Category: Loving the Church

Been thinking quite a lot about courage recently. People I know, struggling with bereavement, and trying to live through the aftermath of a grief that may be getting easier but it still doesn’t feel like it. In any case, there is no cure for such sorrow, because to no longer feel the loss seems no longer to care. And yes life must go on, but….the courage to grieve, and to go on.

Someone coming to terms with the sheer intransigence of the ageing process on their body, so that the mind and will and personality, still strong and vibrant, are living within encroaching limits. The demoralisation of decreasing capacity is a hard process to resist…the courage to witness our own decline, and somehow go on trusting.

A cabin crew find that one of the biggest commercial planes in commercial service is approaching a runway with no engine power and 120 people on board. They were just doing their job, but that doesn’t diminish the achievement of a team of highly trained people doing what they are supposed to when their own survival is now tied up with their responses in the next few seconds, and even that might not be enough…the courage to do the right thing in an emergency.

And then another kind of courage, what might be called the courage for truth. Isaiah 26.13 says,"O Lord our God, other lords besides thee have ruled over us, but thy name alone we acknowledge." There’s a verse to put tyrants in their place. And Ernst Kasemann, the German NT Lutheran scholar was arrested by the Gestapo in 1940 for preaching it, persistently quoting it, and living by its State-subversive theology. In 1977, nearly forty years later, his daughter aged thirty, was killed in an Argentinian jail, for reasons that never made sense. Kasemann’s social activism, anti-nuclear weapons stance, support for student protests and liberation causes, arose directly our of his study of the NT and the central theme of his theology, the Lordship of Christ crucified. And in all these varied situations, what becomes clear is the moral and intellectual courage of a scholar unafraid to ask questions from the standpoint of truth. It’s no accident that some of his best essays are in New Testament Questions for Today, and Perspectives on Paul.

Apparently he was a difficult man to get on with. Moltmann speaks with a mixture of admiration and exasperation about his colleague, Kasemann. But maybe what the church needs today, in a culture deeply suspicious of certainty, allergic to truth claims, and itself certain that nothing is certain, is a number of Christian leaders for whom the courage of truth takes priority over the prudence of being relevant, and where martyrdom as bearing the cost of bearing witness, becomes a form of evangelism much more authentic than any programmes born out of the marketing strategies of a need manufuatcuring and need providing culture.

A certain Church of England cleric who cut his clerical collar in pieces on prime time Sunday morning TV, comes to mind as one example of courage for truth. I’m now going to think of what courage for truth will mean as an act of witness, in all the varied places and times of my own life this week.

To make sense of this post read the earlier one from October 21 about my visit to the Great Western Auction Rooms, now located in what used to be Whiteinch Baptist Church. As noted there, the church closed in 1975/6, and I said something about what might have brought that about.

In George Yuille’s History of Baptists in Scotland, published in the mid 1920’s, the following account is given of Whiteinch Baptist Church – we are talking only 80 years ago, so the church closed 50 years after the following was written. Read and ponder:

The church was formed in 1906, with a membership of 14. the Pioneer Mission took the Church under its care, and the Rev W J Batters of the Ayrshire Christian Union, was called to the pastorate. mr batters rendered yeoman service to the cause and during his ministry the present iron and wood buildings were erected at a cost of £670. The Sunday services previous to this were held in the Whiteinch Burgh Hall, and the week night services in the Co-operative Hall. The lack of suitable premises, and the burden of hall rents made progress difficult during this period. In August 1908, the Church took possession of the new buildings and the membership considerably increased. In 1910 there were over 100 members. After seven years of faithful work, mr batters resigned, and in 1913 Rev J V W Thynne was settled as Pastor. Mr Thynne did well, but his pastorate was brief and in 1915 he was succeeded by Rev John Campbell, of Burra isle. In 1922 much to the regret of the Whiteinch congregation, Mr Campbell accepted a call to George Street Baptist church, Paisley. After a long vacancy of 19 months, the present minister, Rev J S Andrews, of Londonderry, was called to the pastorate. The present membership is 220, and the building is now quite inadequate to the needs of the church. A new Building Scheme costing £6000 has been launched and the members are working heartily to complete it. The record of the Church from the beginning has been one of hard work in face of many difficulties, and progress has been slow. A brighter day seems now to have dawned. Difficulties have been overcome, new opportunities are presenting themselves. A new spirit pervades the Church, and the future is full of hope.

And within 50 years it was closed. Why churches close is as important a question as how churches begin. How does ‘a future filled with hope’ last only 50 years? This isn’t a question about this one church, but a question whose answers, and there will be a good few of them, need to be discerned, considered and, excuse the grammar, learned from.