Kali and I had been on a wild journey of prayer, discernment and discovery which led us to do some things that parents of four young children don't normally consider. Yet there we were, shivering on the windblown shores of Fife, standing on the Ancient ruins of St. Andrew’s Cathedral, seriously considering uprooting our family and moving to Scotland. We knew it was crazy, but the more we prayed the more obvious it was to us that we needed to go.
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| The ruins of St. Andrews Cathedral |
Even before we were married, Kali and I sensed that our pursuit of God’s Kingdom would take us on a journey down some lesser traveled roads. Even after a particularly crazy season that saw the completion of two Master’s degrees, a cross country move, one failed pastorate, 3 new business ventures and the births of four children in four years, we had emerged to the realization that though we were thankful to have survived, we were still being called to a path that would take us far away.
But why Scotland?
To be completely honest, we wrestled with this question a lot more than the question of whether we should go anywhere at all. Scotland just didn't sound like a place missionaries go.
I suspect that when most people think about missionaries, they think about people who go to developing or impoverished countries and minister to people who are culturally very different than those of us in the western world. When we first began exploring the call to international ministry, we thought along much the same lines. One summer while we were still in seminary, Kali and I took an opportunity to visit a Bible College in Kenya where we both could teach and train future leaders, and more recently I have been traveling to Zambia to teach theology courses at an International Bible College. I sometimes wondered if a more permanent posting would be in our future some day.
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| From previous ministry in Africa |
When I was teaching in Zambia, there was a town nearby called Livingstone, named after the most famous Scottish missionary, David Livingstone. Scotland was so involved in sending missionaries to places like China and Africa that in 1910 the city of Edinburgh hosted a large and historically significant missions conference with the lofty goal of bringing about “the evangelization of the world in this generation.” So, when we first entertained the thought of serving in Scotland, I confess I found myself resisting the idea, based in no small part on the thinking that Scotland had no need for Christian workers church planters. In my mind, they were a place that sent missionaries rather than received them.
Of course, much has changed in past hundred years—both in Africa and in Europe. But as is often the case, sometimes the last thing to change are our perceptions. Today, Subsaharan Africa represents one the largest and most vibrant movements of evangelism and church growth measured since the 4th century. Though there is still a lot of work to be done in Africa, the Gospel has taken root. As one Ethiopian born seminary professor of mine used to joke “today, sending church planters to Africa is like trying to import oil to Kuwait.”
Meanwhile, faith in Scotland and other parts of Europe are in severe decline as institutional forms of Christianity have struggled with the forces of modernity. According to one study, over the past 30 years, church attendance in Scotland has fallen by over 50 percent to the point that only 7.2 percent of Scots attend church regularly. Nearly half of them are over the age of 65. Put another way, if you sampled 100 random Scots under the age of 65, you would likely find 4 regular church attenders. I’ll be the first to admit that church attendance is not a great measure of the potency of one’s faith, but no matter how you slice it, that is a sad number for a country with a spiritual heritage as rich as Scotland’s. Most missionary societies consider a nation were fewer than 2% of the population are Christian to be an unreached people group. Based on demographics and trends, Scotland projects to be only a generation away form qualifying as an unreached people group.
There is a statue of Livingstone outside of Glasgow Cathedral in Scotland’s largest City. Unfortunately, like many beautiful churches throughout Europe, the church receives more attention as a tourist destination than as a living community of faith. One of the running jokes Kali and shared while walking the streets of Edinburgh, Glasgow and St. Andrews was pointing out all the churches that aren't churches—beautiful buildings that had once housed the people of God as they communed and worshipped that have now been decommissioned, shuttered, sold or repurposed into cafes, libraries, bars, community centers or used as a meeting space for other religious groups.
As Kali and I walked around the ruins of St. Andrew’s, I was reminded of one of my favorite stories about St. Francis of Assisi who, shortly after his conversion, was passing by an abandoned and dilapidated church building. Francis felt compelled to go inside to pray, and while doing so heard the divine voice speak from the alter, “Francis, go and repair my house which, as you can see, is falling into ruin.”
A man of simple faith, Francis obeyed the literal command and immediately began laboring alone to shore up its walls to prevent its collapse. Eventually the Holy Spirit revealed to him that the church in question was not the broken down structure, but “that Church which Christ purchased with his own blood.” Francis turned his attention to the people of God, the Church universal, and set upon it with the same sort of faithfulness, humility and simplicity as he had that crumbling chapel.
Our prayer for the Church in Scotland, and our hope the ministry we will do with them is not to preserve a dying institution or to save churches from becoming mosques or night clubs, but rather, just as Francis did in his time, to help the faithful people in Scotland find a way to become a living church that exists as the hands and feet of Jesus, loving and beautifying a world that he is still in the process of redeeming.
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