A New Kind of Kirk: The Story of Baptists in Scotland – Nick Needham

ABSTRACT: Since 1690, the history of Christianity in Scotland has been, by and large, a history of Presbyterianism. But beginning in 1750, and especially in the early nineteenth century, Baptist churches began spreading through the land of Knox. The movement multiplied under the leadership of brothers Robert and James Haldane, former Presbyterians who preached, evangelized, and sent pastors to plant Baptist churches across the country. In the time since the Haldanes, Scotland’s Baptist churches have labored for unity and resisted a compromised ecumenism, and today they look for renewal in the United Kingdom’s least religious nation.

For our ongoing series of feature articles, we asked Nick Needham (PhD, University of Edinburgh), lecturer in church history at Highland Theological College, to offer a brief history of Baptists in Scotland.

After the Scottish Reformation of 1560, Scotland’s national church embraced a form of incipient Presbyterianism. However, a battle between Presbyterians and Episcopalians followed for the next 130 years, as each faction strove to capture the national church. The battle was won by Presbyterians in 1690, when Scotland and England drove out their last Stuart king, James II, a Roman Catholic who had favored Episcopalians. Presbyterianism was then definitively established as the Scottish national church’s polity, with the Westminster Confession as its doctrinal standard.

What about Baptists? The first Baptist churches in Scotland were formed in the mid-seventeenth century by English soldiers in Oliver Cromwell’s army. The English army conquered and occupied Scotland in 1651–1652, and many of its Puritan warriors were devout Baptists. However, these Baptist churches did not survive the withdrawal of the English army in 1660.

Old Scotch Baptists

The first native Scottish Baptist church was founded in 1750 by Sir William Sinclair (1707–1768) at Keiss in the Highlands. Sinclair, a wealthy landowner, came to Baptist convictions through meeting Baptists either while serving in the British army or on a separate visit to London, where many Baptist churches existed. His preaching in the Highlands attracted enough interest for a congregation of thirty to be founded. That congregation still exists, although it has now united with the Baptist church in Wick.1

Shortly after Sinclair’s activities, another Scottish Baptist church was founded, in Edinburgh in 1765, led by Robert Carmichael (dates uncertain) and Archibald Maclean (1733–1812). This church adopted a distinctive church polity, with no paid pastor and government by elders who earned their livelihood “in the world.” Carmichael had been a Presbyterian minister, but he embraced first Congregationalist then Baptist views. Maclean, who helped Carmichael provide leadership in the church, became their foremost writer and publicist. History knows them as the “Old Scotch Baptists.”

Old Scotch Baptist congregations were also established in Dundee, Glasgow, Galashiels, Kirkcaldy, Paisley, Largo, Aberdeen, Perth, and Newburgh in Scotland, along with several in the north of England. In addition to their distinctive form of church government, they revived the patristic custom of the “love feast” and “kiss of peace” (2 Corinthians 13:12) and held to a Sandemanian view of saving faith. Named for Scottish Congregationalist theologian Robert Sandeman (1718–1771), this was the view that faith is rooted in the intellect, not the will, and consists in “pure passive conviction” of the gospel’s truth.

Apart from their doctrine of faith and Brethren-style polity, the Old Scotch Baptists followed the Reformed tradition. They formed the majority of Scottish Baptist churches for the next seventy years. However, their significance decreased over that period, and they underwent a steep numerical decline thereafter. This decline was owing to debilitating internal divisions and an inability to “compete” with the aggressive evangelistic outreach of a new generation of Scottish Baptists outside the Old Scotch tradition.

Haldanes: Brothers and Evangelists

A more vigorous and orthodox second wave of Scottish Baptist churches emerged in the early nineteenth century through the evangelistic labors of the Haldane brothers, Robert (1764–1842) and James (1768–1851).2 The Haldanes’ ministry was the Scottish equivalent of the Second Great Awakening. Their father, James Haldane, was a Scot with an ancestral estate at Airthrey Castle in Stirlingshire. A captain in the British army, he died of a fever in 1768, so Robert remembered little of him, and James nothing. Still, Captain Haldane seems to have been a Christian. His widow, Katherine, certainly tried to instill the Christian faith into Robert and James. Robert said of his mother, “She lived very near to God and much grace was given to her.” Sadly, Katherine died in 1774.

