This is the last of four articles, based on addresses to the Free Church of Scotland (Continuing) United States Summer Conference, August 2018. Alasdair Macleod, The Free Church of Scotland 1900 – the Kingship of Christ in the Nation, The Master’s Trumpet, Vol. 13, (Fall 2020).
Standing on the pavement, we watched as twenty-two men, purportedly suspended from the ministry of the Free Church of Scotland, left the Assembly Hall. It was the largest mass suspension of ministers in Scotland since 1662: they had been forbidden to preach, and if they accepted the discipline, would have to sit in the pews and watch hostile preachers take over their pulpits. This they would not do. Together, we sang Psalm 46 and proceeded to the Magdalen Chapel for the reconstitution of the Free Church of Scotland. Why were we there? Was it just a battle over one man, or was this the proclamation of Christ’s Kingship?
1. The History
During the twentieth century, the Free Church of Scotland was able to maintain a witness for Christ. It was much smaller than before 1900 and chiefly based in the Highlands, but maintained a college, a magazine, foreign missions in South Africa, India, and Peru, and faithful gospel preaching in churches throughout the country. In a century of secularization, the Free Church declined numerically, yet maintained its witness.
Within one church, there were tensions. Some ministers favoured cooperation with the Church of Scotland, campaign-style evangelism as promoted by Billy Graham, and identification as general evangelicals rather than as distinctively Reformed. While public worship retained unaccompanied psalmody, many camps, youth meetings, and fellowship gatherings adopted guitars and choruses in the years leading up to 2000.
Some in the Free Church looked with enthusiasm on the ministry of Martyn Lloyd-Jones, and on the work of the Banner of Truth Trust in stimulating an interest in Reformed theology and Puritan literature. Others spoke rather of cultural engagement. They preferred informality in worship, with less emphasis on sin and judgment and on such privileges and obligations as Sabbath observance. There was a spectrum, but as late as 1990, it was still one church.1For a full account of the twentieth-century Free Church, cf. John W. Keddie, Preserving a Reformed Heritage: The Free Church of Scotland in the Twentieth Century (Kirkhill, 2017).
2. The Problem
A matter arose in the 1990s that polarized the Church, fatally undermining its unity.2The two key works that have been published on this case are Murdoch Murchison & Iain H. Murray, When Justice Failed in Church and State (London, 2001), and John W. Keddie, A Divided Church: An Account of the Division in the Free Church of Scotland in 2000 (Kirkhill, 2018). It involved allegations of sexual impropriety leveled against one prominent minister in the Church, who served as a professor in the college. He began to position himself as the champion of the “progressive” section in the Free Church, and consequently secured support that would defend him at all costs. In the early 1990s, a number of women complained to the Church that the minister had made improper advances towards them. The matter became an intense controversy within the Free Church. By a majority, in 1995, the General Assembly determined not to pursue investigation of the complaints through the disciplinary processes of the church. Thereafter, five women took their complaints to the police, and the minister in question was charged with several accounts of sexual assault and tried at Edinburgh Sheriff Court, in 1996.
Throughout this public process, the professor was not suspended and continued to lecture, preach, and write. With considerable financial support, he assembled an exceptional legal team led by the dean of the faculty of advocates. He denied any sinful conduct towards the women. His defence was that the women were liars, that the accusations were the result of a conspiracy against him by some who wished to “bring him down.” Ministers were named and accused as conspirators with no opportunity to testify in court. Sadly, the sheriff3Note that, in the Scottish legal system, a “sheriff” is a judge of criminal cases. appeared to accept these allegations and repeated them from the bench.
The result of the case was an acquittal for the professor. He immediately launched a media campaign demanding that his opponents be dismissed from their positions within the Church—clerkships and committee memberships—though not, crucially, actually disciplined, as that would give them an opportunity to defend themselves against his allegations of conspiracy. When three courageous men on the Training of the Ministry Committee demanded in 1997 that further allegations be investigated, they were censured and dismissed from the committee by a majority in the General Assembly.
Meanwhile, the professor became more radical in his theological assertions. He published a volume on the doctrine of Christ that taught that God the Father “suffered” as Christ was on the cross, and that Christ took a “risk” in dying there.4Donald Macleod, The Person of Christ (London, 1998). These were grievous errors. He openly rejected the confessional doctrine of the papal Antichrist and called for hymns and instruments in worship, in contradiction of his ordination vows.
