Meeting of the Parliament

Meeting date: Tuesday, April 25, 2017

Official Report 1046KB pdf

Time for Reflection

Good afternoon. The first item of business is time for reflection, for which our leader is the Rev Derek Lamont, senior minister at St Columba’s Free Church of Scotland, Edinburgh.

Presiding Officer and members of the Scottish Parliament, thank you for the opportunity to address you. I imagine that being an MSP is not always what it is cracked up to be. I salute your commitment to serving the public. I am sure that you are often misunderstood and sometimes misrepresented, which can be isolating. You work unsocial hours, commuting far and wide, staying away from family and friends, listening to everyone else’s problems and shaking a thousand hands. I am sure that you are wary of letting your guard down with the media and being too personal. It is a bit like being film stars, but I am not sure that you think that that is the case.

Leadership can be a lonely place. As a society, we all face the challenges of isolation and loneliness, particularly among our youth, who are in their electronic world of one-dimensional friendships. There is old age, with its loss of friends and family, as well as poverty, unemployment, having the wrong opinions, busyness and not being like everyone else—there are a thousand challenges today in our sophisticated, first-world society.

I am a minister in the Free Church of Scotland, which is an old Christian denomination. Our roots, at least since around 1900, have had strong Highland connections. We now aspire to be a church for the whole of Scotland, and I value greatly the privilege of having been the minister of St Columba’s in my home city of Edinburgh for the past 16 and a half years, and your neighbour at the top of the Royal Mile.

Our Highland flavour has often been derided in the past, and maybe even still is by some, but it offers a perspective on family, community and belonging that fits in well with the Christian message of reconciliation with God through Christ. He uniquely understands loneliness. As the book of Isaiah prophesied of his short life, he was “despised and rejected”. His death and resurrection, celebrated by the Christian community recently at Easter, offer an end to spiritual desolation and loneliness and inspire us to live and love others sacrificially.

We love community and we hope that, through our commitment to it, as we open our hearts and homes to all, whatever their convictions, religion, ethnicity, orientation or politics, we can inspire something new. With an unqualified attitude of Christ-motivated love and service, we want to reach out into communities throughout Scotland to dispel loneliness. Provoking an opportunity to share our faith in such a way breaks down barriers and helps us to better understand each other and the gospel that has transformed our lives.

Thank you.