Having lost both their parents young, Robert (from the age of ten) and James (from the age of six) were brought up by two uncles. Their early instruction in Christianity now seems to have evaporated. By the time they reached adulthood, the brothers were both utterly unspiritual young men. Nominally, they attended the Church of Scotland, at a time when that was the accepted practice socially; but their hearts were in the world. Both embarked on naval careers — Robert in the Royal Navy, James in the East India merchant service.

Robert’s Conversion

As a young naval officer, Robert Haldane distinguished himself in action against the French. But very soon, Robert’s mind was beginning to remember the faith he had learned in his childhood. His ship was stationed at Gosport in the south of England, where there was a Congregational church, pastored by David Bogue. Bogue was an evangelical who had initially trained for the Church of Scotland ministry. Robert took every opportunity to attend Bogue’s ministry. Although it did not lead to his conversion, it seems to have made a serious impact on his thinking.

After brief but distinguished service, Robert left the Royal Navy in 1783. In 1785 he married Katherine Oswald, and the following year he and Katherine took up the life of a young country gentleman and lady on the ancestral Haldane estate of Airthrey.

The factor that finally aroused Robert Haldane to reclaim the faith of his childhood was, perhaps surprisingly, the French Revolution of 1789. That is, we may find it surprising; but the French Revolution had a cataclysmic effect on the minds and hearts of Europeans far beyond the borders of France. The middle classes of France organized a successful seizure of power from a bloated monarchy and aristocracy, destroyed the entrenched privileges of the Roman Catholic Church, and began transforming their country into a militant secular democracy. Europe’s conservative upper classes trembled; the young, the radical, fancied they saw the rebirth of humanity.

Robert Haldane was initially rapturous about the revolution. In his own words, he looked for

the universal abolition of slavery, of war, and of many other miseries that mankind were exposed to. I rejoiced in the experiment that was making in France of the construction of a government at once from its foundation upon a regular plan. In every company I delighted in discussing this favourite subject and endeavoured to point out the vast advantages that I thought might be expected as the result.3

However, among Robert’s friends were evangelical ministers who had a different attitude. Unlike Robert, they believed in original sin — the bondage of the natural heart to radical evil. A mere change of government, they argued, could not change the heart. “Wait and see,” they said. “The revolution in France will produce misery and bloodshed.” They were proved tragically right.

The impact of the French Revolution led Robert to consider everything afresh. This, coupled with Robert’s friendship with evangelical ministers, prompted him to study the Bible, beginning in January 1794. The question now gripped him: Was Christianity actually true? In pursuit of answers, he read all the classic eighteenth-century works of apologetics, by such acute thinkers as Bishop Joseph Butler and William Paley. As Robert undertook these studies, he gradually passed from unbelief to faith. By 1795, at the age of thirty, he had emerged from his quest for truth as a convinced evangelical Christian.

James’s Conversion

What about Robert’s younger brother, James? Remarkably, his thoughts were also turning anew to Christianity. James had thus far lived a very worldly life in the East India merchant service. He drank too much; he took part in deadly duels to satisfy his sense of honor. James married his first wife in 1793 after being appointed as captain of the merchant ship Melville Castle. This was Mary Joass, only daughter of Major Alexander Joass. (After her death in 1819, James married in 1822 Margaret, daughter of Dr. Daniel Rutherford, the maternal uncle of the great novelist Sir Walter Scott.)

James’s marriage to Mary seems to have had a stabilizing effect on him. In his spare time on board ship, he soon began reading his Bible. Like Robert, he studied the question of Christianity’s evidence. In James’s own words:

I had a book by me, which, from prejudice of education, and not from any rational conviction, I called the Word of God. I never went so far as to profess infidelity [atheism], but I was a more inconsistent character — I said that I believed a book to be a revelation from God, whilst I treated it with the greatest neglect, living in direct opposition to all its precepts, and seldom taking the trouble to look into it, or if I did, it was to perform a task — a kind of atonement for my sins. I went on in this course till, whilst the Melville Castle was detained at the Motherbank by contrary winds, and having abundance of leisure for reflection, I began to think that I would pay a little more attention to this book. The more I read it, the more worthy it appeared of God; and after examining the evidences with which Christianity is supported, I became fully persuaded of its truth.4

James resigned from his naval command and settled in Edinburgh in 1795, aged 27. Shortly afterward, his newfound belief in Christianity blossomed into an authentic personal faith. Interestingly, in this process the Reformed doctrine of election was a key factor in accomplishing James’s conversion. Acts 13:48 had a great impact on him: “As many as were appointed to eternal life believed.” James commented,

My whole system as to free will was overturned. I saw that being ordained to eternal life was not the consequence of faith, but that the children of God believed because they were ordained. This gave a considerable blow to my self-righteousness, and henceforth I read the Scriptures more in a childlike spirit.5

Mission Scotland

The two brothers were now reunited in the faith their mother had taught them. Their converted minds naturally turned to what they could do to help advance Christ’s kingdom on earth. The true hope of humanity, Robert now believed, did not lie in French revolutionary politics, but in the transforming effect of the gospel. Robert was deeply stirred by accounts of William Carey’s missionary work in India. Inspired by this, he planned a mission to Bengal in 1796–1797.

