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As I think about my lifetime spent in Scotland - because I came to Scotland first as a student,
so I guess 17 or 18 years old and I'll leave you to guess how old I am now - but I've been
here a very long time! And it's as if all the stability, and everything
we thought was Scotland, in the last five years - we've taken all the bits and thrown
them up in the air and who knows where they're going to fall? This is a really interesting,
to people like me, a really interesting challenge and opportunity as we move into the 21st century,
thinking not just, 'What is the nation going to be like? What will Scotland look like politically
and in other ways?' but, 'What does it mean to be a disciple of Jesus in this fast changing
context?' And, as I think about it, a lot of people
are in despair because they look at our churches and they say, 'Well, the churches are declining
really quite fast, faster than in other parts of the developed world. Churches are declining
quite fast, the populations in our churches are increasingly old people, so we should
basically just close the thing down, get ready to shut up shop in maybe 20 years' time or
whatever.' On the other hand, we could say, 'Well, the
people of Scotland are as interested in the search for meaning and purpose and identity
and spirituality as they've ever been - and here is God giving us a fantastic opportunity
to ask, right from base line, what does it mean to be a disciple of Jesus in this time
and in this place?' So actually, secularisation in Scotland's changing culture could give
us the opportunity that this place becomes a laboratory to work out the answers to those
questions. A lot of people who've been in churches for
their lifetime, their major big challenge is this, 'Why have my children and grandchildren
not followed in the footsteps of faith that I faithfully laid out for them in bringing
them up?' And for me, as I look at people and engage with people who say 'this challenge
is too big, we don't know how to change', then in a sense my question - without I hope
being strident and critical - is simply this, 'Do you love your own family enough to want
to hand on to them some kind of serviceable faith community that will address the needs
of your own children in your own family?' And I think if we can create spaces where
it's ok to address that question, talk about what we sometimes think are our failures without
piling guilt on each other; recognising that actually the answer to that question is, 'Well,
the culture's changed, life is no longer what it once was, being a young person today is
nothing like any of us who are older than about 20 or 25. We don't have a clue because
life is so different today.' I think, for many people, that comes as a
renewing kind of message as we say, 'Well, what sort of church - or faith community or
discipleship community - what would make sense to your own family? And that can be liberating
and I think can also focus our minds on thinking about things like times, places, the nature
of worship, what it really means to embed discipleship and faithfulness to the Gospel
in everyday life. If we're looking for a change of mindset in
relation to what the church might be, we are talking about conversion actually; we're talking
about a new reformation. Scotland has been the homeland of the reformed tradition for
500 years and one of the slogans of the reformation was 'reformed, but always reforming,' and
that means there should be movement, there should be change, we should constantly be
expecting God to show His new ways forward and we should also expect to be obedient when
God opens those doorways to us. So, in theory, you might say that the reformed
tradition should find it much, much easier to move forward than others because we're
ticking that box all the time except, well, it's a challenge and seems safer to stick
with what we know, what's tried and tested, what's embedded in our institutions. But,
at a time when politically - as well as in other ways - institutions are coming under
great scrutiny; now is the time to ask those fundamental questions, 'What does it actually
mean to be the Church of Jesus Christ in this time and in this place?' And it might be different
in Scotland than it will be in other places. The big challenge for national denominational
leaders of course in Scotland, as indeed elsewhere in the Western world, is how to move our institutions
in effective change; such that the change is something we're in control of or we're
part of, rather than randomly allowing change to come over us.
Change happens anyway, so people who say to me, 'Well, nothing much has changed here.'
Actually I look around at many of our churches and I think to myself, 'Everything has changed
in the last 20 years.' Twenty years ago, most local churches had significant Sunday schools
because they had significant numbers of children. Today the Sunday school is not quite extinct,
but is heading in that direction. Our institutions are changing -- they once had plenty of money
to do what they wanted to do, nowadays it's a different story. So, for me, the question
of change isn't a question of will we change/can we change? We are actually changing. The big
question is, 'OK, are we going to be the ones who initiate and inaugurate change so that
the change we see isn't forced on us by an essentially secular, un-Christian culture,
but the change is actually in accordance with the values of God's Kingdom?' And that is
the big challenge to us. If I believed there was no hope for the church
in Scotland, or anywhere else, I would really be seriously questioning whether I have wasted
my life in being involved in all this stuff. Whereas actually, the message of the Gospel
is always this, it's always, 'look to the future, dream who you might be, you can be,
who God intends you to be,' and that is one of the big challenges to us. I think at this
point of transition and change and challenge, there's a real danger in constantly looking
to the past, asking questions like, 'Who is to blame for the mess we now find ourselves
in?' raking over the ashes of the past rather than, and this is a Gospel value, looking
to the future. It's an eschatological imperative to use the
jargon that Jesus continually says to people he meets, 'OK, that was then, this is now.
Who do you imagine you could be under God's guidance in the future?' And it's that future
orientation, that for me is absolutely the centre of the Gospel, not just a strategic
way of dealing with change in the church. Who are we becoming, who might we become,
who does God intend us to be? There will always be followers of Jesus; whether their churches
and institutional structures look anything like what we've got today...your guess is
as good as mine!