Monday 19th. August, 2019

We had an excellent service yesterday. It was led by Chris, our lay reader. None of us in Fogo are quite what we seem! I’m a retired minister, now working as a non-stipendiary parish minister; Chris is a trained lay reader, but trained in the Church of Ireland rather than the Church of Scotland. I’ve written to presbytery and hope that his Irish readership will be recognised here in our Scottish presbytery.

Not that, at the end of the day, it makes a great deal of difference to us in Fogo: we are a happy band of folk who are enjoying exploring what it means to be a congregation in the early twenty-first century, each of us gaining enormously from each other as we slowly grow from being a tiny congregation into a small one!

One of the excitements of last week was that the congregation of Burnmouth has loaned us their beautiful font. They have done this because their building is to be closed down and will probably be sold, the site cleared, and a house built in their beautiful situation overlooking the sea, halfway down the hill to the harbour. I am sad whenever I hear of a church being closed but I am happy that if this is how it has to be then at least their font will stay in the area and will be a reminder to us and to them of what once was a thriving little congregation at Burnmouth.

Tom and I moved the font to Fogo last week. It is beautiful: ‘Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not’, and some traditional carving on each of the eight sides. As we carried the font we noticed that inside it was inscribed with the letters KOSB, standing no doubt for King’s Own Scottish Borderers, and an indication perhaps that this font has had an earlier history involving that illustrious border regiment. I am going to try to find out more of its history but the more I learn the clearer it becomes that this font really should remain in this area and we will be proud to provide a home for it until such time as the parent congregation decides that it wishes to use it in different way.

As it says in a post about the font (do visit it because there is a grand picture there) the font will not stand idle. It will be used in two week’s time for Alison’s baptism and, of course, as we all come into church, Sunday by Sunday, it will remind us all of our own baptisms. We may not remember the event as we were so young when it happened, but we are baptised. We are part of Jesus’ body, his church and are entrusted by him to work to build his kingdom and promised his support through the Holy Spirit. (I love the photo — no don’t go to the other post to see it, I’ll repeat it here — because the Holy Spirit poster is just behind the font and what a message it spells out!)

The day of Alison’s baptism will be another party day. The church marquee will continue its journey around our parish. It started in the garden of Mount Pleasant for our Garden Party, Music Festival and Bar-b-cue, it moved on to Pete and Gill’s garden for their fortieth wedding celebrations and now it is moving to Jim and Liz’s garden for an after baptism party on 1st. September — and there is going to be a music concert in the church that afternoon at 3 p.m. So there is lots happening.

For me this autumn is going to be busy. We are engaged in preparing Alison for her baptism and Laura for her confirmation; we shall soon be starting a big programme of evening meetings to prepare everyone for the pilgrimage to the Holy Land which will take place in January, 2020, and I am to lead a group which is part of the University of the Third Age which will be looking at the story of the Church of Scotland from 1560 until today.

I was once before asked to tell the story of the Church of Scotland. It was when I was working in Italy, way back in the 1970s and I was invited to the Benedictine monastery at Novalesa to share in a three-day conference there. The monastery was high in the Italian alps and the people of the village community there looked to Bobio as being the place from which their Christianity had come, brought all the way from Scotland by Columbanus, a monk trained in Iona and a follower of Columba. So naturally the story of Christianity in Scotland was important to them. It was a wonderful privilege to share with the monks at Novalesa, something I was able to do more than once during six happy years working for the Church of Scotland in Italy.

Here in Fogo we have grown into becoming a small church but there is a great deal going on!