How evangelicals facilitated Scottish church collapse

During the lengthy period of debates about same-sex marriage and sexuality, the Church of Scotland leadership often spoke of the ‘trajectory’ that the Church was on.

By this they meant a trajectory towards a more ‘progressive’ and ‘liberal’ theology and practice. For over 20 years I have been writing about the Church of Scotland’s ‘trajectory’ – a trajectory which I believed would end up with its demise. I had thought it would be a gradual decline resulting in extinction by 2050. I was wrong. As this year’s Assembly demonstrates, the Church of Scotland has now fallen off a cliff edge and is in a state of terminal decline. It is doubtful whether it will exist in any meaningful form by 2030.

Visiting my home country this July/ August, it was depressing seeing the growing number of closed churches and the increasing irrelevance of the Kirk in modern Scotland. It all came home to me when I read the summer magazine of a once strong evangelical congregation in the city of Dundee – a city I ministered in for 27 years. The editor stated it would probably be the last as the church was going to be merged with three others to create a ‘super parish’.