This past week I've been staying in the small Moray fishing village of Findochty. Once you come down the hill into the harbour area there are rocks and cliffs on both sides, a marina filled with yachts and some fishing boats, and the church on the hill. There are several places of worship still going here, though most are more or less declining. The usual narrative of church atrophy, younger people moving away, and the older generations for whom church mattered and faith gave life some anchorage, and God was a living reality in life, are slowly, and literally, dying out.
And yet. Walking along the edge of the sea, away from the village, and looking back, there is the church, and it has been there a long time. This particular building at least from 1863. In the vestibule is a horn that was used to call people to worship from 1863 till 1893, when the bell tower was built. Also in the vestibule is a memorial to the remarkable minister of this parish who served for 38 years. The Rev John Wesley McKee clearly won the hearts and the love and respect of the congregation. He was well named and I'm left wondering about that unabashed Methodist brand name shop windowed in a presbyterian church.
Those who are in ministry will have some idea of what it meant in faithfulness, self-expenditure, frustration, investment in a community, and the daily struggle to hold on to his own faith, while fulfilling a calling to support and accompany others on their faith journey.The ministry of the Gospel, the calling of ministry, the life dedicated to Christ, the daily carrying of the cross - whatever phrase we use, we are describing something that invites respect, reflection, and gratitude. The congregation which had this stone erected were placing on permanent record, "This was our minister, our friend, and companion in grace, grief and gratitude."
In the 19th and 20th Century, a fishing town was a place familiar with hardship, risk, danger, and sometimes catastrophe. Along the fishing coasts of Scotland especially until recent years, boats were lost, lives were lost and many a family broken by tragedy at sea. The minister in such a place and at such a time was the primary spiritual resource, and the first recourse for support. What that took out of Rev McKee over 38 years only God knows. But God does know, and his people clearly had a good idea as well.
So walking along the coast line tonight I took a photo of the church in which the good Rev John Wesley McKee served, and I gave thanks for a legacy of that stern piety and strong love that had bound minister and community for so long, through so much, at such cost, and such blessing. It was shining white against a darkened sky. In an age of selfie addiction, it is an act of corrective protest when a camera is used to celebrate selflessness. At a time when the church faces challenges and changes that will rock it to its foundations, more than ever, the image of this wee church is a sign of faith's defiance, built as it is on rock, perched above and beside the power and relentless restlessness of the sea.
T S Eliot wrote presciently of the church surrounded by a sea of secular pressures and forces hostile to the love, peace and hope of the Gospel. "The Church must be forever building, for it is forever decaying within and attacked from without." (The Rock) Yes indeed, and whatever other "missional strategies" are imagined, dreamed up, entrusted as techniques of ecclesial survival, the church will always need ministries of unselfish service, sustained by long haul disciplines, embodied in lives filled with the performative energy of the Holy Spirit, lived towards the magnetic North of the risen Christ. Patience in peacemaking, persistence in hope-building, stubborn in loving and alert to every reason for gratitude in a grace-endowed world - perhaps funding every other "missional strategy", we could start with these.
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