A special salute to Coats Memorial
Service will celebrate 124th anniversary
An anniversary service marking 124 years of Thomas Coats Memorial Baptist Church, in Paisley, will take place tomorrow.
It will be the final such event before it closes as a place of Christian worship later this year.
And the Paisley Daily Express can reveal that the last service of all will take place on Sunday, August 26.
The congregation is leaving due to falling numbers and high running costs.
Church secretary Dorothy Driver told the Paisley Daily Express said it felt “terrible” that there would be no 125th anniversary service, or any more at all, come the end of August.
“The final service will be on the 26th of August,” she said.
“What we are doing is we are separating it.
“We thought we should have a separate service to celebrate the life of the church because it’s lasted 124 years.
“So, on the 12th of August we will be inviting Martyrs’ Church and Central Baptist Church, who are people who we’ve had joint services with over the years.
“We will be inviting them, and we will be inviting interested parties, including people who have been members of the church but have moved away and may want to come back for that service.
“The members will go out for a meal that day. The actual last service is going to be very low key because that’s the day we are all going to be very upset.”
A lack of members – there is a regular congregation at the church of just 40 – is the fundamental reason for the closure of Thomas Coats Memorial, Mrs Driver added.
“I’m sorry that people have stopped going to church, because that’s basically what the bottom line is,” she said.
Mrs Driver said the church, which was built in memory of the wealthy Paisley mill magnate Thomas Coats, came into being when everyone went to church.
“But there were three things that the Victorians didn’t see coming,” she added.
“They thought the Baptist movement would just get bigger and bigger and bigger.
“And they had big, big families – Thomas Coats had 11 children.
“So they were building so that they didn’t have to build again.
“But they didn’t see the First World War coming, which killed millions.
“They didn’t see birth control coming – people stopped having huge families.
“And, saddest of all, they didn’t see people just not going to church any more.”
Multi- million pound plans have been laid down by Paisley businessman Ian Henderson to turn the church building into a venue for receptions and other events, but the exact details of this have yet to be finalised, Mrs Driver said.
“We are not to sure where we are with this... it might not be a straightforward handover, it might take time,” she added.
Tomorrow’s 124th anniversary service will start at 11am. Old photographs from the life of the church will be on display.