I just caught part of a report on Reporting Scotland on BBC. The Church of Scotland has just released new figures showing a low for membership.<\/p>\n
The piece was started by showing a trainee minister rearranging chairs in an empty room which was amusingly symbolic. In the short interviews there was mooted explanation behind this although there is a programme on later tonight where it will no doubt be explored further.<\/p>\n
I haven’t posted much on here about religion which no doubt surprises many but I thought it fitting to post a few details about this.<\/p>\n
The first is the figures:
\nIn 1957 membership was 1.32 million
\nToday it is around 464,000.<\/p>\n
This is around 9% of Scotlands population. Although at the last census 42% identified as Church of Scotland there were 27.5% with no religion. Given the truer figure of 9% for Church of Scotland membership that puts Non-religious as the largest religious group in Scotland. A fact I tried in vain to drum home to some a while back in the local press.<\/p>\n
The other interesting factoid around the Church of Scotland is a quotation from their Constitution – the first article<\/a> also enshrined in the Church of Scotland Act 1921<\/a><\/p>\n \nThe Church of Scotland is part of the Holy Catholic<\/strong> or Universal Church; worshipping one God, Almighty, all-wise, and all-loving, in the Trinity of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, the same in substance, equal in power and glory; adoring the Father, infinite in Majesty, of whom are all things; confessing our Lord Jesus Christ, the Eternal Son, made very man for our salvation; glorying in His Cross and Resurrection, and owning obedience to Him as the Head over all things to His Church; trusting in the promised renewal and guidance of the Holy Spirit; proclaiming the forgiveness of sins and acceptance with God through faith in Christ, and the gift of Eternal Life; and labouring for the advancement of the Kingdom of God throughout the world. The Church of Scotland adheres to the Scottish Reformation; receives the Word of God which is contained in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments as its supreme rule of faith and life; and avows the fundamental doctrines of the Catholic faith founded thereupon<\/strong>.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I mention this only as no doubt part of that 33% of people who claim to be Church of Scotland but never attend are those who repeatedly espouse anti-Catholic bigotry their ignorance doubled by their claimed membership a Catholic church, albeit not a Roman Catholic one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I just caught part of a report on Reporting Scotland on BBC. The Church of Scotland has just released new figures showing a low for membership. The piece was started by showing a trainee minister rearranging chairs in an empty room which was amusingly symbolic. In the short interviews there was mooted explanation behind this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[437],"tags":[551,552,274,553,805],"class_list":["post-744","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-religion","tag-catholicism","tag-church-attendance","tag-church-of-scotland","tag-membership","tag-religion"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/agraham.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/744","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/agraham.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/agraham.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/agraham.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/agraham.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=744"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/agraham.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/744\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4385,"href":"http:\/\/agraham.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/744\/revisions\/4385"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/agraham.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=744"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/agraham.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=744"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/agraham.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=744"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}