Renewal in the Church of Scotland

David Robertson makes some interesting comments about the exodus of evangelicals from the Church of Scotland. I like his attitude and his basic approach. However, I was disappointed by his failure to mention the Highland Theological College!  In light of the divisions in the COS and the issue of leave or don’t leave, the potential existence of yet “another” Scottish Presbyterian denomination, the expectation that evangelicals could and/or should join the Free Church of Scotland, Robertson notes the following (with a few annotations from me):

1. We should have an alliance of Confessing churches – where congregations which hold to a biblical confession of faith agree to genuinely work and co-operate together.
2. We should establish close working practical links and unions between neighbouring congregations so that we can pool our resources.
3. Each Free church congregation and Presbytery should reach out to the new IPC (or whatever) congregations from the C of S. Do joint outreach, invite them to Presbytery meetings, keep in touch with one another. We should also seek to work with like minded church of Scotland congregations.
4. The FCC should stop their failed experiment and return to the Free Church, and the APC need to realise that the game is up. Neither are going to be the renewed denomination that they were hoping to be. [MB: Do you really, really want the FCC guys back?]
5. At a national level, Cornhill in Glasgow, the Bonar Trust in Edinburgh and Solas in Dundee should seek to provide training in preaching, leadership and persuasive evangelism. The Free Church College should open itself out more to encourage this kind of co-operation. [MB: Why no ref to HTC? It is a university department now!]
6. There must be a renewed commitment to genuine evangelism, social concern and prayer [MB: Yes, indeed].
7. We need an action plan for joint church planting between us all – where at least one new church per year is started. Our concern should be to have a good reformed evangelical congregation within 30 minutes of everyone in Scotland – whatever the denominational label [MB: I’ve been to Scottish villages where they have three presbyterian churches with about 15 people each, occupying buildings only 300m apart, so do we need new churches here, or to unify old ones?].