Kirk News
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After a long and difficult Vacancy (is there any other kind these days?) these parishes have finally been able to adopt a "Sole Nominee" as candidate for our future minister. We knew Mr. Malcolm Lyon as a student in years past, and we are delighted to renew that acquaintance now that he looks likely to be our next pastor. The procedures of the Church of Scotland bear similarity with the Mills of God - both grind exceeding slow! It will be months yet before this paragraph can be finally updated, but at least we can hope that the end of our quest is in sight. Postscript... In Yester church on 26th August Malcolm Lyon preached to the joint congregations of all the parishes and was voted in as our next pastor, by a margin of 131 votes to 2. With luck his Ordination and Induction will take place in Saltoun Church on the 27th of September. Second Postscript... Yes, on 27th September in Saltoun church Malcolm was Ordained and Inducted and is now established as our parish minister. It was quite an evening! Saltoun church can seat 160 people. We printed 200 copies of the Order of Service, and ran out of them. And still the people kept coming! There is something inspiring about a very full church, and the full-throated singing of hymns from such a congregation resounded from the rafters. I think it was quite probably the biggest and most enthusiastic congregation that this present Saltoun church building has ever seen, in its 200 years of existence.
[After a suitable interval to allow intermittent site visitors to keep up with events, it will be possible to remove these "Vacancy" references.]
We had all better get used to the abbreviation “CH4” - standing for “The Church Hymnary, Fourth Edition”. It is here to stay. When CH3 was published in the early 1970s it was expected to have a life of about twenty years. In fact it has lasted for well over thirty years, largely due to the great difficulties with copyright law in producing a successor volume. (It’s not clear to your editor why words written hundreds of years ago can still be held as someone’s copyright, but it is a fact.) Anyway, CH4 was scheduled to hit the streets during 2005, and did indeed do so, although some versions took a very long time to appear. Older readers may recall that CH3 cost 40p for the ‘words only’ edition (the red books used in many of our churches); and 90p for green copies with the melody music provided; and a whole £1.40 for the organists’ version with full music text. Sadly, thirty five years later the basic version costs about £16, with musicians’ versions and large print versions costing a good deal more. All one can say about this is that the price rise is not very much greater than for books in general over these decades, and that a copy of CH4 will probably “last us all out”. Bolton and Saltoun churches have a tradition of supplying hymn books to all worshippers, but this is unusual - most churches offer hymn books only to visitors, with members bringing their own.
The future lies with CH4, and we would do ourselves no favours by burying our heads in the sand and ignoring it. Our churches have been able to purchase eighty copies, thanks to some generous donations, but members might still consider buying their own. Remember, it will be a Once-in-a-lifetime purchase. It also makes interesting reading.
"The Homecoming" and Bolton's Bicentenary.
Gilbert was Factor to the local estates, and de facto Clerk of Works in the construction of Bolton church. He lived, with many of his family, in close proximity. His mother and other siblings were resident at Grant's Braes, just down the road, In recent years the International Fellowship of Burns Clubs has funded much restoration of Burns features in these landscapes, and in Bolton churchyard itself has completely refurbished the burial plot of Agnes Brown, Burns' mother, and many of her family. Iron railings (removed in mistaken patriotic fervour at the beginning of World War 2) have been re-created, and the memorial upgraded and "Jean Armour" roses planted in the plot. Bolton church has always been a minor waypoint on the Scottish Burns trail, and now will be more than ever worth visiting. Here is a picture of the refurbished memorial plot, immediately after completion. The roses, sadly, will not appear until next summer.
 This column has no Party Politics, so we were pleased when the Chancellor, Gordon Brown, announced a couple of years ago [with Fanfares!] that VAT would be reduced on all church maintenance and repairs. Then more recently he announced [ with louder Fanfares!] that all VAT would be removed from church maintenance and repairs. Three Cheers for Gordon, the Son of the Manse!! Then we looked at the small print….. Over the period in question we have renewed a church boiler, replaced a radiator, upgraded our lightning conductor system, and done one or two other significant fabric repairs and improvements. Should it surprise us that every one of these works has been specifically excluded from the Chancellor’s largesse? But that is indeed the case. We will not benefit by a penny from his proclaimed generosity. We grit our editorial teeth and refrain from comment. Lightning Strikes? I'm sorry that this page seems mostly concerned with Saltoun church. (Maybe Bolton should be grateful that it continues serenely on!) Anyway, as a sort of by-product of the electrical works in Saltoun, our contractor observed that the two lightning conductors on the 99ft Saltoun spire don’t actually connect to a good “earth”. It seems that Saltoun church stands on a few feet of dry soil over a big block of insulating limestone, and the earth connection of the lightning conductor is a bit of a joke! We did point out that there have been quite a few thunderstorms since 1805 when the spire was built, and that it is still standing, with neither the church nor the congregation yet zapped by thunderbolts. All in all, we do not believe that the fear of being struck by lightning is an adequate excuse for not attending church on Sundays. (Maybe, in fact, the opposite is true!) Still, on reflection, we have undertaken a lightning conductor upgrade. With the assistance of £1000 grant from Viridor Credits (via Forward Scotland) and £100 from the Community Council, we have met the £2500 cost of having the whole of Saltoun church properly protected for all time to come. That has got to be a good thing. Now that our friends from Lothian Presbytery no longer visit churches every five years, the above title is out of date. However, we are not sure what to put in its place. Possibly something along the lines of “Parish Development and Mission” or something similar. Anyway, the report from the team who visited and assessed us in