Today’s business of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland had some interesting threads about the geographic nature of the church and what it means to be the Church where you are.  There is also an interesting “personality” thread that I will return to in a moment.

The morning worship began with a nice metric setting of Psalm 24 from the 1929 Scottish Psalter (“Ye gates lift up your heads on high”) and included holy communion.  (The morning video update contains a lengthy section of that Psalm singing. And according to the order of worship the Sanctus in the Great Thanksgiving was sung.)

The balance of the morning and part of the afternoon was spent discussing the Report of the Special Commission on the Third Article Declaratory.  (Due to the time difference I was not able to follow much of the morning session live and so am depending on the video update and to a much lesser extent the archived real time updates.) Since I have previously discussed this report at length I am not going to revisit the written report.  The comments from the convener of the Special Commission, the Very Rev. Dr. Alan D. McDonald, included pointing out that as the Special Commission traveled around and talked with people and congregations they found that “being a territorial church is regarded as a privilege.” As Mr. McDonald is quoted as saying, “The Kirk is not a supermarket, in business only where there is a customer base.”  As the morning update puts it, the Commission came to the point where the question was not whether the Third Article should be retained or deleted but rather, “how can the principles it enshrines be implemented not in 1929, but in the present context?”  In response to a question about how the Kirk, with its already tight resources, can continue to minister everywhere.  The convener is quoted as replying that where there are people but no minister “the people fulfill the remit.”

In the end the deliverance was approved with only minor modifications in wording.

In the afternoon session one of the items following the Special Commission report was the Report of the World Mission Council.  For this discussion I would like to cast a very narrow focus on item 9 in the deliverance:

9. Noting the desire of the congregations of St Andrew’s Nassau and Lucaya Kirk, Freeport to affiliate to the Evangelical Presbyterian Church (USA) as an interim step towards the formation of a Presbyterian Church of Bahamas, agree to their severance from the Church of Scotland, commend them for their Christian mission and service over the past two hundred years and wish them God’s continuing blessing as they take forward their life and witness in the Bahamas.

Let me press rewind for a moment because this item has been hitting the press the last few days.  Consider this headline and lede from heraldscotland:

Congregation quits Kirk in protest over gay ordination

17 May 2010

An entire congregation has quit the Church of Scotland in the Bahamas after its minister resigned over the issue ofthe first gay ordination.

Around 800 members of the Kirk will hear at its annual General Assembly in Edinburgh this week that after the Reverend John MacLeod resigned from St Andrew’s in Nassau, the capital of the islands, his congregation has opted to leave the Church.

It is also expected that the 200-year-old parish will be followed by another in the Bahamas, Lucaya Kirk at Freeport, at a time when the Church of Scotland faces potentially its greatest schism in its 450-year history – over the issue of gay ordination.

The World Mission Council of the Kirk will reveal that the congregation in Nassau voted in favour of leaving the Kirk, almost immediately after approval of the assembly to join the fundamentalist Evangelical Presbyterian Church of America, which takes the position homosexuality is against the Scriptures and is opposed to women being ordained.

It is interesting, having watched the full Assembly discussion on this item, that I did not hear one comment regarding the current controversies in the Church of Scotland.  And they clearly did not do their homework when they call the EPC “fundamentalist” (if they should be using that term at all) since it is, to put it one way, the most liberal of the conservative Presbyterians in the U.S. allowing the ordination of women under “local option.”

Yesterday’s Tribune article tries to set this straight:

Presbyterian Church breakaway ‘not linked to gay issue’

Published On: Thursday, May 20, 2010

REVEREND Scott Kirkland has rejected claims that the ordination of gay ministers in the Church of Scotland drove Presbyterian kirks in the Bahamas to break away.

The minister of Lucaya Presbyterian Church in Freeport announced at the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in Scotland this week that Presbyterian congregations in the Bahamas had voted in favour of leaving the “mother church” after 200 years to align with the Evangelical Presbyterian Church (EPC) in the United States.

A total of 39 church members voted in favour of joining the EPC and three against after Rev John Macleod resigned from St Andrew’s Presbyterian Kirk in Nassau and admitted it was partially over the Church of Scotland’s ordination of its first openly gay minister, Scott Rennie.

So yes, we are dealing with two different churches and two different clergy on only one was represented at the Assembly.  But, the Rev. Kirkland gave a nice speech from the floor of the Assembly about the realignment of the church.  As I said, neither he nor anyone else in the Assembly session, linked the departure of these two parishes to controversies.  The decisions are related to geography, proximity to their new presbytery in Florida, and the EPC’s experience with developing new foreign presbyteries with the vision of one day having established stronger churches in those areas.  He specifically mentioned the work the EPC is doing with St. Andrews Presbytery in Argentina and the five-year cooperative agreement there between the EPC and St. Andrews.  The plan that is being proposed is a similar one to build up the church to do mission in the Bahamas.

I will close with comments from the Very Rev. Andrew McLellan on both these topics.  Regarding the subject of territorial mission, the video update relates his telling two stories from his own experience related to the importance of the Kirk “being there.”  One was from his work with prisons and a particular inmate who did not know he had a pastor until the pastor from his home parish came to visit him.  As Mr. McLellan told the story, the fact that he had a pastor and the pastor had visited him meant a lot to that individual.  The second story was about an employer/employee tribunal and a colleague of Rev. McLellan’s who was asked to be with the employee, but found he was welcomed as well by the employee’s supervisor because he was trusted by both of them.  Those stories were offered as examples of what territorial ministry means.

Regarding the Lucaya Presbyterian Church in Freeport, Rev. McLellan spoke of his father who was at one time the pastor of that church and is buried in the church yard there.  He spoke of his father’s devotion and stubborn loyalty to the Church of Scotland and paraphrasing Rupert Brookes he spoke of how even though the church may realign with the EPC, “There will forever be some part of that foreign field that will for ever be Church of Scotland.”

As I write this over my lunch hour in L.A. the evening session is under way in Edinburgh and the section with the past Moderator’s address is closing with the hymn “As A Fire is meant for burning.”  I leave you with the first verse which ties all this up nicely –