Churches throughout Scotland are particularly busy this coming week, for it is Christian Aid Week (9-15 May). Nowhere more so than in, and around the outside, of St Andrew’s and St George’s West in George Street in Edinburgh.
For thirty years their secondhand book sale has raised more money for Christian Aid year after year than any other of its fund raising events anywhere in the British Isles. Theirs has been an example for many, many other churches for this week of the year that focuses on world development issues.
One hundred years ago in Edinburgh, some 1,200 people from the major Protestant churches mainly of Northern Europe and North America met for the World Missionary Conference. They met from 14 to 23 June in what was then the Free Church of Scotland’s Assembly Hall. My grandfather, a young Church of Scotland minister who had just been inducted into his first parish, was one of the helpers. The Conference is seen as the start of the Christian ecumenical movement. A Continuation Committee developed in 1921 into the International Missionary Council.
During the Second World War the British protestant churches formed the British Council of Churches which played a large part in the creation in 1948 of the World Council of Churches. Today it is based on the campus of the headquarters of several worldwide bodies in Geneva, the city where John Knox ministered before coming home to St Giles’ in Edinburgh way back in 1559. Today there are 348 denominations in its membership.
As the Second World War’s terrible devastation of so much of mainland Europe became apparent the British churches needed to help. The secular Oxfam started at this time. Instead of each British denomination setting up its own development agency, a body was created under the umbrella of the British Council of Churches called Christian Reconstruction in Europe, later to be known as the Department of Interchurch Aid and Refugee Service. The slogan that was later to be used for a week long collection of donations each year, Christian Aid, became the agency’s proper name in 1964.
Each denomination had a representative on the Board of Christian Aid with the oversight of the Executive Committee of the British Council of Church. For some years that Committee’s chairman was my late partner. I was involved in the work particularly on Fairtrade and Jubilee 2000 debt in the 1990’s.
In 1990 the British Council of Churches came to an end so that a new body could take its place which included the Roman Catholic hierarchies of the British Isles. I was a founder member representing the Church of England. The Reverend Ian Paisley and his colleagues shouted abuse from the pavement as we processed for the inauguration from Liverpool’s modern Catholic Cathedral to Sir George Gilbert Scott’s vast Anglican cathedral. Known first as the Council of Churches for Britain and Ireland it is now Churches Together in Britain and Ireland. As a result Christian Aid works far and wide in harmony with the Catholic agencies CAFOD in England and Wales, SCIAF in Scotland and Troćaire in Ireland, all three part of Caritas International.