But the scheme ground to a halt with invincible opposition from the East India Company, which virtually controlled India. One of the company’s directors is reputed to have said, “I would rather see a band of devils in India than a band of missionaries.” The East India Company feared that Christian missionaries would cause major social upheaval in India, antagonizing Muslims and Hindus, which would hamper the Company’s operations. So, Robert was frustrated and defeated in his impulse to be an Indian missionary. But this frustration led to an unexpected new vision. Were there not masses of unconverted people in the Haldanes’ own homeland? The conviction now gripped Robert and James that their true work was in their native country.

This new vision of “Mission Scotland” won over James first. He resolved to make the experiment of evangelizing in public. His first sermon was delivered at the mining village of Gilmerton, near Crieff, on May 6, 1797. Emboldened by his brother’s example, Robert followed suit. His first sermon was preached at Weem, near Aberfeldy, in April 1798. Here was a novelty: two laymen of the Church of Scotland, without formal theological education, rich and respectable members of the gentry — and they had become itinerant preachers!

The Haldanes’ denomination, the Church of Scotland, was not impressed by what they were doing. The national church at that time was dominated by the Moderate party, who leaned to rationalism in their theology. In particular, Moderates opposed evangelicals, who were a growing force in the Church of Scotland as a result of Britain’s evangelical revival in the 1740s. The dominant Moderate party regarded evangelicals as religious fanatics and, therefore, did not look kindly on the lay evangelism of the Haldanes. This resulted in the church’s General Assembly of 1799 issuing an infamous pastoral admonition against unqualified preachers. The assembly decreed that this admonition must be read from every Church of Scotland pulpit in the land, warning congregations against the “evils” of what men like the Haldanes were doing.

The Haldanes were committed not only to itinerant preaching. They also formed the Edinburgh Tract Society for printing and distributing evangelistic literature, and they set up Sabbath Evening Schools. In July 1797, James began his celebrated evangelistic tour of the north of Scotland, stretching from Perth to the Orkneys. This Highland preaching tour was the first in a series of ten, from 1797–1807. In January 1798, the Society for Propagating the Gospel at Home was founded, with Robert Haldane as its directing mind. The Society sent out itinerant evangelists, catechists, and schoolteachers. Most of finance came from Robert, who was in modern terms a millionaire. He sold his estate in Airthrey to finance the activities. Between 1799 and 1810, he spent around £70,000 on the Society for Propagating the Gospel at Home (that would be millions of dollars in present-day currency).

For ten years, Robert trained the evangelists in a seminary; classes were held in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Dundee, Elgin, and Grantown. The students learned Hebrew, Greek, Latin, systematic theology, rhetoric, and homiletics. Good libraries for the students were established. Some three hundred preachers were trained and sent out. Gaelic speakers were enlisted for the Highlands — this became an important factor for the spread of evangelicalism there.

Alongside these efforts, the Haldanes also set up preaching centers (“tabernacles”) where visiting preachers proclaimed the gospel. Robert, once more, financed the tabernacles, which were built in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Dundee, Perth, Thurso, Elgin, Wick, Dunkeld, and Dumfries. The greatest of the Haldane tabernacles was in Edinburgh. The Haldanes at this time had no thought of establishing a new denomination; the tabernacles were purely mission centers for evangelizing the unchurched. Robert and James still took holy communion regularly in the Church of Scotland.

Haldane Baptists and English Baptists

However, Robert and James broke with the national church in late 1798. They had a change of mind about New Testament teaching on church government, becoming convinced Congregationalists. Thereupon a new Congregational church was founded, in January 1799, meeting in the Edinburgh Tabernacle with James as pastor (although he continued to evangelize on a wide geographical basis). There were only twelve members in the new congregation when it was formed; but it soon grew, and the numbers topped the three hundred mark.

