I Will Build My Church

Stephen reviewed the following book for the February 2023 Banner of Truth magazine:

I Will Build My Church: Selected Writings on Church Polity, Baptism, and the Sabbath
Thomas Witherow; Jonathan Gibson (ed.)
Westminster Seminary Press, 2021
313 pp., hbk, $29.99
ISBN 9781733627269

Why would anyone read a little-known, nineteenth-century Irish Presbyterian writing about secondary issues? Sinclair Ferguson’s answer in the foreword is that this trilogy really sets out to answer the questions of how God wants us to regulate our church, family and weekly lives. As for being unknown, a new 70-page biographical sketch by the editor fills out the life story of a man trained under Thomas Chalmers, who pastored a small-town church of almost 2,000 people, before becoming the first Church History and Pastoral Theology Professor at Magee College, Derry.

Witherow’s Apostolic Church seeks to bring Prelacy, Independency and Presbyterianism before the bar of Scripture. While he claims to have entered the project with misgivings as to which would triumph, he unsurprisingly finds Presbyterianism to meet all the Apostolic criteria (Independency meeting half, and Prelacy none). His only real departure from historic Presbyterianism is a radical two-office view which sees no place for a distinct ordination for ministers.

The second work, Scriptural Baptism, robustly sets out the paedobaptist position. Witherow writes as a man who had seen the 1859 Revival lead to defections from the Presbyterian Church, and takes no prisoners.
His work on the Sabbath (a published address) is the weakest of the three. Witherow’s Sabbatarian conclusions are biblical, but some of his argumentation is problematic, not least the claim that our Lord breached ‘the inspired interpretation…of the Mosaic law’.

The three works have been lightly edited for readability. The decision to characterise them all as ‘Presbyterian distinctives’ seems odd when only one of them is. While a number of footnotes say that the editor was unable to locate sources for quotations or books, all are easily found using Google.

Overall, this is a very valuable volume and many will feel that Witherow’s arguments have never been answered.

Adoption Conference

On Saturday 4th March we held a conference entitled ‘Adoption and the Church’, with the intention of helping us be better prepared as a church to welcome adopted children into our midst.

We began the day with a talk from Rev. Peter Loughridge (North Edinburgh RPCS) about the glorious doctrine of Adoption in Bible - how as Christians we are not simply justified (declared righteous), but welcomed into God’s family.

Peter’s wife Emma then spoke about their experience of raising two adopted daughters, as well as practical ways a church can welcome adopted children.

After a buffet lunch, Barbara Ogston (wife of a local Church of Scotland minister who works for Adoption UK), spoke about their experience of adoption, as well as the particular challenges that children with Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder can have.

The conference finished with a question panel where those in attendance had the opportunity to ask questions of the three speakers.

We hope to have videos from the talks at available shortly on our YouTube page.

We are grateful to Trinity, Hamish and Campbell for coming along and putting on some activities for the children during the talks.

"As Long as You Have Your Health"

Last month, 400 people attended a meeting in the Millennium Centre about the future of the town’s GP practices. Another 150 were turned away. Understandably, people are very concerned about their health, and where they can turn when they are unwell.  

One related phrase we hear frequently is ‘As long as you have your health’. Financial disasters can be recovered from. Burnt down houses can be rebuilt. But if you get sick, your future is no longer in your hands. Sometimes your greatest hopes in life will be disappointed. But ‘as long as you have your health’.

It sounds like a good way of keeping things in perspective – but is it actually true?

As he often does, Jesus challenges the inherited cliches through which we view the world. Four friends once brought their paralysed friend to him. Given the huge crowd that had gathered to hear him, they weren’t able to get into the house where Jesus was. So they thought outside the box, went up on the flat roof, made a hole in it, and lowered their friend down. Imagine the surprise of those in the house as they started to hear banging and scraping above their heads! As bits of soil and sticks start falling onto the ground, and chinks of light appeared, and then daylight began to stream into the room.

But the biggest surprise is what Jesus says when the man on the stretcher reaches the floor. Think of the sense of anticipation as the crowd wait to see the paralysed man healed. But Jesus looks at him and says: ‘Your sins are forgiven’. It wasn’t what anybody was expecting! It’s as if Jesus was reading from the wrong script. Here is a man who can't move his limbs – who is crying out to be healed – and Jesus starts talking about sins and forgiveness. Can’t Jesus see that the man has more pressing issues needing dealt with?!

But actually, Jesus is dealing with his most pressing issue. As Jesus looks at this man he sees that he has two defining problems – and he deals with the most important one first. If what he chose to address first seems surprising to us, it only highlights that our priorities aren't always the same as his.

After all, if Jesus had only healed the man of his paralysis, what good would that have been to him in another fifty of sixty years? If, as the Bible teaches, we were made to live forever. And if, to quote the tagline of Russel Crowe’s film Gladiator, ‘what we do in life echoes in eternity’. Then surely our most pressing need in this life is to have our broken relationship with God restored. And to have the sins which separate us from him dealt with.

Many would say there is no such thing as sin. And yet when it comes time to die, many are overwhelmed by guilt. New York paramedic Matthew O’Reilly said in a TED talk that almost all the critically injured people he comes across respond in three ways when he is honest with them and tells them they are dying. He says: ‘The first pattern always kind of shocked me. Regardless of religious belief or cultural background, there is a need for forgiveness. Whether they call it sin, or they simply say they have a regret, their guilt is universal’.

Whether we ‘have our health’ or not is irrelevant in the face of this universal guilt. But amazingly, in Jesus Christ we have someone who claims to be able to deal with our guilt once and for all.

His claim to be able to forgive sins provoked scepticism then, as it does now. After all it’s one thing to claim to be able to forgive sins – but how do you prove it? And so Jesus followed up his claim by physically healing the paralysed man ‘that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins’. He did the miracle that they could see, so they would know that he had done the miracle they couldn’t see.

I believe that the miracles Jesus and the Apostles did were unique and not ones we are called to try and replicate today. However, I have seen God’s miraculous power at work in the lives of those who haven’t had their health – for example, who have been wheelchair bound for decades – but have had an infectious faith and joy in Jesus despite their circumstances. ‘As long as you have your health’? I’m grateful for my health, but I’d take a faith like theirs over it any day.

Published in the Stranraer & Wigtownshire Free Press, 23rd February 2023

Covenanters' attack on Stranraer castle

We recently did some open air outreach outside Stranraer Castle - also known as the Castle of St John. In the late 1600s, the Castle served as a prison for Covenanters as well as a base for Covenanting persecutor John Graham of Claverhouse - ‘Bloody Claverhouse’.

Around the summer of 1685, some Covenanters attacked the castle in order to rescue prisoners.

The historian Robert Wodrow records that:

On 15 October, 1685, the privy council appointed that ‘Hugh M’Kinasters, who has made discoveries of several persons rebels in Galloway, and who were accessory to the attack of the castle of Stranraer, whereof some are taken, to be further examined upon oath by the earl of Balcarras and [John Graham of] Claverhouse.’ (Wodrow, History, IV, 223.)

Dumfries & Galloway Council have an information leaflet about the Castle that you can view here. You can watch some recent drone footage of the Castle below: