Tomorrow will be a new year. More than that it will be a whole new decade, unless you’re one of those pedants who insists that the millennium didn’t begin at the beginning of 2000 (yes, I know). Next Sunday I will preach a sermon of hope for the new year as, I imagine, priests and vicars and ministers of the Christian faith will be doing in churches all over this country and across the world. I will be preaching to a congregation of, perhaps, thirty people. If one teenage girl doesn’t turn up they will all be older than me and I am no longer a spring chicken - feel free to disagree with that. Please.

A process that has been going on for as long as I have been a Reader in the Church of Scotland is now working itself out. Let’s be honest with ourselves - the Church is dying. It is filled with people who come to it for the security that comes with doing what they have been doing all their lives and who want to attend services like the ones they have known all their lives. They are audiences to shows they have always known - like watching, again, those scenes from Laurel and Hardy films. “Hard-boiled eggs and nuts”.

The Church is dying. Let me offer you another symptom of its impending demise. Over the last ten years I have been Interim Moderator to five charges. When I started my biggest problem was finding people to conduct funerals - I can conduct pretty much every Sunday service but, as I work full-time as a teacher, finding people on weekdays was hard. Finding people to conduct the sacraments was a doddle - there were plenty of ordained Ministers with whom I could exchange pulpits. Now there aren’t. Increasingly I find that Ministers are tied down by  other obligations and are fewer in number. Frankly I am at breaking point and am at the point of suggesting to my Session Clerk that we turn away requests for baptism.

That sounds desperate, doesn’t it? Maybe, though, desperation may point a way forward. A way to resurrection, if you like. I’m going to go back twenty-five years now to a wise old man I once knew called Bob White. He trained me as a Reader and we talked about the problems with the Church of Scotland a lot. He maintained that the Church had two problems - that it had too many buildings and that it was ‘Minister-bound’. The first I will leave until another blog. The second was an interesting observation from an ordained Minister.

Maybe we are ‘Minister-bound’. Here I am, in charge of a congregation, taking pretty much every Sunday service, convening Kirk Session meetings, taking responsibility for what happens with the charges I take on (and the last one has been especially long term and tricky) yet, when it comes to organising the sacraments I am ‘bound’ by the willingness of my ordained  brothers and sisters to exchange pulpits with me. Sacraments cannot happen in my charge unless they allow them to happen. Forgive me if I think that there is something wrong there. 

What is wrong, I think, is this: we rely way too much on Ministers. We place way too heavy a burden on them. How do I know this? Because I’m an Interim Moderator. Pretty much every charge I’ve worked with, when the charge has become vacant, the Kirk Session has been like an uncoiling spring - full of energy they’ve never had a chance to release before and they ready to make decisions about how the Church should go.

Here’s the truth I have learned over the last ten years - there is a huge reservoir of unreleased power in our churches; power that comes ultimately from God. It’s there in the congregations I preach to and the people in the pews. It’s there when congregations who haven’t had a Minister for years find that they still greet each other with a warm welcome. It’s there when they decide that their church building needs a makeover.

It’s there when they realise that they - not their Minister or the building they worship in - are the Church. I’ve been there when they realise that and , do you know what? It’s exciting.

And that’s what Church should be. It should be exciting. Church should be the realisation that we are all children of God; that we are all the disciples and the apostles of Christ. It should be the realisation that each and every one of us is a pastor - that each and every one of us is meant to care for all the members of the flock. It should be the excitement that comes with realising that you and I and everyone else makes a difference in people’s lives and each of us bears witness to the love of God and the promise of eternal life.

That’s where the future of the Church has to be - with ‘ordinary folk’ excited and inspired by what happens in church services in a way that inspires and empowers them to go out into their communities, in a secular world and proclaim themselves Christian. That must be our priority in the years ahead and if you think that involves revisiting our idea of ‘status’ in the Church, then give me a call