Without People, the Vision Perishes: Why the Church of Scotland Needs to Change its Recruitment Policy

This week, the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland has been making headlines with to its decision to allow ministers to ‘opt-in’ to solemnise same-sex marriages. Away from the big headlines, however, have been a range of other, more low-key proposals concerning mission. 

Amongst these are:

• A new multi-million pound fund to finance church plants and pioneer ministries
• New education and training routes for members, elders and ministers
• Changes to internal taxation (now known as ‘Giving to Grow’) to allow churches to hold onto more of their local funds to help develop resource churches and local mission

It remains to be seen how soon these changes will ‘go live’, but they are a step in the right direction after decades of complacency and denial. My denomination is, after all, the one which in the early 2010s that could still claim that Scotland was a Christian country, and it is good to see that the penny has finally dropped.

Much of the debate at this year’s Assembly concerns the structures by which the Church might streamline its decision-making, and devolve more power and finance to Presbyteries and local congregations. In addition, my colleague Doug Gay has recently written an essay that examines the funding mechanisms by which the Church of Scotland supports its congregations. What I want to do here, however, is raise a different, and for me more fundamental issue: people. I believe that the Church of Scotland lacks the personnel to launch the church plants and fresh expressions it needs to, and that no recruitment campaign – however well-devised or ‘flashy’ – will turn the tide, because the well is dry.

Evidence

So why do I think this?  The first reason comes from personal experience. For three years, I was a Pioneer Minister in Edinburgh, and ran Edinburgh University Campus Ministry (EUCAM). We launched a number of initiatives – e.g. community meals, community gardening, mid-week worship, debates with Humanists – and had some successes. Yet my experience of recruiting team members was that there were not only very few young Church of Scotland people in Edinburgh who could be recruited, but few people of any age who desired to be part of a pioneering community. Most churchgoers had no interest, and struggled to see the need for new forms of Church. While I was grateful for a few good Church of Scotland people who got involved, in the end, I had to rely on substantial numbers of people from outwith the Church of Scotland to get my little community going. Other denominations not only had far more young people – rather important for a student-aged community! – but also more mature adults who wanted to help. They ‘got it’ in a way that most Church of Scotland folk did not.

Now you might think that I was just a very bad Pioneer, or that I was unlucky. Yet my primary trouble was not recruiting folk in general, but recruiting Church of Scotland folk. Moreover, this was Edinburgh, Scotland’s second-largest city, with – at that time – close to a hundred Church of Scotland congregations. There were church plants taking place all around our central-Edinburgh location, full of young adults eager to evangelise and share the good news, yet few if any were affiliated with the Church of Scotland. It wasn’t a Liam thing or a Scottish thing, it was a Church of Scotland thing.

Which brings me to the second reason why I do not believe a better recruitment campaign will work: it has been done before. The Tomorrow’s Calling campaign was an expensive and well-produced campaign that was well-promoted and supported by all sorts of prominent Church of Scotland folk. Special services were put on, roadshows held, and various other means to try and drum up vocations. Yet while it may have prompted some to discern whether they had a calling, it did not lead to an influx of greater numbers. If something as resource-intensive as this did not bear much fruit, there is no reason to think anything else will.

That is particularly the case when we turn to examine the personnel pool or ‘well’ that we are seeking to draw from. If we are to believe the latest figures produced for this year’s General Assembly, not much more than 60,000 people regularly attend Church of Scotland churches out of a general population of 5.5 million. To say this is bad for a national Church would be something of an understatement. Moreover, the overwhelming majority of this 60,000 will be older people, who after a lifetime of work do not always have the energy or desire to commit to the rigours of church-planting or fresh expressions of Church. 

This is not even just an age issue, however, but a cultural issue. In Mission in Contemporary Scotland, and in my article “The Scottish Ideal” (available here: https://ojs.st-andrews.ac.uk/index.php/TIS/article/view/1921) I examine the cultural and theological issues that led to the Church of Scotland infantilising members and elders in the desire to preserve a particular kind of clericalism. The Kirk has centuries of unhelpful baggage to cast away, and if initiatives such as Church Without Walls, our membership of Fresh Expressions UK, and other projects have not awakened this ‘sleeping giant’ then I am not sure what else will.

The Church of Scotland is failing to recruit missional leaders because it has an ever-decreasing pool from which to recruit, and without growth in overall attendance – something that is unlikely – it will not be able to staff the church plants and fresh expressions needed to reach the people of Scotland and reverse numerical decline.

Proposals

What, then, is the Church of Scotland to do? It is a denomination – even now – with substantial funds and buildings, along with access to institutions and areas of public life that are sometimes closed to other denominations. Yet without the right people, these resources will increasingly go to waste.

I propose, therefore, that the Church of Scotland should throw open its doors to those from outwith the denomination, and seek to recruit leaders for church plants and pioneering projects from different churches.

There would be a need for certain recruitment criteria, of course. Candidates would have to believe the fundamentals of the faith (i.e. those presented in the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds), be comfortable with infant baptism and female-led ministries, as well as some other items. In addition, if prospective leaders wish to celebrate the Sacraments, and are not already ordained, they would have to enter into something like a two or three year part-time training programme before ordination, yet could ‘get on with the job’ before that. These criteria would not be too difficult for many potential candidates to accept. In addition, however, the infrastructure needs to be got right. Rather than depending on in-house knowledge, the central Church needs to bring together the best church-planting leaders from across Britain to advise it of what to do. This means listening and learning from other denominations, and accepting what they say in humility. 

Without recruiting leaders from outwith the denomination, learning how other denominations train and deploy their missional leaders, and making its pioneer and church planting projects ecumenical, I do not see any other way that the Church of Scotland will have the personnel necessary. Some of the reasons for this vocations crisis are explored further in Mission in Contemporary Scotland, yet whatever the causes, the conclusion is clear: expand the recruitment pool, work ecumenically, or the denomination will die, not for want of cash but of people.