Church's emphasis on social commentary has cost society

Published on Sunday 11 May 2008 21:32

Liberal agenda to politicise the Kirk has brought about a loss of direction and evangelism, writes REV DR ROBERT ANDERSON

THE current membership of the Church of Scotland is 489,118. This number does not include children or the large number of adults who attend or support local congregations, but who do not formally join.

In comparison, the membership of the Scottish National Party is about 14,000 and the membership of the Labour Party is some 27,000. What is harder to measure is the increase in knowledge and faith of Church of Scotland members and attendees who aspire to be committed Christians.

There has been a shaking out of nominal and cultural membership of parish churches. Those who remain and those who have joined have a greater sense of Christian purpose and are more generous than some of their predecessors.

For decades, the Church of Scotland has not offered a sufficiently clear Christian alternative to secularism. It has not identified itself primarily as an evangelical organisation with a spiritual agenda. It has departed from its historical role and it has strayed from its niche market. It has lost authority and direction and has become assimilated to Scottish society rather than remaining distinct within it.

One of the reasons for this was that Lord George MacLeod, the former leader of the Iona Community, decreed in the 1950s and 1960s that political comment should be a primary aspect of Christian witness.

The late Tom Allan, former evangelical minister of St George's Tron Church in Glasgow and one of MacLeod's contemporaries, disagreed with this strategy. For him, Christian communication should be primarily about inviting people to become Christians. This was not an "either-or" but a question of order, priority and emphasis.

Members of the Iona Community became very influential in the Church of Scotland. They took their liberal agenda to politicise the Church into its corridors of power and changed the character of the Church of Scotland significantly.

However, they did not have the spiritual weight and charisma of MacLeod himself and so they institutionalised an emphasis on social commentary in place of evangelical communication. They lacked Christian maturity and were over-confident in their opinions and self-indulgent in their rhetoric. There was a sense of undergraduate enthusiasm about their continuing influence and none became visionary leaders. At the same time, a more conservative form of evangelicalism became influential at parish level.

Only very recently has conservative evangelicalism begun to gain some central influence. The liberals ensured they held control of the burgeoning bureaucracy at 121 George Street. By manipulating the loose authority structures of Presbyterianism, they became the new establishment. Tension and struggle between these two emphases continues to this day. Of the last 40 moderators of the General Assembly, only about five may be described as distinctly evangelical in spirituality, theology and ecclesiology.

The Church of Scotland is now dominated by its vastly over-staffed and highly paid behemoth of a bureaucracy which has changed from a facilitating to a management role. Many of its employees are not Christians, but they do have employment rights. In addition, political correctness controls what continually fails as a public relations operation.

The issue of theological liberalism has also been important in the apparent decline of the Church of Scotland. This is not a new issue.

Intellectual and scientific challenges to the doctrines of Christianity are strong. Christianity will survive the current onslaught. It cannot be killed off by the limits of human rational argument conditioned as it is by time and society, restrictions of knowledge and passing history.

Intellectual opposition to Christianity conditions the status of Christianity in schools. It does this incidentally by relegating Christianity to a fringe interest aspect of education. Most children in Scottish state schools today are disconnected from Christianity as a credible life option. Connecting Christianity with local church communities is not made important enough to offer young people the opportunity to opt for Christianity.

But this has had profound consequences for social life in Scotland the measure of which no politician is willing to take. We do now, however, have eight-year-old children being taken to hospitals suffering from the effects of over-consumption of alcohol. Neither can we build prisons fast enough.

Scotland's range of social sicknesses is extensive. Politicians are not wholly to blame for this, but they could contribute to a programme of recovery. They never make the connection between the abandonment of Christianity and the current range of societal problems. They have, however, managed to impose on churches the ludicrous overkill of charity regulations and a profoundly disturbing necessity for a multiplicity of criminal disclosures on largely decent, innocent, exemplary and law-abiding people.

Christianity is diminished by the political tool of equalising faith claims. Christianity is greater than any human politics. It has lasted longer in the world. It cannot be manipulated or controlled. There is recent historical evidence for this in the fall of the former USSR and in contemporary China. Governmental leadership for Christianity is missing in contemporary Scotland. The consequences will be far-reaching for centuries to come.

The Church of Scotland must become more identified with Christianity. It must become distinguished from the political establishment of Scotland. Christianity has been the cement holding many human societies together over some 2,000 years.

Without Christianity, we will continue to fail as a human community. The Church of Scotland must find the means to communicate the essential Christian message of redeeming divine love in Jesus Christ. This message is not time or culture-bound.

The Rev Dr Robert Anderson is minister of Blackburn and Seafield Church, Edinburgh.