At the beginning of this week I promised readers a bilious and bruising assembly. It has not turned out entirely that way.

The bile has been ducted into recording dissent over lottery passions. The throbbing discontent within the board of communication has been contained by a commission of inquiry. But it has not gone away.

Today it may leak out in the nominations report when the acting communications convener (the Rev David MacLeod) and his sidekick (the Rev Alan Sorensen) come up for endorsement. There are moves afoot to express no confidence in them, and another motion already tabled insists that their tenure continues only on an acting basis. It is the stuff of which an eleventh hour drama might be made.

Less dramatic will be the report of the panel on doctrine on the interpretation of scripture, but in my view it is much more symbolic of the real tensions in today's Kirk. The report, in summary, says it does not matter if people take different messages from the same Bible passage. It prefers the process of pilgrimage to a precise destination.

This clearly is not enough for the Rev Peter White, formerly principal of Glasgow Bible College, who wants the Kirk ''''to accept the view of scripture which sees all of it as the written Word of God''. No fudge. No grey areas. Clarity rules OK? Well, not quite OK if you want to try to hold together the spectrum of types and theologies which so evidently make up the Kirk.

This perennial conflict between liberals and conservative evangelicals also surfaced today in two ways.

First, the anger of the conservatives that the fundamentalist-friendly Highland Theological Institute in Moray was smeared by the Kirk's education committee when it described its courses as too narrow to deserve endorsement as part of a university of the Highlands.

Second, the contention of Larbert minister Rev Cliff Rennie that evangelical ministers were suffering stress because doctrine was being watered down. As the shenanigans in the Free Church have proved in recent years, the way in which these tensions are resolved are critical to the unity and peace of a denomination.