Scottish Congregationalism thus received a new lease of life from the Haldane movement. After a decade, however, in 1808, the Haldanes had another change of mind. They now renounced their belief in infant baptism and became Baptists. This change divided their movement. For example, in the Edinburgh tabernacle, a majority of James Haldane’s congregation followed him, reconstituting themselves as a Baptist church, but a minority withdrew and formed a new Congregational paedobaptist church. James Haldane wrote an important account of his change of mind that same year, entitled Reasons of a change of sentiment and practice on the subject of baptism — a classic of Scottish Baptist theology. The Haldane Baptist churches were theologically distinct from the Old Scotch Baptists; the Haldanes accepted the idea of a single full-time pastor and rejected the Sandemanianism of the Old Scotch Baptists. This put the “Haldane Baptists” entirely in the historic mainstream of Reformed theology.

The Haldane revival spread a new wave of Reformed Congregational and Baptist churches across Scotland. Prior to this, Scotland had few Congregational and Baptist churches. From 1798 to 1807, no fewer than eighty-five Congregational churches were planted throughout Scotland by Haldane preachers; many of these churches then became Baptist. In a real sense, then, Robert and James Haldane were the founding fathers of Scottish Congregational and Baptist church life. These churches were committed to evangelical Calvinism, which gave a fresh impetus to the renewal of Reformed theology in Scotland.

Somewhat distinct from the Haldane Baptist churches was a parallel movement known as the “English Baptist churches.”6 The name is confusing since they were on Scottish soil. What the name signified was their adoption of the church polity practiced by English Baptists — a paid pastor — in opposition to the Old Scotch Baptists with their Brethren-like leadership by lay elders. They also opposed the Old Scotch Baptists’ Sandemanianism, confessing the traditional Reformed view of faith as rooted in the affections and will, not the intellect alone. This position aligned them theologically with the Haldane Baptists; but there were differences, since the English Baptist churches originated some years prior to the Haldanes’ acceptance of Baptist views. They looked more decidedly to the long-established Reformed Baptists of England, rather than to the Haldanes, for guidance and support. Still, one cannot too sharply separate the English Baptist churches of Scotland from the Haldane movement. Some of the English Baptist leaders in Scotland received their training in the Haldanes’ seminary. The boundary between Scotland’s English Baptists and Haldane Baptists was open and fluid.

The first English Baptist church in Scotland was the congregation at Kilwinning, formed in 1803 under the pastoral leadership of George Barclay (1774–1838). Barclay had been trained by the Haldanes, but they at this point were still Congregationalists. Barclay’s Kilwinning church thus preceded the embrace of Baptist views by his Haldane mentors. Another English Baptist church was established in Edinburgh in January 1808, led by Christopher Anderson (1782–1852) — once again before the Haldanes became Baptists. This was Charlotte Chapel, which would become the twentieth century’s largest and best-known Baptist church in Scotland. By the mid-nineteenth century, the Scottish Baptist churches that followed the “English” model of a single full-time pastor (whether they were Haldane Baptists or from the English Baptist movement) had come greatly to outnumber the Old Scotch Baptists.

Toward a Baptist Union

The next major phase in Scottish Baptist life was the attempt to found a Baptist Union — a federation of Scottish Baptist congregations, united for common prayer and cooperative endeavor.7 The first attempt was made in 1827, comprising an entirely Reformed body of churches. However, it did not prosper owing to internal dissensions. A second attempt was made in 1835; this endured until 1842, sputtering into failure due to lack of widespread support (it involved only Highland congregations). It had a different theological orientation from the first Union, since the 1835 body did not insist on Reformed theology — evangelical Arminians were eligible to belong.

The third attempt to form a Baptist Union came in 1843–1849. This attempt was dominated by the Arminian Francis Johnston, a disciple of Charles Finney. Although at first Johnston continued the inclusive Calvinist-Arminian policy of the 1835 union, his Arminianism became increasingly militant, so that in 1850 he reorganized the union into an exclusively Arminian body. This exclusivism caused its implosion.

The fourth attempt to form a Baptist Union, from 1856–1869, reverted to the older inclusive approach. Almost all the Scottish pastors of the 1856 Scottish Baptist Association were Calvinists, but they prioritized evangelical catholicity over Reformed confessionalism. Arminians, as long as they were evangelical, were welcome to join. The association was then reorganized at Glasgow’s Hope Street Chapel in 1869 as the Baptist Union of Scotland, a body that has endured to the present day. It stated at its founding,

That a Union of Evangelical Baptist churches of Scotland is desirable and practicable, and that its objects should be to promote Evangelical religion in connection with the Baptist denomination in Scotland, to cultivate brotherly affection and to secure co-operation in everything related to the interests of the associated churches.8

More than half Scotland’s Baptist churches joined the 1869 Baptist Union — fifty-one congregations, representing roughly four thousand church members. The union strove to affirm the principle of evangelical catholicity in continuity with the Scottish Baptist Association, and (equally) in line with a far broader trend among British evangelicals to unite across old confessional divides. This pursuit of evangelical catholicity was in response to the challenges of a resurgent Roman Catholicism in Britain and a growing secular liberalism in British culture.

