Church of Scotland General Assembly 2019

It is General Assembly week in Edinburgh. It was a great experience being there last year and visiting all three of the Assemblies going on that week. Once again, my thanks to all of them for their official and unofficial hospitality. This year we are back to normal and tracking them from the other side of the world.

A few hours from now, on Saturday morning 18 May the 2019 General Assembly of the Church of Scotland will convene in Edinburgh – with all the traditional pageantry – for their annual week-long meeting. And it is looking to be an interesting meeting with major implications for the Kirk in the years to come.

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If you are interested in keeping track of the business and activities this year, here are the starting points:

  • There will be live streaming of the proceedings and you can connect to the stream appropriate for your device from the media page.
  • Most of the Documents pertaining to the Assembly are linked from the General Assembly Publications page. This includes the Assembly Reports volumes, known as the Blue Book in several different electronic formats including the traditional PDF as well as MOBI and EPUB formats for your eReaders. For eReaders, the Blue Book is available combined with the Order of Proceedings included. There is also a separate Order of Proceedings. The Daily Papers will contain late-breaking changes and are available on the Assembly Papers page. There is an option at the bottom of the page to subscribe to notifications of new documents being posted.
  • If you only want the action items, there is a Proposed Deliverances Page with a link to a PDF with all the Deliverances together.
  • If you need to refer to the documents about how they do this decently and in order most of those are linked from the Church Law page. This web page also used to have the useful “An Introduction to Practice and Procedure of the Church of Scotland” but it was being revised and seems to have disappeared. While dated, I have a copy of the 2009 Third Edition available from my Resources Site.
  • A detailed Programme page tabbed by day provides a schedule of docketed reports and events for easy look up.
  • And from the Daily Updates page there will be regular daily updates in print, audio and video.
  • There is usually an official photo gallery of the Assembly. Will add that here when it goes live.

What we all want to know of course is how to follow along on social media and there will be no lack of that. You can begin with the Church of Scotland’s official Facebook page as well as the Facebook page for the National Youth Assembly. There is also the Kirk’s Instagram feed and YouTube channel.

On Twitter, the starting point is the Kirk’s main feed at @churchscotland and the official hashtag #ga2019. (And be alert – there is an event called Gamers Assembly that is using the same hashtag so don’t be surprised at the first person shooter video(s)) There is an official account for the Moderator of the General Assembly, @churchmoderator, but during the Assembly, we will have to see how many opportunities there will be to tweet. And while the incoming Moderator, the Rev. Colin Sinclair, does not appear to be on Twitter, you can follow his church – Palmerston Place Church – @ppc_edinburgh. The retiring Moderator, the Rev. Susan Brown, can be followed at her personal account, @VicarofDornoch. Similarly, the Church of Scotland Youth may be tweeting at @cosy_nya, although the account has been inactive. The official account for the NYA Moderator, currently Tamsin Dingwall, is at @NYAModerator, and that is probably a better starting point. The church’s official publication, Life and Work, is also a good source for information on the web, on Facebook and on their Twitter feed @cofslifeandwork. In addition, while it is a personal account, you can follow the editor, Lynne McNeil, at @LifeWorkEditor, who usually does the most comprehensive live tweeting of the Assembly.

I add to this list a semi-official account with a good potential for close live tweeting of the meeting: The curated account Church Scotland Voices with weekly rotating contributors at @churchscovoices says they will have someone covering GA. And worth mentioning the Kirk innovative ministry incubator, Go For It (@GoForItCofS)

In suggesting personal accounts to follow, let me start with three past Moderators of the General Assembly, besides Susan Brown who I mention above. The first is the Very Reverend Lorna Hood who is always an interesting read at @revlornascot and has been very active the past few years with projects related to Srebrenica justice and remembrance and also serves with YouthLink Scotland. The second is the Very Reverend Derek Browning at @DerekBrowning2. Add to the list the Very Reverend Albert Bogle at @italker who has been getting some recent traction with the Sanctuary First ministry (@sanctuaryfirst) and whose charge is now related to online church. Finally, I will include the Very Reverend Angus Morrison (@angusmorrison6) has been an interesting and entertaining read and frequently tweets in Gaelic, but he has not been active for a while.

In suggesting other personal accounts let me begin with the Rev. Peter Nimmo of Inverness who is a member of the Church and Society Council (@ChurchSociety01) and always a good source of information at @peternimmo1. And his choir from St. Stephen’s Church ( @invernesschurch) will be performing at Heart and Soul. Also from the Inverness area will be the Rev. Susan Cord at @sue_cord. Others I regularly follow from the Kirk include Darren Philip (@darphilip), Alistair May (@AlistairMay), Neil Glover (@NeilMGlover) who chairs the church’s Ministry Council, Liz Crumlish (@eacbug), RevShuna (@shunad) and Angus Mathieson (@angusmathieson). As reform and renewal will be a major topic again this year, following Douglas Gay (@DougGay) should be helpful. He has helped drive this discussion with his three-part 2017 Chalmers Lectures, and his book, Reforming the Kirk, released a couple years ago. Life and Work published a piece by him about this year’s Radical Action Plan initiative. More on that in a minute.

And stay tuned – as usual once GA gets rolling I will update the list.

UPDATE: Should have added this sooner, but through the tweets found Scott Paget has a blog called Reading the Blue Book, 2019 Edition, where he breaks down reports from the Blue Book individually with his comments. You can follow him on Twitter at @smpaget.

Once again the Assembly will have its annual Heart and Soul festival on the Sunday afternoon of the Assembly week that will again be happening in Princes Street Gardens near the Assembly Hall. The theme of both the Assembly and the Heart and Soul event this year is “Jesus Said: ‘Follow Me'”. It is reflected on the cover of the Blue Book. There is a Programme of events, including the multiple stages and venues, and the website suggests a broadcast, but I don’t see an active link for that yet.

Concerning the business before the Assembly there is a nice summary of each report on the Life and Work site. In addition, each of the conveners has recorded a short video introducing their report.

The challenge of how to reform the church to remain viable for the future is front and center this year. Last year the Assembly made a bold move when it rejected the Council of Assembly’s proposed ten-year strategic plan in favour of a countermotion calling for “a radical action plan.” The group working on this radical action plan is reporting and as I mentioned above, Doug Gay gives a nice summary of the plan in that Life and Work article. For the full details, check out the Council of Assembly report. It also headlines the Kirk’s GA preview news article.

The proposal makes major changes in the structure and work of the church. The proposal is to cut at the top to provide greater focus and resources for the churches and the communities. For example, one detail is to cut the number of presbyteries from 45 to 12. It would establish a Growth Fund between £20 million to £25 million for church planting and community outreach work. Administrative costs at the top level would be cut, maybe as much as 40%, and the number of councils would be reduced from four to two. In addition, the church’s social care arm, Crossreach, could be given greater autonomy. The debate on the Radical Action Plan is scheduled for first thing Wednesday morning (which means I will have to set an alarm).

So here we go as we kick off a packed week for GA. The other two Assemblies begin Monday evening and I will have more on those Sunday evening or Monday morning.

Stay tuned…

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