland and the United Free Church which had itself come into being in 1900 through the Union of the Free Church (1843) and the United Presbyterian Church (1847).

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