AGM 2022

The congregation pictured in November 2021

Last week we held our Annual General Meeting for 2022. As well as being a legal requirement for charities, holding an AGM is one way we try to fulfil our obligation to do everything ‘decently and in order’ (1 Cor 14:40), and be transparent about what the money God entrusts to us is used for. The session report gives us an opportunity to look back at what God has done in our midst during the previous year, and you can read it below. Audited financial accounts are available to download from the OSCR website.

Session Report for 2021

2021 was a year that began with soaring Covid death rates in the local area, and the challenge of a second Scottish lockdown, but in God’s grace he preserved us and the year ended with new people at worship and the prospect of a new elder being elected.

Public Worship

While Stranraer as a town had avoided significant Covid outbreaks for most of 2020, that changed as the year drew to a close and 2021 began, with the local newspaper leading with the headline ‘Scotland’s Covid Capital’. Given the situation, session reluctantly took the decision to suspend public worship (with Stephen preaching via livestream instead) for the first two Lord’s Days of the year. However, a second Scottish lockdown was soon announced, which unlike other parts of the UK, included a prohibition on public worship. This ban was ruled unlawful on 24th March, and we resumed public worship on 28th March.

During the period of lockdown, Stephen continued to preach morning and evening each Lord’s Day from the church, with the services livestreamed via Facebook, and also available via telephone for those without access to the internet.

The average attendance for public worship during the year was 28 in the morning and 18 in the evening.

We urge our members to make the Lord’s Day the high point of their week, bookending the day with morning and evening worship, and devoting the day not only to rest and worship, but to fellowship with God’s people (Acts 2:42).

Preaching

Rev. Stephen Steele preached 84 times in Stranraer (20 via livestream). He also preached four times in Stornoway RPCS, twice in Airdrie RPCS, twice in Bready RPCI, twice in Knockbracken RPCI, once in New Life Fellowship, Letterkenny (RPCI) and once in Dervock RPCI.

Rev. Gerald Milligan preached six times. Rev. Stephen McCollum (RPCS) preached four times. Rev. Barry Galbraith (RPCI), Rev. Andrew Kerr (RPCI), Mr Ian Gillies (RPCS) and Mr Benjamin Lowery (EPCEW) all preached twice.  

On two Lord’s Days during lockdown we joined North Edinburgh RPCS via Zoom, with our interim elder, Rev. Peter Loughridge, preaching.

Stephen preached on the following books and topics: ‘Behold your God’, Genesis 25-35, Colossians, Nehemiah, Luke 24 and Eldership, as well as a few topical sermons and a couple on the doctrine of the church.

Stephen also spoke at a Scottish Reformation Society meeting on former Stranraer minister William Symington (1795-1862), with over 100 households tuning in via Zoom.

Sacraments

·      Communion – The Lord’s Supper was celebrated on 16th May and 14th November, with 18 people taking part on both occasions.

·      Baptism – Isaiah Samuel Struthers Steele was baptised on Saturday 28th August by Rev. David McCullough (Woodstock RPCI).

In October, Session announced the decision to hold the Lord’s Supper four times per year from 2022.

Session

Session met four times (all via Zoom). We are grateful to Rev. Peter Loughridge (North Edinburgh RPCS) for his continued work as an interim elder.

On 20th November we had a congregational lunch at Henry’s Bay House to mark 40 years since Rev. Gerald Milligan’s induction as minister in Stranraer (something we had been unable to do in 2020 due to Covid restrictions).

In May, Session made the decision to pray and work towards an elder election before the end of the year. Stephen preached 7 sermons on eldership between October and December, and in mid-December Session announced their intention to nominate Dr James Fraser at an election to be held, God willing, on 18th January 2022. 

Membership

It is with much sadness that we record the unexpected death of Mrs Betty McGowan, one of our long-time members, on 21st January. Due to Covid restrictions, her funeral was limited to close family members, but livestreamed to a wider audience. We continue to pray for God’s work in the lives of her family circle.

