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Crane, Govan yard
Photograph in memory
of Jimmy Reid by
Islay McLeod
R D Kernohan
Elie
Photograph by Islay McLeod
I’ve been having bad dreams about the Church of Scotland. In one I’m expelled from some fundamentalist congregation as a notorious sinner and (less plausibly) a dangerous liberal. In another I’m addressing a women’s meeting whose chairperson considers a joke inappropriate. In a third I’m back editing ‘Life and Work’ but as confused about changing times and jargon as Rip Van Winkle after 20 years’ sleep in the Catskills.
Then I wake up and, over breakfast, find that things are even worse in morning papers than nightmares. Some BBC survey statistically concludes the Kirk will be extinct in 2031. The financial reserves are alleged to be running out even sooner. The number of ministers and parishes is to be cut again. The moderator has somehow missed even the inadequate place allowed him in the papal state visit. The convenor of whatever succeeded the once-formidable Church and Nation Committee comes across as hostile to the forces and bravery awards. The token minister-columnist in what was once a sympathetic newspaper – back in the 1960s I was writing its leaders supporting women’s ordination – writes off the Crown but encourages meddling with its expedient laws of marriage and succession.
Only on Sundays, when I no longer read the papers but go to church, do things seems a bit better. Often we get singing the great metrical psalms and not just the ditties from the new hymn-book, some encouraging and a few excruciating. The lessons are usually superbly read. The latest modern translation is more than tolerable. The prayers assemble and deliver our deepest feelings. Frequently I also agree with the sermon. Even when I don’t there’s value in the reasoned or emotional response. And, looking down from the choir gallery and calculating expectations of congregational life, I reckon that young parents have come in and lowered the still-too-high average age. But the good attendance conceals a real decline even here, for the population of the parish has been swollen by new building.
You know that the situation is serious when the cuts and redundancies extend (as they have done) to the central staff and planners of the Kirk based at 121 George Street
So much for subjectivity. A more objective look at the Kirk isn’t much more encouraging, though it must recognise extraordinary variations in congregational vigour and morale as well as better-publicised differences in theology and moral judgements. The number of Scots claiming at the last census to adhere to the Kirk (well over two million, 42% of the population) will almost certainly have fallen by the next one, if only for demographic reasons. Fewer than 25% of these census adherents are actual members of congregations.
District elders also know that many names on their books are of non-attenders or merely nominal members, thought these conditions are not always the same. Only 10% of Scottish children are baptised in the Kirk and, although it remains by far the largest provider of church weddings, its ceremonies account for less than a quarter of all marriages.
Though the financial troubles tend to be exaggerated both by alarmists in the Kirk and by media people unfamiliar with its ways – I recall a dozen or so such crises since the Great Inflation of the 1970s – they are real and getting worse. The size of the Kirk’s ministry will soon be determined by what it thinks it can afford, not what it needs and can recruit from men and women who feel the call.
Only about a third of its congregations are self-supporting and the imperative support of ministry in poor, remote, or scattered areas falls necessarily and increasingly on a smaller group of prosperous and relatively thriving churches. You know that the situation is serious when the cuts and redundancies extend (as they have done) to the central staff and planners of the Kirk based at 121 George Street, which many a tight-fisted local kirk treasurer always regarded as built over a bottomless pit swallowing both the widows’ mites and the proceeds of gift aid.
But these problems reflect deeper troubles, some of them shared by all ‘mainstream churches’ of Western Europe (whether of Reformation inheritance or Roman obedience) and others peculiar to our Scottish situation. The Kirk’s real crisis is not about finance or even an alarmingly shrinking membership. These are the symptoms of deeper problems of conviction, direction, confidence, and – to use a word recently returned to fashion – coalition.
The deepest of these problems are those common to all Western Europe: weakening of faith, distrust of institutional religion, and alienation from worship. They are probably even more pronounced in England and the continent than in Scotland. But these signs of our times are often misread. It isn’t that aggressive secularists and publicists like Richard Dawkins are more convincing or eloquent than their many predecessors – even the psalmist had to rebuke those who said in their heart there is no God – but that they are in tune with widespread Western assumptions about freedom without responsibility, refusal to be ‘judgemental’, and the absolute autonomy of the individual.
These attitudes – embedded in modern liberalism, often co-existing bizarrely with economic socialism, and in danger of corrupting political conservatism – are very different from the older Protestant idea of ‘the right of private judgement’, for they want a freedom untrammelled by obedience to any higher power or to past revelation, received wisdom, and sense of sin. They lack a proper humility in face of all the evidence of humanity’s inclination go astray both in personal and collective behaviour.
It will have to demonstrate that the best pattern for the future church (not just in Scotland but everywhere) is one in which a conservative, evangelical foundation is the base for liberal experiment and innovation.
But there is a special problem in Scotland – and a similar English one expressed in a very different theological and liturgical tradition – over the church as a coalition of believers of different kindred and styles trying quite rightly to keep in touch with a wider population of seekers, agnostics, sceptics, and not just occasional attenders but occasional believers.
All churches, unless they are narrow sects, are coalitions. This is very evident today even in a Roman Catholic Church held together by self-perpetuating hierarchy, skilful blending of monarchy and oligarchy without democracy, the devotion to unity even of those who rebel against authority, and a populist idolisation of the papacy and the person of the pope which the anti-reformation Council of Trent might have thought a bit overdone. But the earliest church was an inspired coalition (as Luke’s Book of Acts and Paul’s letters make clear) and the church of the future will have to be one – or rather a group of coalitions with appropriate styles for its various territories and denominations.
Among them the Kirk of Scotland, so derided and even despised now in the country which it shaped, will have to realise it is a coalition and not the perfect union which earlier generations thought they had achieved by gathering together almost all the fragments of Scots Presbyterianism in 1929. It will have to work and pray to avoid another Disruption – not because that would be any national convulsion like the one of 1843, for much of Scotland would be indifferent, but to survive. It will have to demonstrate that the best pattern for the future church (not just in Scotland but everywhere) is one in which a conservative, evangelical foundation is the base for liberal experiment and innovation.
And it will have to revise and refresh some of its assumptions and customs. In part II, I shall suggest some changes of emphasis and direction.
Part II on Tuesday
R D Kernohan is a writer and broadcaster
