Drift from Kirk

It is concerning that the Church of Scotland is struggling to recruit new ministers, especially young ones (your report 23 May); it is even more concerning that the General Assembly has been told that this is because of innate 
conservatism.

The Cornhill trust, a training organisation based in St George’s Tron, has more young people in training for the ministry than the total number of Church of Scotland ministerial students in 
university theological faculties.

The Tron is one of the congregations that left the Church of Scotland because of its perceived “trajectory” away from the Bible.

The problem is not the “innate conservatism” in the methods of training; it is because the growing churches in Scotland tend to be those which are becoming more, not less, Bible based.

In choosing the path it has chosen this Assembly, the Kirk has only exacerbated the problem of recruitment that it faces.

David Robertson

Shamrock Street

Dundee

I call the attention of Dr Mary Brown (Letters, 22 May) to the countless heroines of the Christian faith through the centuries – martyrs without number, survivors of intense suffering in Stalin’s gulags or Hitler’s concentration camps et al, not to mention those enduring similar fierce ordeals today in North Korea and other places.

Not one of them had or has any hang-ups or difficulty in 
referring to the author of their salvation, Jesus Christ, as “He” or to God as “Father”.

God is, in fact, outside gender and to refer to Him in feminine terms is as ridiculous as it would be for the girls in a human family to call their Dad “she”, even if they and he were in a one-parent household.

God is in a state of change, moreover, only if He exists merely as a projection of humans themselves, like the ancient 
Olympians.

It certainly does not reflect how He testifies to Himself as the unchangeable, immutable “I am”.

MD Taylor

Ettrick Terrace

Selkirk

THE Reverend Dr John Cameron (Letters, 23 May) seems to think we have or should have “a degree of autonomy over our mortality”. My answer to that is that we are not the authors of our own 
existence, and neither are we the authors of the time of our death.

St Paul makes that very clear when he says we have been bought and paid for by Christ’s redeeming death.

Nor does God demand 
“extreme and prolonged suffering in order to authenticate his ultimate control”. Palliative care is entirely permissible.

Nevertheless, in Christian teaching, suffering is not without meaning or value, since Christ suffered for our sakes, and “the servant is not greater than his Master”. Suffering is, indeed, a mystery, but then so are so many other things about God.

Colin McAllister

South Street

St Andrews

It was amusing to read Allan Massie (Perspective, 22 May) 
suggesting that the letters page of this newspaper shows that Scotland is “less Christian”.

This is an understandable but naive impression (understandable given that most people of faith rarely get their letters printed whereas the constant correspondents from the Edinburgh Secular Society and National Secular Society lobbies are published daily, often side by side).

Indeed, in the case of Dr 
Norman Bonney (letters twice this week so far, to say nothing
of the article about and then by him in the evening companion paper) this newspaper and its evening stablemate are rarely making it clear that he is a secular activist.

There is a tiny cabal of secular lobbyists writing to The Scotsman, Mr Massie, but it is the same few each time, each day, each week.

Do you not see the repetition of the same few names? The Christian correspondents? They just rarely get published.

It is as simple as that. Playing fields are plainly not even, Mr Massie, and there is plainly something of Denmark in the current state of The Scotsman on the religion/secularism debate.

Angus LOGAN

York Road

North Berwick