Meet Rev Bling!
He drives a Porsche, is a DJ in his spare time – oh, and he’s spent £15,000 on hair transplants. An eye-popping encounter with Scotland’s most unlikely minister...
RECLINING on his sofa, the new occupant of the big white house opposite the village church reaches for a zapper, hits a button and the lights come on. Nearby lie remotes for the 65in TV dominating the wall opposite, and the state-of-the-art audio system with speakers mounted in each corner of the living room for quadrophonic sound.
Outside in the driveway sits his pride and joy – a 12-year-old Porsche 911 Turbo with personalised numberplate. These cars cost £150,000 new.
On his head sits another serious investment – his hair. To date he has spent almost £15,000 on transplant surgery, which certainly seems to have done the trick. Today his thick black locks are arranged in a Mohawk style, clipped short at the sides and swept back on top. ‘I’ve had five surgeries now,’ he confides. ‘I was going to buy a Ferrari, but I spent it on my hair instead.’
So who is the new arrival in the Dunbartonshire village of Old Kilpatrick? A pop star? A top footballer? No, the Rev Scott McCrum is the local minister – and the big white house where he parks his supercar and entertains friends with a spot of DJing is the church manse.
It is fair to say the 36-year-old dance music fan, petrolhead and former pie factory worker is on the ‘progressive’ wing of the Church of Scotland. He does not use the pulpit, preferring to deliver his sermons from the altar, iPhone in hand as an
aide memoire. And while there is certainly room for hymns in his Sunday services at Old Kilpatrick Bowling Parish Church, he prefers ‘modern worship songs’ which rely on a backing track rather than an organist to get them under way.
Don’t worry if you don’t know how they go. The minister, who has done a bit of singing in his time, will perform them solo on the first go round – then everyone can join in thereafter. So how is the new Kirk minister settling in to his charge? Has there been much feedback from his flock?
‘I think it’s going well,’ he says, warily. ‘You always get the standard feedback at the door, like “Nice service, minister”. You get people saying “you have a lovely voice” and “I love that new song”. I’ve had feedback about my sermons as well. I start every sermon with a joke. It’ll be themed on whatever I’m talking about. It’s a good place to start if everyone is laughing.’
Last Sunday, the Judgment of Solomon was retold as a mother-in-law gag – and such tactics seem to be paying dividends. It might just be the curiosity of lapsed churchgoers, but his modern approach to ministering has seen the congregation grow from an average of around 50 to nearly 70.
YET his early years as a son of the manse were orthodox enough – until he began to rebel. Looking back on his Forfar childhood, he reflects: ‘I wasn’t the biggest rebel in school or anything, but I suppose I was reasonably rebellious for a minister’s kid. The police were at the door once or twice.’ Good Lord. What did he get up to? ‘Drinking, soft drugs, smoking... just all the joys of being a normal teenager.’
He recalls how his minister father Robert was once up in the church tower in Forfar with a visitor from the presbytery, and used the vantage point to draw attention to loose slates on the manse roof: ‘The two of them looked over... and there was me, sitting on the roof smoking. I was only about 14.’
Unpromising academically, young Scott left school at 16 with no Highers, enrolled at Angus College in Arbroath – and promptly dropped out. He worked at Strathmore Foods pie factory before another abortive attempt at college. Then he became a removal man, and after that worked in a call centre, until he decided his future lay in the motor trade: ‘I started as a salesman with Peugeot when I was 18. I was the youngest in the UK.’
At the same time he bought one of his favourite early cars, a VW Golf GTi 16V. It now appears in a list of his most memorable motors, posted on his website with the comment: ‘After going out in a mate’s “Valver” and hearing the induction noise it made at 4,000/4,500rpm I knew I had to have one. Excitedly as we raced along (half s **** ing myself if I’m honest) I remember saying: “I’m getting one!”’
By 21 he was a sales manager in a Dundee showroom, getting behind the wheel of dream machines. ‘I first drove a 911 Turbo and Ferrari in the same week, so it was quite cool when you’re 21,’ he says. ‘The only problem is it set my impression of what was fast way above what I could afford. It was a long time before I got a supercar.’
So far, God’s name has not come up once in our conversation. I glance at his dog collar just to make sure. Yes, it’s still there. It was in his early 20s, he says, that a most inconvenient urge lodged itself in his brain and refused to budge. He recognises it now as ‘the calling’.
He explains: ‘It’s the same for a lot of ministers – or it should be. It’s something that you feel called to do. It’s certainly not something you would choose to do if you know what it’s actually like – which, as a minister’s son, I did. It’s kind of like you feel as if you should do something that you don’t really want to do.’
