Slow debate over ministers delivered miraculous conclusion

SEX never used to be a problem for the Kirk’s clergy. Some years ago, a friend was talking to a minister’s wife who told him she was expecting her eighth baby.

“Why don’t you get a television, like the rest of us?” he asked. She looked bemused, because they already had one. Then she smiled. “I expect you think we’re bonkers,” she said. He could only agree.

In that manse, as in so many over the centuries, sex was a normal part of life, cause for celebration not angst, unless the cost of feeding mouths became a headache.

To judge by the first hours of yesterday’s debate on ordaining gay ministers who are in civil partnerships, you’d have thought – mistakenly – it was still no big deal, whatever shape it took.

Under the steely direction of the Moderator Lorna Hood, a Hannah Gordon lookalike who brooked no rambling or time wasting, the Assembly’s 700-odd delegates appeared so laid back you’d never have guessed they were involved in one of the most historic moments in the Kirk’s modern history.

Caged in her pulpit, alongside a purple-gowned Principal Clerk and bewigged Procurator, the Moderator in her red robes presided over an excruciatingly nit-picking debate conducted with exquisite good manners from a floor carpeted with grey, white and bald heads – those who could take a week off to attend the Assembly.

Countless legal niceties were teased out in the opening few hours, to the point where Banal of the Parish might have been the best title for this preliminary throat-clearing.

As she deftly handled a cataract of amendments to the Deliverance of the Report of the Theological Commission, the Moderator’s cheeks began to match her gown.

The afternoon dragged, with little of the passion this volcanic subject normally ignites. Not until the outgoing Moderator, Albert Bogle, tabled his winning lastminute amendment, did the affair catch fire.

In a heart-felt plea for unity, Bogle offered a third way, which in his words would “give everyone what they want”.

It would also, however, delay a final ratification by at least another year.

The subdued mood of the hall suddenly seemed less an indication of apathy than of fear. It was clear that neither side of the debate wanted to see their church split, that the thought of schism was even more alarming than the idea of actively gay ministers.

As the discussion finally gathered pace, the only consensus to emerge was that there would be no agreement on this subject, other than a desire to stick together.

After four years of hysterical headlines, and predictions of walkouts, the outcome was disappointingly but not surprisingly fudged.

The Assembly’s vote simultaneously to uphold both traditionalist and revisionist positions fits a long history of painfully slow and complicated change.

As one onlooker muttered, this is not a church of God-botherers but of God-ditherers. And yet, it is a momentous day.

This vote promises that power for calling ministers, gay or not, will in future lie in the hands not of the central authorities, but of congregations. That’s little short of miraculous.