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The Story of the Congregational Union of Scotland
Scottish Congregationalism in common with the rest of Christendom derives from the early Church - the foot of the cross and Pentecost. Contrary to a popular assumption it is not an import, but as native as tartan. With the rest of the Scottish Church it shares the heritage of Ninian, Columba and the Celtic Church, and that church's later translation to an Episcopal, Roman model.
Scotland's Reformation was as confused, messy and complex as that of any nation. It was born during forty years of struggling regency. Protracted arm-wrestling between Kirk and Crown on the issues of Presbytery-versus-Bishop and
Church-versus-State turned the visionary, Presbyterian Church of the Scottish Reformation by the time of the Civil Wars into an intolerant one. The time was not ripe for a Scottish Congregationalism. Cromwell's New Model Army did attempt to hard-sell Congregationalism to Scotland, during its eight-year occupation, but these efforts barely survived the Restoration.
In the 18th Century voices dissenting from the Kirk could be heard in Scotland. The Glasites, the Old Scots Independents and the Berians, three indigenous forms of Congregationalism, came and went as movements concerned to synthesise the primitive New Testament Church. Their example however was still in currency when a more dynamic movement began.
In 1798 Robert and James Haldane with others founded The Society for Propagating the Gospel at Home. Its purpose was evangelical revival, and it used lay catechists and preachers as well as ordained. Sunday Schools for adults and juveniles were part of the agenda which was ecumenical in vision, driven by mission and more concerned with promoting faith and spirituality than founding a new denomination. Excluded from Presbyterian pulpits they established tabernacle preaching stations, which would become Congregational Churches. Ten years later a schism occurred when the Haldanes became Baptists. Greville Ewing gave leadership to the on-going Congregationalists, and was instrumental in founding the Theological Academy in 1811. The Congregational Union was formed the next year with the twin aims of mission and church aid.
In the middle years of the 19h Century hard-line Calvinism was being questioned by James Morison in the Secession Church and by John Kirk in the Congregational Union, both of whom moved steadily towards Universalist doctrines.
Morison with others who had been expelled from the Secession Church formed the Evangelical Union in 1843, and John Kirk and others from the Congregational Union who had been disassociated soon joined them. It formulated a Doctrinal Declaration to explain its position to other bodies, but treasured freedom of conscience and never required a credal affirmation from its membership. From 1843 until 1896 Scotland had two unions of voluntary, independent churches with similar membership standards and an aversion to creeds. At first they were alienated by theological differences but, as decades of more liberal theology came in, the small print of Calvinism lost much of its importance to both bodies. Negotiations lead the two Unions to a Uniting Assembly on 1st October l 896.
In the weaving trade, a tartan is defined by its thread count. The numbers and arrangement of the threads on the loom determine the blocs of colour in the ground together with the lines, which give it its distinctive character. In the story of Scottish Congregationalism certain colours stand out.
The first is mission. It has been one of our raisons d'etre. Mission drove the Haldanite revival and the theology of Greville Ewing. It motivated both Unions in their engagement with the social issues of the Nineteenth Century. Inspired by the World Missionary Conference of 1910 in Edinburgh, the recently united Union was constant in its support of the London Missionary Society and in its participation in the Council for World Mission. There were also in the Twentieth Century three periods of planned church extension, and at least three periods of soul-searching and reappraisal in which commitment to mission was reaffirmed. In 1993, after the last of these periods, we took on the working practices of a church and built mission into our structures, from local to national.
Ecumenism also runs broadly through our history. The Society for Propagating the Gospel at Home was originally intended to serve the whole Church in Scotland. The founders of our two parent Unions were excluded from their original churches, and the form of church government chosen by each was a principled but pragmatic response to their exclusion. The Union formed in 1896 played its part in the formation of Scottish Churches' Council in the 1920's. It made an Ecumenical Committee part of its structure in the 1940's in a period of ecumenical enthusiasm which saw the founding of the Church of South India and the World Council of Churches. From recognition that the visible disunity of the Church was hampering mission and squandering resources, there came a growing commitment to what became known as the Ecumenical Imperative. Between 1965 and 1988 the Congregational Union of Scotland explored unity with the Church of Scotland, the Churches of Christ, the United Free Church of Scotland and the United Reformed Church in the United Kingdom. Although the proposals from the latter won in our Assembly a 65% vote in favour of Union it fell short of the legal requirement. We reaffirmed our commitment to the Ecumenical journey in 1991 and in 1996, having survived schism, and having set our house in order, we concluded that Christ was leading us to approach again the United Reformed Church.
If mission and ecumenism are the two background colours of the CUS tartan, the pattern is completed by the lines which cross it.
Education is the first. From its beginnings, the Congregational Union was at the heart of the Sunday School movement for teaching adults and children. Both parent Unions were founded with theological training institutions up and running, and the priority of education was reclaimed most recently in the new structures of 1993.
Church Aid - the second line - was a founding aim in the formation of the Congregational Union and, from sharing the financial responsibilities of ministry and mission to mutual empowerment and dealing with outside bodies, interdependence was being constantly rediscovered.
The third is perhaps more of a loose thread than a line. In 1928 the Revd Vera Kenmuir became the first woman ordained to the ministry in the CUS as well as Scotland's first woman minister. In 1951 she became the first of six women called to the presidency of the denomination. Women in the ministry and in leadership have been part of the Union's life since early in the twentieth century. Six presidents in fifty years with never a woman in the chair, however, makes 'the community of women and men' unfinished business at the dawn of a new century.
The achievements of the Congregational Union of Scotland did not come painlessly. The early Scottish Congregationalists had experienced schism before the Union was founded. Controversy, healthy and otherwise, seems to be one of the ways in which we have grown up. As recently as 1993 we haemorrhaged about a third of our member churches in a time of divergent visions, differing agendas, and fear, suspicion and mistrust. Adopting the working practices of a Church, reasserting our commitment to the Ecumenical journey, and achieving the unanimous vote in Assembly that brings us to this point of Union have all been costly, but it has been the price of faithfulness - faithfulness to a vision and an imperative to which there was no honourable alternative.
So the tartan that is the Congregational Union of Scotland is offered today, a little frayed, slightly bloodstained, but guaranteed colourful and hardwearing.
Alan G M Paterson (Revd)
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