General Assembly week in Edinburgh began today, Saturday, 18 May, with all the ritual and pageantry of the opening of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. As it starts, here are some details and places to find the basic information, and as the GA progresses, I hope to comment a bit more.

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

• The proceedings will be live streaming, and you can connect to the stream from the livestream page.
• Most of the Documents about 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. The Assembly Paper contains late-breaking changes, the summary business agenda, and worship material. Other formats are available on the Publications page.
• Individual reports and additional documents are 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.

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. There is also a photo gallery from the Assembly.

On Twitter, the starting point is the Kirk’s main feed at @churchscotland and the official hashtag #ga2024. 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, and congratulations on this, your 30th GA)

Concerning the business before the Assembly, there is a nice summary of the major reports on the Life and Work website.

The Assembly convened today with opening worship and the usual ritual of formally electing the new moderator and hearing the King’s Letter. After a break, the morning session continued with committee reports including the Legal Questions Committee bringing a draft of the Presbytery Review Act with the intent to do a proof of concept in the coming year in two presbyteries before bringing a final version of the act to the 2025 Assembly. There was a bit of drama in the afternoon in the report of the Assembly Business Committee regarding the cost of the Assembly. It was suggested by a commissioner that it could be done better at half the cost and a motion was presented to that effect going forward. The motion was defeated but the convener of the committee discussed various costs particularly in view of the number of churches being closed and sold. At one point the comment was made about the Assembly that it was “an annual act of self-sabotage.” More on this in the Daily Report from Life and Work.

The Assembly is about Worship tomorrow on the Lord’s Day and will return to the Assembly Hall on Monday morning. There are also several Fringe events including many lunches. In the evening programs, there is a hymnary supplement launch and the Guild’s Big Sing worship event Tuesday evening.

Some of the consequential reports include the Assembly Trustees report on Monday which will address the financial situation the Kirk is in. It notes right at the top that “the Church’s financial situation demands further urgent attention supported by a focus on the agreed priorities.” Later it says:

It is apparent that the Church can no longer afford its current model of ministry support and the Assembly Trustees therefore have a duty to take urgent steps to move to a new, affordable, model which recognises the hard reality that only 29% of charges are paying for the cost of the ministry they receive.

I look forward to this discussion and considering hard realities and decisions.

The Theological Forum in their report will present a new report on Transgender Identities in the Church of Scotland.

So here we go. It will be an interesting Assembly. We will track what happens during the week and add what we can in the midst of the three Scottish assemblies this week. We watch and pray for the commissioners and all involved in the meeting.