The inexorable decline in membership of the Church of Scotland has gone on for a generation, yet every May the Kirk has managed to draw strength from its General Assembly. Year after year representatives of parishes across the land debate reports, pass deliverances, wrangle over counter-motions and addenda, and yet seem always to emerge with optimism. Sometimes they turn in on themselves as a house divided, as they were this year over the Lottery; within their communications division; and over the way in which the Bible should be interpreted. That is to be expected in a national church embracing so many diverse elements, and indeed could be seen as a strength rather than a weakness.
This year the Assembly was leaner and younger. It had fewer than 1000 members, embraced for the first time youth delegates, and contained fewer retired ministers. The Assembly Hall itself is to be refurbished at the taxpayer's expense and will house the first sessions of the Scottish Parliament, something for which the General Assembly has consistently called, and for which it became a surrogate in some people's eyes. This year, above all, we might have expected the Kirk trumpet to give out a triumphant sound. Moses had reached the promised land and could hand over to Joshua. Yet there was for all that a sense of weariness and wariness under the surface.
It was not simply internal divisions or cumulative decline which caused it, but the dawning realisation that Joshua may decide to seek a different kind of church-state settlement in the new Scotland. The crisp refusal of the Government, announced on the opening day, to make no exemption for the Kirk's spiritual independence in the Human Rights Act, got matters started on a sour note, and sparked an anxious reminder to the Government that the Kirk would see the ending of its independence as a betrayal. It would indeed be paradoxical if the Parliament so fervently desired by the Kirk loosened church-state relationships and precipitated a period of uneasy alliances in place of the support which the Church once enjoyed.
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