The 2008 General Assembly of the Church of ScotlandFootnote ⁴ attended to various legal issues in the spirit of general reform.

CHARITY GOVERNANCE

Many of the changes were administrative ones, necessitated by the establishment of Church regulation as a charitable body by the Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator (OSCR).Footnote ⁵ OSCR was established under the Charities and Trustee Investment (Scotland) Act 2005 (asp 10), and massively increased the amount of regulatory activity affecting all Scotland's 23,500 charities. The Church as a whole and all its individual congregations are registered as charities, along with some presbyteries and central agencies. The hierarchical structure of Presbyterianism provides the supervision of individual congregational charities to the satisfaction of OSCR, and the Church of Scotland is one of the few bodies in Scotland to benefit from Designated Religious Charity status (along with the Roman Catholic Church dioceses and one or two much smaller Presbyterian denominations). This status gives relief from some elements of scrutiny, such as over the discipline of individual trustees.

All office bearers, including all ruling elders, constitute the charity trustees of each congregation. Their responsibilities have changed little, but the changes – and the greater active scrutiny by the Regulator – have made them very aware of their duties and often nervous of an increasing risk of personal liability. It is an interesting illustration of the gradual way in which the temporal jurisdiction of the state and the spiritual jurisdiction of the Church are increasingly defined in relation to each other. The Church courts accept the supervision of the state for purposes directly relating to their duties as charity trustees, while strictly maintaining their independence in those spiritual areas in which OSCR should have no interest.

NAMES OF CONGREGATIONS

A scheme was devised by the Church and OSCR to standardise the naming of congregations, with each name including a geographical referent and clear specification of the denomination. This was needed to avoid ambiguity in the identity of congregations qua charities. Some congregations were resistant to changing the everyday name, and they may retain that for ordinary use, provided that the formal, registered name is used on letterheads, printed orders of service, and the like. Some congregations were more fundamentally resistant to the whole scheme, and the General Assembly passed an instruction to ensure that it is universally implemented.

CONGREGATIONAL ACCOUNTS

The Church's Regulations on financial accounting have been updated to reflect current legal requirements. Knock-on effects included the requirement to remove the whole congregation's approval of annual accounts (approved instead by the charity trustees), and this necessitated amendment of the constitutional documents of some congregations.

THE ARTICLES DECLARATORY

There has been some appetite recently for a review of the Articles Declaratory of the Constitution of the Church of Scotland in Matters Spiritual,Footnote ⁶ but the Special Commission on Structure and Change persuaded the Assembly to instruct review of only one of the Articles. Article III defines the nature of the Church's national ministry as the ‘distinctive call and duty to bring the ordinances of religion to the people in every parish of Scotland through a territorial ministry’. Opponents claim that competing claims for scarce resources spread resources impossibly thinly across the Scottish map; defenders are alarmed, fearing that relinquishing its responsibilities must expose the Church to the loss of its ‘national’ status, with serious social, mission and ecumenical implications. A new Special Commission will examine this question, reporting back to the General Assembly of 2010. Any change to this constitutional document would take three years and would involve consultation throughout the Church.

ORDAINED LOCAL MINISTRY

The Church of Scotland's Auxiliary Ministry (of part-time, unsalaried ministers ineligible for induction to a parish charge) has never been particularly extensive. Because the Auxiliary Ministry requires a more extensive education and preparation than that for trainee Readers and appears to afford few greater opportunities (because of the relative infrequency of sacramental worship), it does not attract large numbers of candidates. The Ministries Council successfully steered a controversial report through the General Assembly, instructing the Council to explore plans that could, conceivably, eventually unite both categories into a class of ministry with a more extensive range of ministerial functions, albeit with local authorisation.

PRESBYTERIES

The Special Commission on Structure and Change, established in 2006, presented its final report. It was established to answer the core question of whether restructuring the executive, administrative machinery of the central Church in recent years was entirely consistent with a Presbyterian polity. Concluding that there was no inconsistency, the Commission examined some of the areas within the Church's governance that may have prompted the Commission's establishment.

The most far-reaching conclusion of the Commission was a resolution to return to the question of the size and function of presbyteries. Six years ago, an initiative to reform presbyteries by increasing their average size, extending their executive functions and resourcing their regional work did not find enough favour across the Church. The new resolution will open these questions again, in an effort to complete an act of reform long overdue.

THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY

The Assembly itself is frequently reviewed by the wider Church. One such review has been authorised this year, and will be more radical than some have been in recent years. Presbyteries, kirk sessions and individuals have the opportunity to reflect on the very purpose of the General Assembly, at a time when many of its informal strands – worship, fringe meetings, celebration, social gatherings, bookstalls, youth and children's representatives – seem to mean as much to its members as does the formal court business of the Church's supreme legal body as legislature, executive and judicial authority. The current consultation will ask these deep questions about purpose and point, in additional to the perennial ones about timing, length, location, and so on.