Minister travels to Scotland

Rev Ian Brown, who is Minister of Londonderry Free Presbyterian Church as well as a Clerk of the Presbytery, will make the two-day visit to take part in a meeting in the Magdalen Chapel, where the first Presbytery under John Knox was held, before staging a dignified protest at the Grassmarket where centuries ago the Scottish covenanters’ heads were impailed on spikes for heresy.

“I am going as Clerk of the Presbytery because it is a Presbytery organised protest, therefore, as Clerk, I will have a function to play in some of the meetings that we are conducting there,” he said.

Leaving via Larne by boat, the delegates from Northern Ireland will make their forward journey by coach to their ‘sister’ congregation in Rutherglen in Glasgow, where they will meet up with other delegates from the smaller congregations such as Stranraer, Dundee and Gardenstown (Aberdeenshire).

“Those congregations are converging on Glasgow, and we are having it as only Ministers and some elders, and it is a representative delegation of about 60 people or so that are going over. We could have broadened it out to regular members, but we didn’t. We wanted the meeting to be dignified and we are not saying that with more people at it, it would be less dignified, but you can certainly exert more control if you have got a smaller number of people, and we do want our protest to be a dignified protest and it will be that. We have one banner, so it is not going to be a lot of placard waving, and that banner is central to our message,” Rev Brown said.

The ‘message’ they impart will be tied in with the 450th anniversary of the Scottish Reformation, which was, he said, extremely significant in 1560 because it was the first parliament that enacted the end of Roman Catholicism in the country, stating it was not going to be the ‘State religion’.

Giving a potted history of the Reformation and its importance, he said: “I find it significant and not at all accidental that the Pope chooses to come at the time of the 450th anniversary of the Scottish Reformation. Much of the thrust of our meeting in Edinburgh when we get there will be a commemoration of the 450th anniversary of the Scottish Reformation and what we are more or less saying in that is that we are identifying with that in standing on the same ground as the Scottish Reformers.

“We are not interested in rubbing shoulders with him, not at all. Basically in today’s modern age you don’t need to rub shoulders in order to register an effective protest,” Rev Brown said, adding: “I see today there is gathering momentum against abuses and oppression”.

He added that the visit to Scotland was “a redeclaration and a rededication to the Protestant truth of Biblicism”.