What is in Kelvin's Head?

Guest Post: Why I am an Episcopalian – Christine McIntosh

18/09/2012

In this Guest Post, Christine McIntosh reflects on why she is an Episcopalian. Chris lives in Dunoon, doon the watter from Glasgow and blogs at www.blethers.blogspot.com

â€œOh, so youâ€™ve said goodbye to reason, then?â€ Maybe I had. At the age of 27 I had just informed my father that I was going to be confirmed in the Cathedral of The Isles – not, I add, because I thought my parents might want to be there, but to explain why I would not be celebrating my 28th birthday on the actual day. Nominally Presbyterian, but not having had any truck with church since the age of 10, I had encountered the beauty, the mystery and the music of the Piskie church on Cumbrae, where I had met the old Dean, George James Cosmo Douglas, while singing Evensong for a week with our quartet. When he died at the age of 84, we sang the Kontakion for the departed over his coffin – and that was it. I was clobbered. Thatâ€™s what it felt like – an explosion of certainty, followed by consternation. Suddenly it was all true, this stuff Iâ€™d been singing and chanting, and I didnâ€™t know what to do next. The only person I could discuss it with was dead. I was lost before Iâ€™d begun. (I ended up being prepared for confirmation by Iain MacKenzie, the Rector of Holy Trinity, Dunoon, and the rest is history – why else would I have moved there from Glasgow?)

Now, all that reflects the emotional state of someone who has just lost a friend for the first time – for friends are different from family. I was at my first funeral, ever. I was singing wonderful music in a state of emptiness, in a numinous place. I reckon God took a chance while the barricades were down. But the manner of my conversion gives the clue to why Iâ€™m a Pisky rather than anything else. In that early experience, back in the late 60s and early 70s, I found the mysterious element that still makes belief possible – the silence that allows the other to take over, the refusal to pin things down and thereby diminish them. That is why, for all the joy of an exuberant Cursillo service or the happiness children can bring to a church, I still need time to be silent, space to avoid distraction.

Music, then, and liturgy with all its poetic possibilities, and room for questioning and unknowing, and open-ness to change – these keep me the Piskie I became in 1973. And as my entire Piskie life has been lived in the Diocese of Argyll and The Isles, Iâ€™ll add one more thing. In Argyll, there is always a sense of life lived on the edge – the edge of Scotland, the edge of Europe, but also the edge of a precarious journey, a ridgewalk through faith with the winds of God blowing round my head. There is no room for complacency in the church I know and love. And that suits me just fine.

Christine McIntosh, pisky, Scottish Episcopal Church, why I am episcopalian

7 responses to “Whither the Kirk?”

Pausing Place

25/08/2010

I missed last night’s programme, but I thought your comments were interesting.

In a sense, perhaps it’s unsurprising if the SEC is inwardly more positive about itself than the CofS. My take is that in the recent past, at least, the SEC started from a lower common denominator, not being the “local” church in the same way as the Kirk, and so it doesn’t have to contend with others saying of it “look how the mighty have fallen” in quite the same way.

As to the health of the Kirk (and the SEC for that matter), I think we need to reflect on our self-perception and to consider carefully the points and places in which a dying church (congregation or denomination) should be allowed to die gracefully, and the ways in which we might see new life emerge from the rubble.

As a young(ish!), relatively new Christian I have seen examples of (both urban and rural) SEC and Kirk congregations where there are few signs of new growth, little to draw in younger (under 50 year olds, to pick a random-ish number) new folk, and much to sustain negative preconceptions of church as boring, irrelevant and so forth.

We as a faith community need to get much better at stepping up to the mark in our creativity and engagement with our society. The sad truth is that most young adults do not know and have not heard about Jesus Christ, and unless we engage with them in ways culturally relevant to them, and which do not presuppose previous knowledge (too often taken for granted) they never will.

It troubles me, but I do think it’s true to say that in the SEC and in the Kirk we have a church sustained by the traditions and cultural reference points taught to a previous generation. Culture has shifted radically, with the result that the same will not be able to be said in 20 years time.

Our challenge is clear. Whether the Kirk and the SEC can step up to the mark to address what it means to live out the Great Commission in the 21st century is less so.

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Cal

25/08/2010

I didn’t really understand who this programme was aimed at, or even what its aim was.

Yes, numbers have fallen, but perhaps the small number of people who remain are there because they actually want to be, not because it’s the done thing on a Sunday morning.

And personally, I rather like the idea of a church “sustained by traditions”. Clearly the church has to be relevant to modern society, but in abandoning the traditions of worship then you lose the centre of why the church exists in the first place.

There was something very Presbyterian about the programme with its “we’re doomed” mentality. I find the SEC generally more positive in outlook.

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John

25/08/2010

The only book the presenter seemed to have used in his research was ‘The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation 1800-2000’ By Callum G Brown – indeed Callum Brown was one of the speakers. The thesis of this well argued sociological study is that “quite suddenly in 1963 something very profound ruptured the character of the nation and its people sending organised Christianity on a downward spiral to the margins of social significanceâ€. That something he identifies as new media, new gender roles and a moral revolution which has dramatically ended peopleâ€™s conception that they lived Christian lives.â€ It could be said to have happened as â€œsex beganâ€ between the end of the Chatterly ban and the Beatles first LP as the poet Philip Larkin so famously put it.”
To balance this statistical decline the programme flagged up some of the “church without walls ” iniatives in a lame sort of way. All in all a most unsatisfactory programme that only told half the story.

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Kenny

25/08/2010

Good crit Kelvin. My reflection at the end of the programme was, “Lord, we visited this stuff over 30 years ago, and have come out of it stronger and better Church in the SEC.” Hopefully, we stopped longing for ‘the good old days’ a long time ago!

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MartinRitchie

26/08/2010

I thinking “Pausing Place” makes a good point about needing to creatively engage with society. From my own experience of working with a CofS congregation, this creative engagement is a weak spot for many.

As a counterpoint to the programme, interesting to note in the latest “Life and Work” a very positive article about a growing CofS congregation in Stornoway – and I mean really growing! So not all doom and gloom, and I’m sure there are many more examples of bright spots, just as there are in the SEC!

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Graham Vahey

28/08/2010

If the C of S disappeared completely we would be at a loss. During the dark and bleak years of Thatcher’s reign she refused to visit Scotland for 5 years. When she did she expressed shock that we had Royal Regalia and ordered it to be removed immediately for safe-keeping to England. Her ‘Sermon on the Mound’ is now historical for its condescension to the Scots. She was none too pleased to be handed two reports on poverty in Scotland by the powerful Church and Nation Committee. Indeed, it was to this Committee that the population turned to for a moral lead during Thatcherism. When James VI (‘Jamie the Saxt’) became James I in England, the population turned to senior Scottish earls for a moral lead. Unfortunately, the Piskie Church does not give a moral lead in Scotland, apart from the work of the Scottish Constitutional Convention in the recent past. The RC Church does pronounce on moral issues. Could it not be conceivable that all the major Churches could unite in a Committee to pronounce for Scotland on moral issues as the Church & Nation Committee once did?

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Aldous N. Gaiters

01/09/2010

Speaking as a Nonjuror myself I am sure the SEC has a right to a moral voice in Scotland. Taking the US daughter church of the SEC as a model you could see where the fissures would appear. There is room for a modern liberal Christian voice, but even I an old Liberal myself, would have to fear that such a voice might appeal to only a select few.

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