Assembly Trustees Update August 2022

The Trustees met on 11 August, accompanied as usual by the Chief Officer, Solicitor, General Treasurer, Head of HR and by the Principal Clerk, with other staff joining for various agenda items.

The Trustees noted progress on the hard work of Presbytery reshaping, commending the creativity shown by many and noting the way in which congregational data available through the Church's statistician could assist decision-making. The Trustees are all themselves members of local congregations and aware of the impact on morale locally. The relational aspects of Presbytery Mission Planning are important and pastoral support is largely for Presbyteries to provide themselves, though the Principal Clerk, Chief Officer and other staff are doing what they can.

The Trustees had ‘church planting' as a main discussion topic. The new Seeds for Growth Fund will be focussed on Presbyteries. This is God's Church and the potential for growth is real. While this may sound counter-intuitive when congregations are being asked to unite and adapt in the Presbytery Mission Planning process, there are signs, from this country and elsewhere, that ‘fresh expressions of church' offer ways of engaging with people that enthuse and inspire. A difficulty has often been how, ultimately, such initiatives become part of the Church of Scotland to the mutual benefit of the initiative and the Church, and Trustees expressed their keenness to understand and help address this. Plans for the Seeds for Growth Fund continue to develop. Meanwhile the Pioneer Mission Fund is open for grants and donations, and the Small Grants Fund continues. See the Grants and Funding webpage for further details.

The Trustees were meeting in the offices in George Street for the first time since early 2020. They took the opportunity to have a tour of the building, seeing the modifications that bring all of the Faith Action staff together in a single open plan area with attractive meeting rooms, and the areas now on short-term let, for example, to the Edinburgh International Book Festival. The building's capacity is 500 and even before the COVID-19 pandemic the usual numbers attending averaged about 100. Future working patterns are still uncertain, with hybrid working continuing to be trialled, and meantime the Trustees approved plans to use two floors, plus the ground floor, and seek short-term tenants for the other spaces.

A priority since the General Assembly has been to address the deliverance about manse energy costs. The Trustees were appreciative of a detailed options paper that had been prepared, and after considering the detail and complexities, signalled that they were happy to share the thinking that is having to go into the decision-making. The Trustees have since had an extraordinary meeting, on 24 August, in which they discussed further work that had been done and developed their thinking further. The intention is to have a solution for implementation in September. In attending to this deliverance, the Trustees are differentiating between what will be, in effect, a short-term fix and the medium- to long-term issues that must be addressed in terms of both Church manses and the adequacy of stipends and staff salaries in the light of the economic crisis.

The Trustees heard that its CrossReach Task Group, chaired by Lord Wallace of Tankerness, has begun work. This will look at CrossReach's place within the Church of Scotland, the social care sector and Scottish life.