Category Archives: Church of Scotland

Counter motion

Now the counter motion (substitute motion in some circles) by the Mission and Discipleship Council is presented. The maker of the motion says that the Legal Questions motion puts the “legal cart before the theological horse.”

The Legal Questions Committee report can be found at: (Link broken)
http://www.churchofscotland.org.uk/generalassembly/gareports.htm#legalq

The counter motion is in the daily papers: (Link broken)
http://www.churchofscotland.org.uk/generalassembly/downloads/ga06tuesnotmots.pdf

The counter motion, and an addendum, have been presented and debate has begun.

Short comments

A few quick observations on the CofS GA over the last 24 hours:

They have started podcasting and having available the Rev. Douglas Aitken’s updates on the GA. The podcast is linked from the GA Live page, the direct link to the updates is: (link no longer active)
http://stream1.churchofscotland.org.uk/generalassembly/ga06dailynewsupdates.php
(The start page is available on the Internet Archive but the media is not archived)

For the celebration of the Lord’s Supper this morning among the silver plates and chalices used were ones from churches which had been dissolved. A nice tribute to the “host of witnesses” in my opinion.

In the afternoon debate on properties there were a couple of recurring issues. One was the balance of individual churches keeping older manses which were more expensive to keep up but would last longer (typically traditional stone homes) versus newer structures which were cheaper in the short run but would need replacement sooner. The other was a push to have church buildings use “green” energy including wind, solar, and ground pumped heat.

Blessings
Steve

Current debate in GA

The Church of Scotland (CofS) GA just wrapped up a debate on the structure of the national church and the role that presbyteries play. The petition before the GA was to give presbyteries more authority in the reorganized structure of the CofS and weaken the power, especially regarding monetary issues, of the central structure. The discussion touched on all the usual issues about connectionalism and what it means to be presbyterian.

An amended version of the petition was rejected in a close vote. (How close I am trying to find out since my web streaming crashed right then.)