General Assembly week in Edinburgh will begin tomorrow, Saturday, 17 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 frequently a photo gallery from the Assembly, and I will update here when I find it live.

On Twitter, the starting point is the Kirk’s main feed at @churchscotland and the official hashtag is #ga2025, although right now it is dominated by a gaming competition. 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)

Concerning the business before the Assembly, there is a nice summary of the major reports on the Life and Work website. Additional General Assembly material is on their General Assembly 2025 page. Also, as GA progresses, there will be daily reports from Life and Work.

The Assembly will convene with opening worship and the usual ritual of formally electing the new moderator and hearing the King’s Letter.

Much of Saturday will involve business from the Legal Questions Committee. While some changes to the Acts of the Assembly are short and relatively minor wording changes, there are two substantial revisions. The first is to the Assembly review of the governance of each Presbytery, and the second relates to church discipline.

The topic weighing on everyone within the Church of Scotland is the decline in membership and the implications for ministry at both the Assembly level, presbytery level, and church level. Significant consolidation has already happened at each level, and the Assembly Trustees will report that the Kirk is still running a significant annual deficit of £5.9m. Additional steps will be discussed. As the report says in its Forward:

In 2024, the General Assembly instructed the Assembly Trustees to reach a balanced budget by 2027. The financial situation since last year’s Assembly has in fact worsened and the Church of Scotland is at a tipping point in terms of its financial viability. This has resulted in the Trustees having to take a number of decisions in recent months which they hoped could be avoided.

Related to the financial issues, the Assembly Business Committee is recommending that the General Assembly become a more streamlined event, with the meeting held for four days from Friday to Monday. They are also looking into options for leasing out the Assembly Hall on a long-term basis that would offload the modernization and upkeep.

On the encouraging side, a newer group, the Faith Action Programme Leadership Team, has been working to revitalize the Church of Scotland. This is where much of the church’s witness and outreach comes from, and they held a conference in February where they launched the Vivid Vision video, envisioning a hopeful future for the Church of Scotland. As this group now coordinates a number of programme areas in the Kirk, much of Tuesday is taken up by their report and supplementary reports in conjunction with other committees and groups.

So here we go. It will be an interesting Assembly. We will track what happens as the week progresses 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.