Today was the first full day of business for the General Assembly of the United Free Church of Scotland.  The Assembly convened yesterday evening and will conclude tomorrow evening with worship. They are meeting in the Scottish city of Perth.  Here is some information if you are interested in the meeting and what they are discussing:

The Moderator of this Assembly is Elder George H. McRobb from Aberdeen.  The official press release tells us that he is only the ninth elder to serve as Moderator of the General Assembly in the 82 year history of the church.  He has extensive experience and has given significant service to the UFC serving as Session Clerk, and Moderator of the former Presbytery of Aberdeen and the North and the current Presbytery of the North. He has also served as an Interim Moderator of church sessions and has been involved in supporting foreign missions.  Best wishes to him in his moderatorial year.

The docket can be found on the last page of the report of the Administration and Finance Committee. 

All the reports to the Assembly are available from the reports page.

In reading through the reports I find a lot of the business that is generally being done by any Presbyterian Assembly.  But one topic that many Presbyterian branches have been working through is what ordained ministry looks like in this modern age.  There are a couple of interesting items in the Ministry Committee report that reflect on this.

One of these is regarding Readers, a position like a Commissioned Lay Pastor, licensed elder or lay preacher.  The report says this about the new process and focus of the position:

It is the committee’s view that presbyteries should take up a new responsibility for the training and deployment of Readers. Candidates will be interviewed by presbytery, and hopefully space will be made available for Reader candidates to engage in a short church placement within the denomination. The reason for this is that the committee intends to make it possible for Readers to be involved in local situations of team ministry.

Overall and final responsibility for the preparation and approval of Readers will remain with the committee. The training will have academic and practical aspects…

…

After appointment it is hoped by the committee that Readers might be available to serve in a team ministry context, serving in a cluster of UF congregations. This will be overseen by presbyteries, and would be a new departure for the church. The committee has made recent efforts to meet with presbytery representatives, who obviously have a much clearer view of ministry needs on the ground. In the past Readers have been contacted informally by individual congregations about preaching and leading of worship. There is no reason why this should not continue, and the committee is very grateful to Readers for this excellent ministry.

However our vision now is that Readers can and should be deployed in more creative ways, allowing them to exercise a more focused ministry role within the United Free Church of Scotland.

The second topic the report touches on is the Sacraments.  This is the result of a referral last year after the 2010 Assembly adopted a report from the Panel on Doctrine on conduct of the Sacraments.  (I have looked and not found this report on-line so if anyone can point me to it or provide a copy I would be interested in reading it.)  In these days of reduced roles for Ministers of Word and Sacrament and increasing alternate forms of worship leadership, the report adopted by the last Assembly makes the theological case for the Sacraments to be administered by Ministers called out and ordained to that ministry.  The question referred to the Ministry Committee was under what exceptional circumstances could another person conduct the sacraments.  The bring the following response for the approval of the Assembly:

“Except in exceptional circumstances, it is only those who have been set apart and ordained to the ministry of Word and Sacrament who are authorised to conduct the Sacraments. Where there is difficulty in providing sufficiently those so set apart and ordained, a Presbytery may also nominate an elder appointed to serve as an interim-moderator of the congregation to preside at the Lord‟s Supper. Before being so authorised these elders must satisfactorily complete a course of instruction provided by the Ministry Committee. Such authorisation must be granted annually and the names of such elders intimated to the Ministry Committee which shall include the names in the report of the Committee to the General Assembly. Any elder who ceases to be a bona-fide elder within his own congregation, or whose appointment to serve is cancelled or not renewed by the Presbytery, shall not be permitted to preside.”

It is a with the changing nature of the church, tighter budgets and declining membership that each branch is examining what ordained ministry means, how to be creative in providing that ministry, and in what ways the ministry can be broadened to include more people in the ministry.

So best wishes and prayers for the final day of the UFC General Assembly.

Background info:  You might of guessed that the UFC is one of the smaller Presbyterian branches.  Referring to our handy guide to Scottish Presbyterian Churches we can see that the UFC was formed back in 1900 with the merger of the two major branches outside the National church, the Free Church of Scotland and the United Presbyterian Church of Scotland.  (The Free Church that is active today descends from the minority that did not join in the merger.)  Then in 1929 the United Free Church merged with the national Church of Scotland and the UFC that continues today descends from the minority that did not join that merger.

[Editor’s note:  The pattern you see here is typical of Presbyterian mergers in that time period.  Other examples are the present Cumberland Presbyterian Church which is the part that did not join with the PCUSA in 1906 and the Presbyterian Church in Canada which are those who did not join the United Church of Canada in 1925.  But more on this sometime in the future.]

According to the report of the Administration and Finance Committee, there are three presbyteries with 62 congregations, one less than at the end of 2009 — a 1.6% decline. There are 51 ministers, of which half (25) are not retired.  Membership at the end of 2010 was 3394, down 5.8% from 2009.

One more distinctive of the denomination is that the ordained ministry is open to both men and women.