Dear Editor,
I greatly appreciated David Robertson’s forthright feature on the Church of Scotland’s decline It (September en). particularly grieves me too because of the debt my family owe to Scottish missionaries who came out to South Africa to help shepherd my Dutch-Afrikaner ancestors, scattered to the interior by overbearing British rule in Cape Town.
When my orphaned great-grandfather, also Charles, was left alone with his siblings after the untimely death of their father journeying through the veldt, the family were saved from extinction by passing Christians. Charles was brought up in the expansive Dutch Reformed Church parsonage of the Revd Andrew Murray Snr in Graaff Reinet.
I agree with David’s three suggestions contributing to the Kirk’s decline – departure from her Biblical foundations, lack of realism, and evangelical weakness – but I would add a fourth, which relates to the first. For she has severed her Hebraic roots to the point where Israel and the Jewish people are no longer seen as on God’s agenda. This is a serious heresy for which many of us need to repent.
God told Abraham: ‘I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse…’ (Gen.12:3) Our relationship with Israel is therefore a matter of life or death.
Robert Murray McCheyne, who I believe once led the Dundee church with which David was linked, discovered the truth of this Scripture way back in the 1830s. He and fellow Scot Andrew Bonar encouraged evangelisation of the Jews and both led missions to Palestine and Jewish communities in Europe. So when a revival broke out in his local parish of Kilsyth, McCheyne took this as a sign of God’s promise to Abraham. Like many post-Puritan evangelicals, they believed that the salvation of the Jews leads to the restoration of the church.
Yours sincerely,
Charles Gardner By email
