Save the Garden Party!
Maxwell Macleod – 'perhaps a little late in the day' – speaks up in defence of the Mother Kirk as its annual General Assembly suffers a damaging curtailment of its activities to a weekend event – without the 'glamorous' ending garden party
THE MIDDLE of this May has seen a major cultural event in the history of Scotland when the collapsing Church of Scotland decided to shorten this year's annual General Assembly from around a week to around a week-end and cancel its one glamorous social event, the Holyrood Palace based garden party which traditionally book ends the end of the Assembly.
Consider and possibly weep, within many very old peoples' memory the Kirk was attracting millions to weekly worship, whilst today only sixty thousand attend church each Sunday with hundreds of churches lying empty, many costing tens of thousands of pounds a year to maintain, a never ending drip of an expense that is rapidly draining the Kirk's meagre coffers.
The Kirk's lack of leadership is currently allowing the business plan from hell. Some predict that unless the Kirk authorities do something radical, and now, it will go bankrupt within a few years and it's high time they started to panic.
My late father, born in 1895, used to recount how he would remember as a child that every house in his Glasgow street (Park Circus Place) would always send a crowd of toffs and servants to the local church and that if he had announced to his own father that he wasn't going to church that Sunday it would not be that his father would remonstrate, but that every clock in Glasgow would stop, their mechanisms frozen in horror at hearing his cultural blasphemy.
I review those figures with great guilt and shame. Through no effort of mine, down the last four hundred years my family have been the most successful in the Kirk's history, producing six Moderators (chairs of the Assembly) and over five hundred years of service as priests, and here we are on my watch and I have done nothing at all to prevent, or even slow down, the collapse of the institution that has been my family's, and indeed national's, cultural and indeed moral nursery.
Once the Scotsman would print entire speeches from the General Assembly which was in many ways Scotland's debating chamber. Today, the Assembly hardly gets a mention in that paper, and every debate day a foot dragging delegate or two can be seen diverting from entering the Assembly halls to lie sunbathing in Princes Street Gardens rather than endure watching the Kirk's death rattle being played out in the halls..
But should we give a damn? Are you drawn to the old chestnut that Scotland will not be free until the last minister is beaten to death with the last copy of the Sunday Post? Would the end of the Kirk be a release for Scotland, a chance for her to be reborn to meet new challenges unencumbered by superstition and the colonialist and monogamistic principles of our ancestors?
Let me speak, perhaps a little late in the day, in support of the Mother Kirk, an organisation that, if nothing else, does much to feed the hungry, cloth the naked and release the imprisoned from bondage and should surely be both celebrated and emulated for such.
I am a sometime amateur journalist and recently I was reporting on the twenty per cent rise in shop lifting. When the manager of a store I was hanging around in on this task saw me preventing a youngster steal a steak he told me it was against company policy to intervene on such a crime in case the criminal was armed. When I retorted that surely as a citizen I had a civic obligation to prevent wrong-doing he looked mystified. Who can blame him. If there is no Kirk to provide a moral framework, it's all just about short term pragmatism.
Thinking about it later I pondered whether in a future Kirk there should be room for the Godless as well as the evangelical, the non practising agnostic – if there can ever be such a thing – as well as the passionate believer who is convinced that some greater power is listening when they say their prayers.
Should the person who solely wishes to live in a community of mutual respect and respect for law not also be allowed to join Kirk worship without feeling uncomfortable and even celebrate with those who follow St Paul's explanation that faith is merely believing what is hoped for.
Please forgive this allowing the Cold Blast column to wander into amateur, uninformed theology. It's genetic, and if there is a heaven I don't want to have to endure an eternity of dog's abuse from my ancestors.
And I feel an absurd obligation to try and save the Church of Scotland. If only to preserve the garden party.