Bible Studies, Prayer Meetings and other fellowship opportunities

As soon as restrictions allowed, we resumed our weekly Bible Study to discuss the passage that was preached on the previous Lord’s Day morning.

We resumed tea and coffee after the evening service in May, and our monthly church lunches from August.

A men’s breakfast was held in November, and it is hoped that going forward we will be able to hold one every couple of months.  

A series of five 30-minute prayer meetings were held via Zoom from November through December. This followed on from a sermon Stephen preached in the summer on ‘The Priority & Power of Praying Together’.

Outreach

A two-night mission was held on 16th and 17th September with the theme ‘Is there more to life than staying safe?’. We had one non-Christian visitor each night. We used the leaflet advertising these services to publicise the sermons on the following Lord’s Day under the title ‘A tale of two sons’.  

Leaflets advertising these four special services were distributed by a week-long GO Team. The team also did some open-air psalm singing in the town centre, ran a drop in (offering free tea/coffee and a chat) in the church hall on two of the afternoons, organised a One Day Bible Club and cleaned every seat at Stair Park, as well as visiting Covenanter sites at Anwoth and Wigtown.

We were delighted that one of the team members, Miss Charis Wilson (Drimbolg RPCI), was able to stay on until December. Although the bulk of her time was taken up with an Open University course, having Charis with us enabled us to keep running the drop-in as a weekly event, immediately after our Wednesday morning Bible studies.

Children & Youth

We take the nurture and training of our covenant children very seriously – and see it as a great privilege. We exhort families to hold family worship daily, to bring their children to church morning and evening, and to involve them in the body life of the church as much as possible.

We were delighted to be able to begin two Sabbath School classes in the autumn, with two teachers and four pupils. We are grateful to Miss Charis Wilson and Miss Amy Bingham for caring for our covenant children in this way. We are also thankful to Rev. Gerald Milligan for taking up the teaching of Charis’s class after her departure.

Worksheets to help the children engage with the sermon were provided. While these are not tied to the particular sermon being preached (as they were in the past), specific worksheets on each attribute of God were provided during our series on ‘Behold your God’. Sweets were offered as a prize for completed worksheets, as well as the opportunity to have pictures of the worksheets shared on our facebook page.

A One Day Bible Club was organised by the GO Team specifically for our own covenant children. Six children attended and all were given prizes for taking part.

During Charis’s time with us she did a one-on-one Bible study with a young woman associated with the congregation, based around the book Lies Young Women Believe.

Financial Support

We continue to receive significant monthly financial support from a number of congregations and individuals in the Reformed Presbyterian Church of Ireland. We are grateful that this has meant we have not needed to call on our own Presbytery here in Scotland for financial support. We are also thankful that although the past year saw a decrease in outside financial support, giving from within the congregation increased.

We are thankful for God’s provision and remind our members of the Biblical requirement to return back to God at least a tenth of what he gives us.

Website

The church website continues to be updated with weekly sermons and news articles (including Stephen’s monthly ‘Pause for Thought’ page in the Stranraer & Wigtownshire Free Press). Over the course of the year the website received 7,681 unique visitors.

Conclusion

Despite the challenges that Covid and the related restrictions continued to bring during the year, we are grateful to God for the measure of unity he has given to enable us to move forward together. We enter 2022 confident that the church is at the centre of God’s plans and purposes for the world, since it is ‘through the church that the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known’ (Ephesians 3:10). We look to Jesus that in the year ahead he will continue to glorify himself among us by saving the lost, building up saints, and seeing people added to the church.

Rev. Stephen Steele, Rev. Gerald Milligan, Rev. Peter Loughridge.

Men's breakfast

The first men’s breakfast of the year was held on Saturday 21st May at the manse. It was encouraging to have a couple of men present who were new to the church since the last men’s breakfast in November. We enjoyed both the food and the fellowship! The next one is planned for Saturday 9th July.

