Still crazy after all these years

I notice that the bookstore at WTS (http://www.wtsbooks.com/) is puffing a new book by the late WIlliam Still, flagging it up with a godly puff from Sinclair Ferguson.  Well, Willie made an impact on me too.

I once went to hear him preach while I was studying in the Granite City.  When he asked where I was from, I told him from the Free Church down the road, at which point he told me I was a complete disgrace, that I had no right to be absent from my own church on a Sunday, and that it was incredibly discouraging for my own minister to get uyp in to the pulpit and not see members of his congregation there because they were off sampling other preachers.  He rounded it off by telling me he hoped never to see me in his church again on a Sunday morning.

Point of fact, I suspect my absence might well have been very encouraging to my minister, who quite possibly shared the same ambitions as Mr Still with regard to ever seeing me again.  But his message was well-taken: casual absence from our own churches on Sundays is unacceptable and discouraging to the minister who faithfully tends his patch of the kingdom.

Nevertheless, I retain very strong misgivings re. the evangelical movement which Still spearheaded in the C of S.  It cultivated congregations but let the wider Church of Scotland go to the dogs.  It put on good conferences where the faithful could gather together, and mistook such ventures for wider spiritual vitality and success.  It let evangelical candidates get hung out to dry at presbytery meetings on issues such as homosexuality.  And it bequeathed to the current generation of evangelical C of S leaders an unenviable legacy of church courts and policy controlled by the George Street bureaucrats and the theologically disastrous. 

In ecclesiastical circles, geographical and chronological distance so often seems to grant diplomatic immunity.