Persistence Without Spectacle

The story of Scottish Baptist churches in the twentieth century, and on into the twenty-first, has little spectacular about it, although lack of spectacle does not diminish its significance. The Baptist Union of Scotland outshone all its predecessors by surviving, growing, and perpetuating itself with considerable vigor. One of its most notable institutions to that end was the Scottish Baptist College, founded in 1894 to train men for ministry. The college met in a succession of places in Glasgow, finally in large premises in Aytoun Road. In 2001, the college relocated to the Paisley campus of the University of the West of Scotland. The Baptist Union of Scotland today comprises 156 congregations with almost ten thousand members. The Union is broadly evangelical in outlook, with some churches holding to a Reformed theology in their preaching and teaching.

Some moments of drama marked the relationship between the Baptist Union of Scotland and the ecumenical movement.9 The union was a founding member of the British Council of Churches in 1942, a body that involved Unitarians but not Roman Catholics. In 1948, the union joined the World Council of Churches. This led to energetic dissent from some churches, especially the largest Baptist church in Scotland, Charlotte Chapel (at the time a member of the Baptist Union). In fact, Charlotte Chapel withdrew from the Baptist Union in protest. After some controversy, the Baptist Union reversed its decision and came out of the World Council in 1955. But Charlotte Chapel did not rejoin the Baptist Union, unhappy at the union’s continued membership in the British Council of Churches. So began Charlotte Chapel’s history as an independent church.

There was another twist in 1989, when the Scottish branch of the British Council morphed into ACTS (Action of Churches Together in Scotland), effectively the Scottish expression of the World Council of Churches. The Baptist Union of Scotland voted on a series of possible attitudes to ACTS, ranging from full membership to total rejection. It voted for total rejection. This remains the case today.

Outside the Baptist Union, the tradition of independent Baptist church life continued. The most well-known of the independent Baptist churches is Charlotte Chapel in Edinburgh, which (as we saw) left the Baptist Union in 1955. A very large congregation, especially after the impactful evangelistic ministry of Joseph Kemp (1902–1915), it had a succession of influential and eminent pastors — Graham Scroggie (pastor 1916–1933), Sidlow Baxter (1935–1953), Gerald Griffiths (1954–1962), Alan Redpath (1962–1966), and Derek Prime (1969–1987). These men were all widely recognized in the evangelical community for their preaching and writing.

Two other forms of Scotland’s Baptist life are the small Scottish branch of the Grace Baptist network of churches — whose congregations subscribe either to the historic 1689 Confession of Faith or the very similar 1966 Baptist Affirmation of Faith — and Baptist churches belonging to the UK-wide Fellowship of Independent Evangelical Churches (FIEC).

Today, Baptists are an entrenched part of Scotland’s religious life. They are not united in a single denomination, but spread across the Baptist Union, the Grace Baptists, the FIEC, and a significant number of unaffiliated congregations. Some from all these categories belong to Affinity, the name now given to the British Evangelical Council founded in 1952, partly under the inspiration of Martyn Lloyd-Jones. The great majority of Scottish Baptist churches are evangelical, but only a minority are Reformed. Over the past decade, the Reformed Baptist churches have found a new sense of connection in the annual Scottish Reformed Baptist conference held at Pitlochry.

Worship in Secular Scotland

Scottish Baptist churches, in common with all evangelical churches in Scotland, face a challenge previously unknown in Scottish Protestant history. The secularization of Scottish society has been swift and far-reaching. Of the four nations making up the United Kingdom (England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland), Scotland is now the least religious. Gone are the romantic days of Christian Scotland, whether we contemplate the Reformation in the sixteenth century, the era of the Covenanters in the seventeenth, the blessings of the evangelical revival in the eighteenth, or the time of the Haldanes in the nineteenth. Baptist churches are now tiny oases of spiritual life in a vast surrounding desert of religious apathy or scornful hostility. Therefore, “brothers, pray for us” (1 Thessalonians 5:25).

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