And so he contacted Glasgow University and asked how a two-time college drop-out with no Highers might go about getting a degree in theology. To his mild astonishment, he was told how to enrol for an access course.
‘It got to the point where I had to make a choice, because at first I was just trying to put my foot in the water but without risking my career. I actually went abroad on my own for a week to Cyprus, trying to search and think about it and decide what to do. I basically took a leap of faith and moved away from my career.’
That leap of faith was rewarded, in the years to come, with a crisis of faith. For the more the aspiring churchman learned about theology, the less certain he was that he actually believed.
‘The lecturer I had for the New Testament was basically a guy who had been a Baptist pastor who had decided that most of it was a load of non-
sense. Well, the traditional interpretation of it was a load of nonsense, and he basically taught us everything you would want to know if you’re an atheist trying to shoot down Christianity.
IWENT into uni as a very conservative Christian. I wouldn’t have drunk much then, or sworn, and I was celibate before that as well. So yeah, by the end of it I didn’t know what I thought about anything.’
The solution was another change of career – or several: ‘I took three years out and just worked full-time as an entrepreneur primarily, doing some DJing and setting up some other companies. That was when I had a tooth-whitening company. At that point I didn’t know if I’d ever come back to [the church].’ To make matters worse, he was losing his hair, and the thought of letting nature take its course depressed him. So he enrolled on a course of ‘follicular unit extraction’, becoming the first man in Scotland to have the 16-hour hairrestoring operation.
As he gradually came round to the idea that he could become a minister and still remain true to who he was, he put his scalp under the knife four more times. So how does he feel the surgery sits with his current role in the parish? Would Jesus ever have considered a hair transplant?
He laughs. ‘Jesus would be, like, “What? A hair transplant?” I can see why some people would say it was vanity, and that’s fair enough if that’s the way they want to look at it. Personally speaking, I wouldn’t say I was crying inside about the fact I was losing my hair but, if I could change it, it was the one thing I’d definitely change.’
There are perhaps one or two other things which some of the more traditional minded bosses at the Church of Scotland’s HQ in Edinburgh might like to change about their young minister.
During his first charge in Glenrothes, Fife, he took a difficult phone call from central office.
‘Basically I had a profile on a Christian dating site and it said I liked fast cars and was hoping to get a Lamborghini next or something. So they were trying to pull me up to say that’s an inappropriate thing and I just said, “Well, I’m driving a 911 Turbo now so what difference does it make?” But that’s the kind of cr*p I get just because I’m a little bit different.’
That may be something of an understatement. When I ask if he would drive the Porsche to officiate at a funeral, he says he has already done so and would again. Not to show off, he hastens to add, but because the interior of his Corsa van is covered with hairs from his Border collies.
THEN there are his entrepreneurial activities. Despite being the parish’s sole Kirk minister, Rev McCrum’s position is part-time – so he supplements his income with business sidelines which play to his strengths. There is Church AV Scotland Ltd, for example, which sells sound systems, TVs and the like to churches.
‘Who could understand your needs as a church better than an audio/visual engineer who’s also a parish minister?’ goes his sales blurb. Then there is a lighting service, which sells LED bulbs to churches and manses – and a PAT testing outfit, which carries out safety tests for portable appliances in churches. In short, Rev McCrum reckons he is the man to call for your church’s technological needs.
It all began, he says, when he saved his last church ‘thousands’ by installing new sound and lighting systems himself. Then he had an entrepreneurial brainwave.
‘I thought there’s bound to be other churches in the same situation, so I bought a few sound systems from the manufacturer in the belief – again, just a wee step of faith – that I’d be able to sell them. At that point there were loads of sound systems sitting in my dining room. So that’s how it started. I sold them no bother.’
In the past two years he has kitted out some 40 churches across several denominations with new audio visual solutions. So does he find the dog collar helps his sales pitch?
‘I think it helps from the point of view that they know I’ve got a better knowledge of the inner workings of a church and of their needs than a company that doesn’t specialise in churches.’
There is, then, rather a lot going on in the life of the new arrival in Old Kilpatrick – church minister, entrepreneur, occasional DJ and even sometime model for the hair transplant industry, petrolhead (he tells me his Porsche can do 200mph but won’t say whether he has put it to the test), pub-goer, clubber, martial arts enthusiast, website designer... the list goes on.
So is there a partner to share it all with? ‘No. Basically I’m, er, fussy,’ he says enigmatically. ‘Relationships can be very good for your life or very bad for it.’
No doubt more will be heard of the Rev Scott McCrum. He could be the first man of the cloth on The Apprentice or The X Factor, which he’s tried once already. But if he really is to be the modernising face of the Kirk, fasten your seatbelts. It could get bumpy.