Reforming the Kirk

I have just finished reading Doug Gay’s Reforming the Kirk: The Future of the Church of Scotland, (based on the 2017 Chalmers Lectures), a fascinating, but also extremely challenging, read. Gay is very clearly writing to and for the Church of Scotland context and there is much that is specific to that; but there is also a great deal that can easily be applied to my own United Reformed Church context, either directly or with just a little thought as to the differences. Indeed, Doug Gay has served as a URC minister and seeks to apply some of what he learned there to the ‘Kirk’ context.

He is writing into the situation of decline which challenges the vast majority of mainline traditional denominational Christianity in the UK in these days. As he says of the Church of Scotland context, but it applies much more widely: “From the 1960s, membership began to decline, numbers of church weddings declined, numbers of infant baptisms declined and attendances at worship declined. That such decline has been a painful and dispiriting experience for hundreds of thousands of Scots is beyond question. Some of the ministers retiring now or who retired in the past decade, especially those who were ordained in the 1970s, have spent their whole ministries with declining congregations.”

He is concerned to suggest possible solutions for a refreshing of the Kirk. As he says: “Increasingly, institutional survival will come only through missional renewal. The tide is going out too fast for it to be otherwise. Sessions which had functioned reasonably well as administrative or pastoral bodies are experiencing new and unsettling challenges as urgent questions about missional leadership are put to them.”

I am fascinated by some of what he says about eldership, ministry and church organisation – but exploring that would take too much space here. What can certainly be agreed is that there is a crisis. He talks of the Kirk seeing the threat of congregationalism but, I think, suggests we need to reduce the amount of centralisation. He says: “Without compromising on generosity and solidarity, we need to reinvigorate local motivations to be sustainable and adventurous. Our current highly centralised systems are strong on pooling and sharing, but they look increasingly less well suited to motivating local giving. The acute missional challenges facing the Kirk over the period to 2030 call for a new financial imagination which will maintain a powerful commitment to smart, creative and empowering expressions of national sharing while incentivising a new era of local responsibility and offering greater local and regional flexibility.“  That same debate is very live in the URC, as we, too, struggle with the balance between emphasising the local, the regional (presbytery/Synod) and the denomination, despite those points where he cites us as being a good example. Though many colleagues would disagree with me, I, too, wonder if we have become, and continue to become, too centralised.

Incidentally, I really like his idea of commissioned elders, not replacing, but going alongside the traditional ordained for life model. He suggests: “The Kirk would introduce a new form of eldership alongside the old. Commissioned elders, as I suggest we call them, would be set aside to serve for periods of three years, with that three-year commission capable of being extended indefinitely, subject to concurrence on both sides. The decision to be commissioned or ordained would lie with the prospective elder and they would be asked to make it on the basis of discerning whether they understood their calling to the office in terms of a lifelong consecration or a time-limited assignment. No judgement would be made about depth of faith or degree of commitment, the discernment of vocation would be related to what Moltmann describes as the ‘charismatic freedom’ of the church, recognising that after one or more terms of commissioned eldership, a woman or man might feel called to a different sphere of service. Both forms of eldership would be eligible to fulfil exactly the same functions within the courts and councils of the Church of Scotland. The advantage of this reform would be that without diminishing, altering or undercutting the status of those already ordained to eldership, or preventing others being ordained in the future, new avenues of ministry could be opened up to church members who have the gifting and calling to serve, but have not felt called to be ‘ordained’ to this office for life.”

Could we possibly pull that off?