How our children come to faith

(A helpful article which illustrates some of the principles below is the interview with Margaret McPhail in the most recent issue of Good News, pp 5-7)

How our children come to faith
Stephen Smallman
P&R, 2006

P&R publishing have a helpful series of booklets entitled ‘Basics of the Reformed faith’. This booklet is particularly helpful for giving a covenantal understanding of how we should expect our children come to faith. It’s written by a grandfather who by God’s grace has seen all four of his children come to faith and marry Christian spouses.

Here are some highlights:

  • “In my pastoral experience, too many Christian parents are so focused on their responsibility for their children’s spiritual lives that their prayers are essentially, “Lord, help me do my job and fulfill my calling to raise my children in the faith.” They don’t stop and listen first to what God has told them about his commitment to our children” (p. 6)

  • “When we pray for our children and work with them in our homes and churches, God’s covenant-making and covenant-keeping should give us confidence that it is his purpose and plan to pass his salvation from generation to generation. In the Presbyterian tradition, we use the expression covenant children to describe their unique standing before God. That is a very helpful and biblical way to think of our children. Having this confidence in God’s faithfulness to his covenant promises is the most important single thing we can do for the salvation of our children. We should pray for them with earnestness, but pray with confidence because God has clearly revealed his will for our children and he keeps his promises” (p. 15)

  • “…Once we understand that regeneration is a hidden work of God, then we can pray and believe that the Spirit would begin that work very early in our children’s lives. It will probably be several years before our children express that faith in a public confession. But that doesn’t mean the Spirit hasn’t been at work from a very early point in their lives. I think many parents are particularly zealous to press their children to make some sort of “decision for Jesus” because they think that such a point marks the beginning of their spiritual lives. Actually, the beginning is the mysterious work that only the Spirit can do.” (p. 17)

  • “Do our children need to be converted? The answer to that is yes, as long as we don’t define conversion in terms of a particular kind of experience. In a companion booklet in this series, I have defined conversion in the words of the Westminster Shorter Catechism as “embracing Jesus Christ, freely offered to us in the gospel.” Based on this definition, our children most certainly need to be converted—but that conversion could be so much a part of their lives that they grow up never knowing a time when they weren’t embracing Jesus Christ freely offered in the gospel.” (pp 20-21).

  • “The matter of how to make sure that our children are “saved” is a source of real anxiety for many conscientious Christian parents. Concerned parents begin to “evangelize” their children as soon as they are able to talk...Then they proudly announce that Mary, at age three or four, has “received Christ as her Lord” because she prayed some variation of the sinner’s prayer or answered the call at a vacation Bible school or Sunday school meeting. Loving teachers or youth leaders ask our children over and over whether they are “really sure” they have accepted Jesus. After a while they aren’t sure—because they don’t know which time they prayed the prayer was the “real” time. One of my children tells about making up a “testimony” to finally satisfy his youth leaders that he was a believer.

    That is all well-intentioned, but I wonder if it is the best approach. How much of this way of dealing with children is a consequence of feeling that their salvation hangs on how effective we are in evangelizing them? I want to encourage you instead to start with an awareness of God’s wonderful promises and to rest in those promises. Of course we have great responsibilities, but that can’t be our starting place.

    If we build on the foundation of God’s promises and Jesus’ statement about our children, then we can view the salvation of our children from the perspective of faith rather than anxiety. And by faith, we then set about the privilege of raising our children “in the training and instruction of the Lord” (Eph. 6:4). The word that better fits this admonition is discipleship rather than evangelism. The earliest disciples were following Jesus even while they were learning what it meant to believe in him. Can’t it be said that our children are part of a family of Jesus’ disciples and that in that sense, they themselves are also disciples? As the family serves the Lord, led by the head of the household, the members of the family learn together what it means to embrace Jesus personally.” (pp 21-22)