the summer of last year is finally to hand. As a congregation we are: * Commended for the warmth and friendliness of our office-bearers,* Commended for the way we use both Bolton and Saltoun churches for worship, * Commended for setting up a Prayer Group within the congregation, * Commended for the positive attitude of the congregation towards all ages and the wider community. So there you are! We must be doing something right. Speaking of warmth and friendliness and positive attitudes, we have been delighted at the success of the five coffee mornings held in Saltoun Session Rooms over 2007 to reduce the financial loss caused by the closure of the Tithe Byre. These have proved successful beyond our best hopes and have, to everyone’s surprise, raised more money over the year for the church than the Tithe Byre and Tearoom ever did. These coffee mornings appear to be enormously popular and are continuing in the same manner in 2008. We are very grateful indeed to Mrs Gillies, Mrs.Kerr and Mrs.Sandilands for masterminding all this, and to everyone who has donated produce, prizes, and has turned up to support and enjoy it all. Most people must have heard the term "Church Without Walls" and wondered what on earth it is all about. Well, don't look for the answer here, because your editor is still a good deal less than certain himself. However, there are some things it is NOT about. For a start (let's get the silly ideas out of the way first) it is not about returning to Covenanting times, worshipping on the hillsides, or any physical sense of "without walls". Nor, so far as we can see, is it about a total breakdown of the parish system - at least, not in country areas where parishes still mean something - which would lead to us all singing hymns in the aisles of Tesco on a Sunday morning instead of being in our church. (There may be a case for that, possibly made by BBC's "Songs of Praise", but it's not one that will be made in these pages. Not by this editor, anyway!) If it means opening our services, and our worship and our minds to different influences - welcoming input from different strands of the Christian faith, well then, we have nothing to fear - we've been doing that for years, to our great benefit and joy. If it means closing down redundant churches, well, again we should have nothing to fear, because that problem is centred in the towns and cities (though there is always the risk that if Edinburgh or Glasgow sneezes, the rural parishes will catch a cold - in other words, that urban solutions will be forced on country areas. We'll have to face that problem if it arises. Arises again, some might say). "Church without Walls" does seem to open the door to much more co-operation between parishes (our parishes included) at all sorts of levels, and there is no doubt that a future shortage of parish ministers will force big changes on the Church. However we (the Editorial We) see no great need for us to fear these things. If we go out and embrace them, they can certainly be made to work for us, and for our Christian experience. God works in many ways, only some of them mysterious! Mind you, as a closing caveat, we offer the thought "If there are no walls, what is holding the roof up?" Sadly, after thirty years of operation, and round about the same time as the moving spirit and originator of the Byre died, (that was Mrs. Nan Louden, who passed away aged ninety one, in the spring of 2003) it was finally decided to wrap up the whole enterprise. For some years it had been an increasingly burdensome load on a decreasing group of suppliers and helpers. In the end it was decided that the game was simply not worth the candle. The world has moved on, and there are neither the people with free time to supply the Tithe Byre, nor are there the people who used to come out "for a run in the country" and visit us. Also, of course, bureaucratic idiocies from Brussels, ignored by everyone else in the European Union but enthusiastically enforced by Whitehall, Holyrood, and the local council, all tended to drive nails into the Tithe Byre's coffin. Not to be defeated, we now run four or five Coffee Mornings each year, with sales tables and raffles and all the usual good home baking and things. With the support of the village and our other friends, it looks as if this will go a good way to making up the loss to the church's funding caused by the closure of the Tithe Byre and Tearoom in its former format. In 2007 this venture raised about £2000.
For very many years we have sought to convince Presbytery that Bolton church is not a redundant building, eating into our resources, and kept going only out of nostalgia and sentiment, but is instead a vital and indispensable part of our witness and outreach. Also (curiously enough) it brings us in more money in collections and in donations than Saltoun does, and frequently provides bigger congregations. Our sin seems to be that we are different from most other parishes in the Presbytery, by worshipping alternately in our two widespread country churches. Thus far, Presbytery has always conceded the case. (But Heaven knows, at times it has been a "sair fecht"!) We mention this because Presbytery has set up a new standing body, the Deployment of Resources Committee, which is already expressing reservations about Bolton (from the usual standpoint of total ignorance and Political Correctness, of course). Probably we, and Bolton church, are safe so long as the church building doesn't need any large sum of money spent on it, and - this is important - so long as the congregation really supports it by filling the pews at every service. To an extent Bolton's future is in our own hands........ But in our next Vacancy - Who knows?! Tailpiece: (1).........
Ten Reasons Why I Never Wash.
Tailpiece (2)
A Philosopher and a Theologian were arguing about religion. The Theologian accused the Philosopher of being like a blind man in a darkened room looking for a black cat that wasn't there. "That's as may be" replied the Philosopher "But a Theologian would have found it".
Tailpiece (3)
Our Church Website with its full list of burials in Bolton and Saltoun churchyards is constantly being accessed by ancestor-hunters and people trying to climb their family tree. So indeed are all the old Church Records everywhere, the records of Baptisms, Banns, Funerals and so on. Life, however, is not always made easy for the researcher, as evidenced in these real-life examples taken from the Church archives at Register House in Edinburgh. And who said genealogy was boring!
Tailpiece (4)
Teacher was trying out Comparative Religion on her young primary class. "Each of you bring something to school that represents your religion" she told them.
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