It is General Assembly week in Edinburgh and the meetings are returning to a more in-person format than in the past couple of years. And Saturday the first of the GA’s kicked off with the usual ritual and pageantry.

Saturday morning 21 May the 2022 General Assembly of the Church of Scotland convened in Edinburgh in a hybrid format with some commissioners joining virtually from around the world.

And in both the early press coverage as well as in the afternoon business it became clear that there is plenty of important business to be discussed in the week ahead. But more on that in a minute.

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 livestream page.
• Most of the Documents pertaining to the Assembly are linked from the General Assembly Publications page. This includes the Assembly Reports and Order of Proceedings volumes, known as the Blue Book, in several different electronic formats including the traditional PDF as well as EPUB format for your readers. There is also a Dyslexia-friendly version. The Reports and Order of Proceedings are available separately on the Publications page in all those formats as well. The Daily Papers will contain late-breaking changes and worship material and the first for Saturday through Thursday is posted. We can expect a second concluding one later in the week.
• Individual reports and some additional documents can be found on the Reports and Additional Documents Page.
• 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. There is also a Guide to the Assembly page that covers some of the basic actions and terminology.
• There is a News Round up for the GA news items on the 2022 General Assembly Page.
• There is an official photo gallery of the Assembly.

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. There is also the Kirk’s Instagram feed and YouTube channel. And the YouTube channel is now the place to watch the proceedings after they have happened and they have the meeting broken up into individual reports.

On Twitter, the starting point is the Kirk’s main feed at @churchscotland and the official hashtag #ga2022. 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. The church’s official publication, Life and Work, is also a good source for information on the website, on Facebook and on their Twitter feed @cofslifeandwork. In addition, there is the individual account of the editor, Lynne McNeil, at @LifeWorkEditor, who does the most comprehensive live-tweeting of the Assembly. (As always – Thank You Lynne)

In suggesting personal accounts to follow, let me start with past Moderators of the General Assembly: To lead off there is a recent Moderator, the Very Reverend Martin Fair (@wmartinfair). Others include 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. Another is the Very Reverend Derek Browning at @DerekBrowning2. I will conclude with three other former Moderators who have Twitter accounts but have not been as active recently: the Very Reverend Susan Brown (@VicarofDornach), the Very Reverend Albert Bogle at @italker and the Very Reverend Angus Morrison (@angusmorrison6).

As for others following along and Tweeting about the Assembly let me start with Paul Middleton (@ProfPMiddleton) who is present and actively tweeting. Others appearing in the Twitter feed include Doug Gay (@douggay), Sue Cord (@sue_cord),and Daren Philip (@darphilip). One interesting contributor is Daniel Scott (@ScottDdscott), the Moderator of the Presbyterian Church in Canada and an Ecumenical Delegate. And a commissioner is tweeting at Live Tweeting the General Assembly of the COS (@church_scotland).

Concerning the business before the Assembly there is a nice summary of each report on the Life and Work website.

With a day and a half of business completed following the formal convening Saturday morning, a number of high profile items have been decided. In the Saturday afternoon session in the Report of the Assembly Trustees some decisions related to the reform of the church and the realignment and funding of presbyteries were debated. Some of that has been put off to the Faith Nurture report tomorrow, Tuesday. In addition, in a motion from the floor the Assembly asked the Trustees to take action regarding ministers in manses who face the issue of fuel poverty for houses owned by the church and not by them. The headline report this morning was the final affirmation of the ability for Kirk ministers and churches to preform same-sex marriages. This action has been developing for several years and since the last GA the necessary changes were approved by 29 of the 41 presbyteries. The Legal Questions committee brought it back to the GA for the final action and the Assembly concurred 274 to 136.

This afternoon the Assembly, as part of the Ecumenical Relations Committee report, the Assembly overwhelmingly approved a Declaration of Friendship between The Church of Scotland and the Catholic Church in Scotland. It has been proposed and tentatively accepted by the Catholic Archbishop to call it the Saint Margaret Declaration. This report was followed by the main report of the Theological Forum who brought to the Assembly a proposal to supplement the Westminster Standards with additional subsidiary standards in a Book of Confessions. While the Scots Confession was mentioned as a possible part of the new confessional collection, the Assembly approved the next step to study what should be included in the book. The Assembly also approved the creation of resources to help the office holders and others in the Kirk understand the confessional nature of the Reformed Faith. The Theological Forum will return with another report related to Creation Care as part of the Faith Impact Report tomorrow.

As has already been mentioned, tomorrow, Tuesday, will be a day with major business for the Kirk. It has been labeled in the schedule as the “Faith Action Plan Day.” This will include more business related to the reorganization of the church, particularly at the presbytery level, as well as the social witness of the church. The Faith Nurture Forum report includes a new Code of Practice for ministers as well as adjustments to recruiting and preparation of individuals for the various forms of ministry. The Supplemental Report and actions from Saturday will deal with adjustments and corrections to the allocations of ministers to presbyteries. The Faith Impact Forum will be addressing business related to Creation Care, including getting the church to Net-Zero carbon emissions by 2030. There is also business related to refugees, including those from Ukraine, and encouraging the the UK Government to work to get COVID vaccines to areas of the world that have not gotten adequate supplies.

Further down the week Wednesday is titled “Witness and Service Day” with reports by the Chaplains, Social Care Council, the Guild, and the Safeguarding Committee among others. The GA concludes on Thursday and as it looks back and looks forward so in addition to the business traditionally transacted as the Assembly concludes, there will be a time of looking at “Life in the New Presbyteries.”

So here we go. It has been an interesting Assembly already and while the next few days may not grab the headlines we have had so far, the business still to come is no less important to the future of the Kirk. We watch and pray for the commissioners and all involved in the meeting.