Obituary: Rev William Wylie

Rev William Andrew Wylie, minister.

Born: 17 May, 1927 in London.

Died: 28 June, 2011, in Fife, aged 84.

Andrew Wylie was a pioneering minister who made his impact not only in changing the outlook and focus of a traditional Edinburgh congregation, but in spearheading its outreach to the burgeoning offshore oil industry based in Aberdeen in the 1980s.

He became minister of St Andrew's and St George's in Edinburgh's George Street in 1972, succeeding the Rev Cecil Bigwood, who had gone to St George's in 1956, when the Church of Scotland was at the height of its numerical strength and enjoyed its rather effortless superiority.

By 1972, however, the seeds of its decline were becoming obvious, and its congregations could no longer rely automatically on calling on the support of a church-orientated population.

The comfortable, gathered congregation of St Andrew's and St George's (since the union of these two churches in 1964) needed a focus for its outreach, if not, some would have said, a justification for its existence. Andrew Wyllie provided both. He conceived the idea of a ministry to the retail trade in the parish, on Princes Street and George Street. In 1978 the Rev Mary Levison was appointed to this outreach ministry as associate minister, and, while bringing to it her own theological insights and pastoral sensitivity, with Andrew Wylie's enthusiastic support she prepared the groundwork for the later ministry of the Rev Richard Baxter.

Andrew Wyllie also saw the need for the Church to build bridges to the increasingly important financial and business sector establishing itself in his parish.

He brought together groups of financiers and businessmen, in whose company he was at ease. He visited their offices and worked hard to understand their difficulties. In a television programme in the early 1980s he said that while the Church had to have a clear commitment to the poor, it should not ignore the pastoral needs and economic importance of wealth creators.

Following the break-up of his marriage, Wylie left St Andrew's and St George's in 1985, and for a short time became industrial chaplain for Inverclyde, but he was soon appointed as chaplain to the offshore oil industry in 1986.

His work involved flights from Aberdeen to the rigs and services for those killed in North Sea tragedies like Piper Alpha in 1988, which killed 186 men.

In a book about his years working in the oil industry he wrote of how he had been unprepared for it, because for the first time he had to secure the confidence and trust of those at the very top before he was trusted. All his ministry had been spent in situations where clergy were either in control or accepted without question.

He had a sharp learning curve, but there is no doubt that Andrew Wylie's ease with those in positions of power and his ability to listen to those who were not laid a strong foundation for the later work particularly of men like the Rev Andrew Jolly.

Wylie was born in London and educated at Glasgow Academy. He saw service with the Royal Navy from 1944 to 1947 and then took an arts degree at Glasgow University, followed by a course training for the ministry at Trinity College.

In 1953 he was ordained and inducted to Whitehill Church in Stepps. Six years later he moved to the Scots Kirk in Lausanne, whose ex-patriot congregation found his urbanity to their liking and where his ecumenical outlook was welcomed. While there he wrote a history of the congregation.

It was his ecumenical outlook which led to Wylie's next post in 1967, when he was appointed general secretary of the Scottish Churches' Council, which had been formed in 1964 to overcome the duplication of a large number of ecumenical agencies in Scotland, and which at the time was based in Augustine Bristo Congregational Church on George IV Bridge in Edinburgh.

It was while he was working there that Andrew Wylie suffered a stroke from which he made a complete and long-lasting recovery. In 1972 he left to become minister of St Andrew's and St George's.

In one of his entries in the journal he kept during his years in the oil industry, Andrew Wylie recorded: "Out of the blue someone remarked, 'If more people did what you are doing, folk would want to come to church.'"

Allowing for the natural optimism induced by hindsight, it is undoubtedly true that the Gospel can only make sense to people once they realise they matter and are accepted for who they are, and not as pew-fodder for the Church. Andrew Wylie's ministry was a journey to that discovery.

When he retired from the oil industry chaplaincy he went to live in the Peat Inn in Fife. His first marriage was dissolved and in 1988 he married Jennifer Geekie, who survives him along with four children from his first marriage and eight grandchildren.