Clergy fail to warm to sun-kissed paradise

Published on Sunday 15 May 2005 01:09

KIRK ministers have shunned the ultimate in luxury parishes, proving the old Scots Puritan spirit is alive and kicking.

Just two ministers from Scotland have applied to minister to a congregation in the Bahamas, part of the Church of Scotland, out of about 80 applicants.

Despite the promise of sun, sea, a free manse and tax-free salary, it seems the Kirk’s clerics believe it is more spiritual to minister to struggling communities in cold, windy, rain-soaked Scotland.

The post, at Lacaya Presbyterian Kirk in Freeport in Grand Bahama, was advertised as being just 70 miles from Florida and having a tropical climate. The salary was 15,000 tax-free, which is roughly on a par with the typical earnings of a Kirk minister.

Although Scots ministers have decided to shun the tropical paradise, the attractions of the Bahamas are not lost on their North American counterparts, who have been quick to apply for the post.

Dugie McNab, the Clerk of the Kirk Session in Freeport said: "Most of the applications have been from either the US or Canada, with just two applications from Scotland. In a way you can understand it, a young minister wanting to get on in the Church would stay at home rather than risk being forgotten about over here. But it’s a great place for whoever wants to be the minister."

McNab, originally from near Inverary in Argyll, said memories of the Scottish climate tempered his homesickness.

He said: "Every so often I do suggest to my wife that it would be nice to go back, but then my wife says, ‘What, and return to that kind of weather?’"

In the past many Kirk preachers were depicted as railing against the "pleasures of the world and the flesh", regarding a person’s life as a grim pilgrimage in which they had to resist temptation and endure in the hope of solace in the hereafter.

While travelling abroad as a missionary was encouraged, the Kirk usually ventured to less cushy areas of the world, were there might be famine or disease, in the hope of bringing comfort to the suffering.