3. The Stand
Was this situation acceptable? Consider that Christ is King in church discipline. It is not optional; the church’s membership constitutes “an epistle of Christ,” “known and read of all men” (2 Cor. 3:2–3). Discipline is a mark of the true church and must be maintained. It will benefit the recipient if rightly applied, but that is not the primary purpose. Rather, it serves the glory of God in general, and the purity of the bride of Christ in particular. Christ as King requires such action (Matt. 18:17); he wrote by Paul to command it in Corinth (1 Cor. 5:5); he wrote by John to demand it in Pergamos (Rev. 2:14).
It was not malice that moved the minority to demand that allegations be formally investigated. Rather, they called for this as they saw what they believed to be direct breaches of the ninth commandment in court, as they heard what they believed to be credible allegations of breaches of the seventh commandment, as they were offended at erroneous, arguably even heretical, statements being made, and as they noted the breaking of ordination vows with regard to purity of worship.
Therefore, these ministers formed a Free Church Defence Association (FCDA). They worked to disseminate information and encourage adherence to the full doctrine of the Confession, to the “old paths” of godly conduct, and to Reformed principles of worship. They continued trying to work constitutionally through the Church courts: one elder brought a petition to the General Assembly; libels against the professor were brought to the Edinburgh Presbytery; yet both cases were thrown out on alleged technicalities by a majority determined to protect their champion.
The situation escalated badly in 1999: the Stornoway congregation split over an invitation to the professor to preach, and Rev. Maurice Roberts was purportedly suspended from the ministry for refusing to withdraw some strong words of condemnation of the actions of the majority at the General Assembly, which resulted in a split in the Inverness Greyfriars congregation. Church courts were in many places divided into two parties; the atmosphere was febrile.
4. The Test
In October 1999, the Commission of Assembly threw down a gauntlet: the FCDA was banned, and to hold office in the FCDA was declared incompatible with office in the Free Church. Here was the test: would the FCDA men obey the majority or Christ? Their stand was for His Kingship, and their answer was clear: thirty-two ministers took up nominal office as vice-chairmen in the FCDA. The result was a mass issuing of libels in terms of the greater excommunication (which places a person outwith [outside] the visible church), in December 1999, on a charge of contumacy. On 20 January 2000, twenty-two ministers, those who had chosen to answer the libel in person, were suspended from the exercise of ministry. They walked out of the building and out of the fellowship of their brethren in the majority.
The dissenting ministers did not secede from the Free Church in January 2000. They left the Commission of Assembly to reconstitute it elsewhere. The Declaration of Reconstitution that they signed declared that the majority had been “treating as contumacious any conscientious inability to give obedience” to assembly findings, contrary to the Westminster Confession (31:4), that they had “breached fundamental principles of equity and natural justice,” contrary to the Confession (19:5), and that they had contravened and subverted the “principles of church discipline set out in the [obligatory] Form of Process.” As these actions were breaches of the Constitution of the Free Church, they were illegitimate, devoid of authority, and not to be regarded.
It is true that, in January 2000, the majority had not changed the wording of the Constitution of the Free Church of Scotland. However, they had broken it by imposing unconstitutional and indeed unscriptural obligations on the Church’s office bearers. Either the FCDA men had to cease to demand the exercise of church discipline, or they must themselves accept unwarranted suspension from their duties. Either course would be disobedient to Christ. It was an extraordinary position in which they were placed. Even in the darkest days of the nineteenth-century Free Church, the Assembly had never interfered with the right of minorities to engage in “continued protest” against decisions they believed to be unconstitutional. The denial of this right was in itself a fundamental breach, and a change in practice of the constitution of the Free Church.
Conclusion
And so, discipline was pronounced upon the twenty-two faithful ministers in the Commission. To preserve the guilty, the innocent were cast out. The minority separated themselves, because the fulfillment of their ministerial vows in fellowship with the majority had been rendered impossible. They left a building, but not the Free Church of Scotland.
So for the Kingship of Christ, the Free Church (Continuing) went forth into the wilderness. The early years after the division were challenging: congregations were small, and many people believed the Church would prove financially unsustainable. But the Lord provided in remarkable ways: he has preserved and kept a witness in Scotland, that Christ is King in Church discipline.
Footnotes
- 1For a full account of the twentieth-century Free Church, cf. John W. Keddie, Preserving a Reformed Heritage: The Free Church of Scotland in the Twentieth Century (Kirkhill, 2017). ↩︎
- 2The two key works that have been published on this case are Murdoch Murchison & Iain H. Murray, When Justice Failed in Church and State (London, 2001), and John W. Keddie, A Divided Church: An Account of the Division in the Free Church of Scotland in 2000 (Kirkhill, 2018). ↩︎
- 3Note that, in the Scottish legal system, a “sheriff” is a judge of criminal cases. ↩︎
- 4Donald Macleod, The Person of Christ (London, 1998). ↩︎
