2007 Free Church General Assembly

Our Chairman, Gordon Kennedy was invited to address the Free Church General Assembly on Tuesday 22nd May 2007.

His address, along with that of Rev. John Ross, Moderator of the Free Church of Scotland are reproduced with permission.

• Gordon Kennedy's address to the Free Church General Assembly
  
  Moderator, commissioners to the General Assembly, may I begin by thanking you for this invitation to be present at your General Assembly and to address the Assembly. The invitation has come to me as chairman of Forward Together and I bring you Christian greetings from, and the assurance of the prayers of the members of, Forward Together. (more...)
  
  
• John Ross' moderatorial address to the Free Church Assembly
  
  Fathers and brethren, a few weeks ago, I was sitting on a mountain top above the Bealach nam Ba, on the Applecross peninsula. It was a gloriously sunny April day. To the north and east, stretching as far as the eye could see were mountain peaks. To the south and west lay a panorama of islands, Rasaay, Skye, Eigg and Rhum. Deep in the corrie below was a clear, cold lochan. Nearby a ptarmigan was sitting on her nest. A flock of snow buntings spiralled up from the corrie. A solitary wheatear flitted around the summit boulders. I thought how privileged I was to belong to a land that boasts some of the finest natural landscape, cleanest air and purest water anywhere in the world. A land and a heritage enjoyed not only by its own inhabitants but also by two and a half million visitors each year.

  By contrast, Scotland’s contemporary moral and spiritual landscape is blighted. Hidden behind our castles and mountains, our forests and lochs, and the Brigadoon world of tartan and shortbread is an under-world of social exclusion and anti-social behaviour; a world where Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting proves to be a better guide than the National Trust for Scotland’s Yearbook. (more...)