A visit to Stornaway
My wife and I went to the Hebrides on 16 February. It was a magnificent journey through the winter landscape, utterly breathtaking at times. Outside Inverness a lordly stag was eating heather near the roadside, not batting an eye at the occasional car zooming past. We pressed on to get as near as we could to the port of Ullapool and found a hotel in Dingwall where we spent the night.
The morning ferry left for Stornoway at 10.30. There were a few dozen passengers that Thursday morning and the Minch was as calm as a millpond. The voyage back on Monday was also tranquil but many more passengers on the 7.15 sailing to the mainland. The crossing takes about two hours and 45 minutes and half way across you can see the snow-covered mountains of the Highlands stretching north to south behind the boat while in front there is the long strip of the Hebrides. ‘Picturesque’ is a poor word for such a sight. We have never had a bad crossing; I have been to Lewis five times and this was my third communion season. I don’t think of Stornoway as a ‘pretty’ town. Few towns built around a ferry port are. Much of the island of Lewis is drab bog, fields of peat, brown in the winter and the landscape lacks trees. The beaches are grand, and the south of the island is mountainous and thus more attractive. But there are other delights to Stornoway which make it beautiful to the Christian visitor. Once one has been there one always returns with anticipation.
Our friends George Macaskill and Isobell were there to greet us at the harbour as was another minister awaiting a pastor from Scotland on a similar mission, taking the communion season at that church. George is the pastor of the Associate Presbyterian Church, and the ‘season’ is the time, twice a year, February and August in this case, when all seven or more Presbyterian churches in Stornoway hold their communion services. The services begin on Wednesday night with a Prayer Meeting and then there are seven preaching services which end on the final Monday. This ‘season’ in Harris is at a different time, and in Back at a different time and so on, so that hardly a month goes by without a communion season being held in some part of the Hebrides. The schools in Stornoway were closed for the Thursday, Friday and Monday of the communion season. There were in all some thousands of people attending all the services. The main Free Church has to hire the town hall for the overflow meeting on the Sunday night, and the church itself would hold 1400 I guess, and its adjacent hall would also be full. The population of the Hebrides is about 22,000 people. People who do not attend very regularly, or at all, will make every effort to be in ‘their congregation’ on the evening of the communion Sunday. It is also the time for new members to be welcomed in. The main Free Church received seven new members, and the other congregations heard the news and were glad of that number. Our own congregation received one lady.
There is a traditional pattern to the themes of the sermons on the five nights, humiliation, examination, preparation, commemoration and gratification, but that is no longer rigidly held in many of these churches, certainly not in the Associate Presbyterian Church where I was speaking. There is a general need for encouragement everywhere. The tide of apathy and indifference flows everywhere in Europe and it has reached the island of Lewis. However hallowed and useful traditions may be, and I guess I am a traditionalist, new pressures and needs need to be addressed at these times when so many people gather to hear the Word.
The season is not all about preaching services; there is time spent sitting in homes, eating and talking together for lunch and also after the services in the evenings. We were blessed with sensible cut-off times of around 11 but these fellowship times have been known to go on way past midnight. But they are very edifying; the talk is all about the Bible, and Christian experience, and the work of grace in the life of the Christian and within the fellowship. You learn more from them than from the sermons I think.
Certainly Scottish egalitarianism reigns in this politically radical island. It is a classless community. These are all working men and women, precariously hanging on in this economically unfavourable situation - an island to the far west of Europe. For example, the precentor of the psalms is a diver. He has been a deep-sea diver in Saudi Arabia and the North Sea, but now he dives for crabs, shellfish and lobsters in 100 feet of water around the island. He stays down for about an hour, and this time of the year the water is freezing. We met him and a friend on the Monday crossing drinking coffee, his Bible and Spurgeon's 'Morning by Morning' open on the table in the ship's restaurant. They were going for a week’s climbing around Fort William, planning to ascend Ben Nevis. He has climbed in the Alps and in Snowdonia. Who could not feel great about such an example of manly Christianity? I told him that I would send him a photocopy of Dr. Machen’s ‘Mountains and Why we Love Them.’
The elaborate structure to the morning service leading up to the distribution of the bread and wine needed a little preparation and thought. After the psalm that followed the sermon I needed to fence the table to clarify who might come. The people were already sitting in the front in the first pews which is an area which for that time is designated the ‘table.’ Then a few people came from the congregation and crèche and joined them. We sang Psalm 116. Then I announced that it was open communion, that it was the Lord’s Supper, not this particular congregation’s, and explained this. Then we heard I Corinthians 11 and I prayed. Then I gave the Table Address – I chose to speak on Mrs Alexander’s ‘Green hill far away.’ After the bread and common cup had been passed from one to another by the communicants themselves I gave the second table address on the closing verses of the Green Hill, regarding the three things we are urged to do, to love Him, to trust in his redeeming blood, and to do the works he did. I finally spoke from the pulpit after the last psalm, and decided to read the narrative of Mary and Jesus in the garden – ‘Mary!’ ‘Rabboni!’ It was a moving and blessed occasion.