  • “The term used in earlier generations to describe this more discipleship-oriented way of passing along the faith was Christian nurture. The question of how children come to faith received a great deal of attention in the Presbyterian church with the rise of revivalism in the nineteenth century. So much attention was given to dramatic conversion stories that the “boring” examples of people growing up and receiving the faith passed along to them by their families were considered invalid. In some ways it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because such ordinary means as family prayers, catechizing children, and faithful church attendance were being set aside to wait for the next great season of revival, many children were leaving the faith of their fathers” (p. 23)

  • In previous generations: “Christian nurture was, then, the appointed, the natural, the normal, and ordinary means by which the children of believers were made truly the children of God. Consequently it was the method which these leaders believed should be principally relied upon and employed for the salvation of their children.” (p. 23)

Why does God allow suffering?

Probably the biggest objection I hear to Christianity is the question ‘How could a loving God allow suffering?’ A few years ago the actor and comedian Stephen Fry made headlines after calling God ‘monstrous’. He said that he would like to ask God: ‘Bone cancer in children – what’s that about?’ Now Fry doesn’t have any children. As far as I know this isn’t something he’s experienced up close. But for many others, the question of suffering is very real. For those who’ve lost children, or received a devastating diagnosis, or suffered abuse or injustice at the hands of others, it’s far from a theoretical question.

If God really is both all-powerful and infinitely loving – as the Bible claims he is – why does he let suffering come into our lives? When he must have the power to stop it?

It’s not an easy question. And yet the problem of suffering and evil isn’t just a question that Christians must face. Because even if you ditch the idea of God altogether, suffering and evil are still a problem – just in a different way. If there’s no God and the universe is just random, then the problem isn’t why suffering and evil happen. The problem is why do they matter? Why should we expect any different?

Richard Dawkins declares that our universe has ‘no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference’. But if there’s no good or evil, why do we instinctively use those categories when we look at the world, and when we assess what happens to us? If it’s all just meaningless, where does our sense of justice and fairness come from? If it’s all just meaningless, why should we care about the suffering of another human being?

If there is no God, then your suffering is a lot less important than you think it is. In fact, it’s completely meaningless. There’s no point looking for answers, because there are none. So whatever our beliefs, the presence of suffering and evil are a problem.

What then of a Christian response to the question? It must begin at Creation. Stephen Fry asked in his interview: ‘Why should I respect a capricious, mean-minded God who creates a world which is so full of injustice and pain?’. Fry assumes that if there is a God, he created a world in which there is misery, injustice and pain.

But did he? The Bible actually tells us that God created a world with no sickness, suffering, misery, injustice or pain. A world which God declared was ‘very good’. Suffering wasn’t part of the original blueprint. Rather it came about as part of God’s punishment on the human race for seeking to live in his world and enjoy his gifts without acknowledging him.

And yet while that explains the presence of suffering in the world in general, what about the suffering we face as individuals? The believer can take comfort in words spoken by Joseph to his brothers, twenty years after they sold him into slavery: ‘You meant it for evil, but God meant it for good’. When Jesus was asked why a man had been born blind, he told his disciples that they were quite mistaken to try and link it directly to some specific sin: ‘It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him’. His words reassure us that God has a purpose in our suffering – just like the skillful surgeon who cuts in order to heal.

Meanwhile suffering in the life of an unbeliever is ultimately intended to bring them to God. As C. S. Lewis famously put it: ‘God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain: it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world’.

One thing we can be sure of is that in our pain, God isn’t asleep or uncaring. Nor is the God of the Bible one who sits up in heaven making detached pronouncements about human suffering. Rather, the God of the Bible is the one who in Jesus Christ has come down. Who lived in this world of suffering, sickness and death. Who wept as he stood at the tomb of his friend Lazarus. And who ultimately would face not just the physical torture of crucifixion – but the wrath of God – in order that our suffering would only be temporary. So that we might escape the eternal suffering we deserve. The question ‘Why does God allow suffering’ must ultimately take us to the cross.

Published in the Stranraer & Wigtownshire Free Press, 5th May 2022

You can hear Stephen give a longer version of this answer in this talk from 2019.