Two Down and Six to Play

tentative proposals for a new united church in Scotland are outlined in a 30,000-word report just published (Multilateral Church Conversation in Scotland, Saint Andrew Press). Suggestions are made for new enlarged parishes and the pooling of resources in buildings and manpower, as well as for small groups to be formed within these parishes. Ministers and congregations would be in the care of “superintendents” or bishops, since it is felt that some personal pastoral oversight is desirable. The superintendent would deal with an enlarged parish rather than a diocese, and he would be regarded as a pastor of the people, the congregations, and the ministerial team.

The proposals have been drawn up by representatives of six denominations: the Church of Scotland, the United Free Church, the Episcopal Church, the Methodist Synod, the Congregational Union, and the Churches of Christ. Round-table talks have been held over five years. Two years ago the ruling bodies of all six agreed to a list of principles and authorized the hammering out of a plan of union.

On the question of relations with the State, the report notes the United Free Church’s opposition to establishment and says, “A united church would need to stand at a measured distance from State institutions, free to exercise a prophetic criticism of them while falling heir to the responsibilities in both mission and service accruing from establishment.”

If there is to be any possibility of recovering the “lost unity” of the churches in Scotland, declares the report, it must be on the basis of agreement on the fundamental Christian beliefs. The panels have found that such consensus already exists, and the report includes a brief statement of these fundamental convictions.

So much for summary, presented very largely from official sources lest my own selectivity be faulted. This, it is stressed, is an interim report only and goes now for discussion and comment to the ruling bodies of the six. It should be added that non-participants in the conversations were three smaller Scots Presbyterian bodies (including the historic Free Kirk) and the Baptist Union.

It is in the nature of inter-church reports to emphasize points held in common, while insisting that there have been frank exchanges on strongly held differences. Just as predictable, however, is the discovery that such differences are seldom mentioned in anything but the vaguest terms.

For example, I have before me now a Scottish Episcopal Church booklet entitled “The Apostolic Succession,” written by one of its bishops who is currently the executive officer of the worldwide Anglican Communion. Its claims on this single issue would serve to focus inter-church conversations largely on the terms on which the 97 per cent non-episcopal church membership (i.e., membership of the five other churches in the talks) would accept bishops. I have always been appalled in ecumenical discussions that Anglicans should so easily assume they are negotiating from a position of strength when their stance is rejected both by Rome and by Reformed churches. It makes me think of the exasperated parliamentarian who said he did not mind Gladstone’s acting as if he had the ace of trumps up his sleeve, but he did object to his assumption that God had put it there.

But confronted by the present report I would not make the above a major issue. Whatever the merits of the case, to the overwhelming majority of Scots the bishop is an alien concept in which a sense of history is for once utterly unhelpful. Not untypical is the reported protest by one university teacher against the 1956 “Bishops’ Report”: “I may be an atheist, but I’m a Presbyterian atheist.”

What made me groan continually as I read this report was its failure (though we are told it tried) to speak to the intellectual capacity of the people for whose benefit presumably the words were put together. There is something pathetic about high-level talkers of several denominations ascending amid jovial good fellowship into the profounder reaches of church order, polity, and doctrine, fondly imagining that the average church member is following them.

Even if we overlook the tendency to linger lovingly over questions that the man in the pew is not asking, there is a problem of sheer communication when the compilers’ niceties of speech are as incomprehensible as the mumbled Latin Mass, which even traditionalist Rome is superseding. I took this report to my octogenarian farmer friend, a man of generous heart and shining witness. His radio has told him of new church talks; he wants to know what is being said. I open the report: “The Gospel has to be indigenized … Jesus is aut deus aut non bonus … extra ecclesiam nulla salus … The Church will readily consume all the presbyteral man-hours it can get, and is unlikely to spawn unattached practitioners of the Presbyterate” (which would have the makings of humor in any other context). My farmer friend, who left school at twelve, listened with that patient courtesy still found in TV-less households, then told me I’d had a long ride and that I’d better sample some of those scones before a couple of big-eating Methodists arrived for the weekly home Bible study.

I persevered, this time with a Presbyterian landlady who saw me through some tricky student years. I chose an easy sentence: “The witness of the Church as a whole is weakened by the fact of disunity.” She understands. She agrees. But her mind is not on the vision splendid. It turns out that she is thinking of the ancient parish church where the two ministers are not on speaking terms and communicate through a church officer. Happily neither of the ministers is a signatory to the present report. And unhappily (Women’s Lib please recall this remark when the battle is won) the Church of Scotland’s fifteen representatives included not a single woman to obtrude that unity-but-begin-in-me note into the conversations.

I mention the above for no mischievous purpose, and not simply to highlight an extreme example of disunity within my own church. The Church of Scotland (which comprises some 85 per cent of the church membership represented in the six bodies) has in the last decade conducted individual talks with four of the others. All of them began with high hopes; all have quietly foundered. Are we then to evolve a new Parkinson’s Law for ecumenical man—that unity prospects are enhanced as dissident elements increase? That after four discordant duets a sextet of the same fumbling trumpeters will blend in harmony? Moreover, will they choose the right music to play?

It is a pity that ecumenical discussion in Scotland was not put into cold storage for a generation after the bishops-in-presbytery scheme was rejected, for we still have something to learn from an Arab proverb: “Keep your tents separate and bring your hearts together.”

J. D. DOUGLAS

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