We are an inclusive church
At St John’s we welcome everyone to our worship and common life. We make no distinctions in attendance, participation, membership or leadership on grounds of race, gender, age, sexual orientation or social background. We welcome visitors from other faiths, or from none, from other countries and from other Christian communities. Membership is open to anyone who wishes to identify with us.
All who worship with us, including the very youngest, are encouraged to share bread and wine at the Eucharist (we have unfermented grape juice for those who prefer it). Our clergy are authorised for the celebration of same-sex marriages and we have done what we can within the limitations of a small, nineteenth-century building to make our church and our worship accessible to those with physical or mental disabilities. We have wheel-chair access to the building, a single floor-level throughout the nave and chancel, a wheel-chair accessible toilet via a ramp, an induction loop, sound reinforcement and large-print service booklets.
We don’t claim to be perfect, but we do our best to be inclusive.
We are a family church
We are a small church: we have about 60 communicant members and our regular congregation numbers around 30 (though not all the same people every week). Visitors almost always remark on how friendly and welcoming they find us. Like the wider community of the Scottish Borders, we are predominantly grannies and grandpas, but we have younger families too.
We are a collaborative-ministry church
For 12 years from 2011 St John’s did not have a paid priest. Leadership of our life and mission was (and still is) the responsibility of a Ministry Leadership Team (MLT) ‘called-out’ by the congregation and authorised by the Bishop every 5 years. For a few years recently we became a ‘linked charge’ with two neighbouring congregations, St Peter’s, Galashiels, and St Cuthbert’s, Hawick, together comprising the ‘Borders Centre of Mission’, sponsored jointly by the Diocese of Edinburgh and the Church Army, with a priest-in-charge who was also ‘Lead Evangelist’ and a lay ‘Pioneer Evangelist’. However, during the summer of 2022 the Lead Evangelist left for a new ministry in Norfolk, the partnership with the Church Army ended, and the Centre of Mission was wound up. St John’s and St Peter’s continue as linked charges, which have now welcomed the Revd Dr Lesley Penny as priest-in-charge, an appointment which makes her an ex officio member of our MLT at St John’s.
Before her move to the Borders Lesley was a curate at St Cuthbert’s Episcopal Church in Edinburgh and was in training for 5 years with the Scottish Episcopal Institute. A vet by profession, she was involved in church leadership for over 30 years in Edinburgh. She felt a call towards the Borders for a long time and was delighted to be able to come to the linked charges of St Peter’s, Galashiels and St John’s, Selkirk.
As she began her ministry with us Lesley wrote: ‘The Scottish Borders have been on my heart since the start of the ordination process over 6 years ago and so when this position was advertised, although my training was not quite completed, I jumped at the chance. Childhood holidays at Gattonside, and time spent at the vet practice at Galashiels when I was a student, mean that the area around Gala and Selkirk is very familiar, and my husband and I are delighted to be moving to a place that we both love. St Peter’s and St John’s have done well to re-establish their various ministries to their communities after COVID and it will be good to build together on these and explore other opportunities. ‘
Our Ministry Leadership Team (MLT) currently comprises several lay people as well as our priest-in-charge, and it reports to the Vestry. Its role is to nurture and support the ministries of all the members of St John’s – in the wider world as well as in the church – and to discern the vision for our common life. It started its current 5-year term of office at Easter 2023, and was formally commissioned by the Bishop of Edinburgh in February 2024.
This is an unusual and pioneering arrangement in the Scottish Episcopal Church. We hope it may offer an example of how church can be ‘done’ differently within the Anglican tradition. You can find out more about it by reading a brief account of our story: see A Collaborative-Ministry Church.
We are an open-minded church
We’re not very keen on labels at St John’s: we’re not a particularly tribal community. Our congregation includes people from a spectrum of Anglican styles; our worship, which is based on the Scottish Liturgy of 1982, with seasonal variations and some material from other parts of the Anglican Communion, is neither ritualistic nor ‘happy-clappy’; we value the liturgical tradition of the Episcopal Church and the encounter with mystery that goes with it, and we strive for the sort of informality that allows us to make meaningful connections between our Monday-to-Saturday lives and what goes on in church on Sundays.
For us, being a faith-community means being on a journey of discovery with God – a work in progress. Few of us feel we have arrived. Many of us have more questions than answers; some of us are less sure about some things than we once were. We don’t regard doubt as reprehensible and we tend to be suspicious of certainty. We’re aware that we don’t know what we don’t know, and we’re conscious that there is a provisional quality to the things we’re sure about. In other words, we live by faith.
Opportunities for learning together play an important part in our common life. We ask questions. We take the Bible seriously as a record of humankind’s encounter with God and a testimony to human experience of God’s self-disclosure. We see ourselves as part of God’s project for solving the human problem through people committed to living by the goals and values of God’s rule (or kingdom) – but we know that God’s rule has to be worked out in the context of our own changing circumstances.
Our aspirations are well-expressed in American Bishop Wesley Frensdorff’s poem, The Dream, written in the 1980s. Some of us feel this could have been written for us!
We make connections with our community
The internal re-ordering of St John’s, completed in 2021, has given us lots of new opportunities for making connections with our local community. One of the most important of these is our own Memory Cafe for dementia sufferers and their carers, which takes place in the church fortnightly on Tuesday afternoons. A varied programme of activities, exercises, games and conversation, supported by trained volunteers, offers encouragement and stimulation to people in various stages of memory loss.
Another initiative saw St John’s take part in the Churches Together in Selkirk programme of ‘Winter Warmers’. During the winter of 2022-23 the church was open on Friday afternoons from 2.00 to 4.30 pm, providing a warm space with hot drinks, newspapers, table games and space for crafts, or just to sit, for anyone who wanted to take advantage of it. Ther was nothing to pay – though we didn’t say ‘no’ to voluntary contributions towards the cost of keeping the building warm.
The re-ordered church also provides a welcoming space for other community organisations to use. Borders Youth Theatre, Selkirk Stormers (a yarn-bombing group), Fitlates, Tai Chi, the Roxburgh Singers, have all made use of the flexible space, which also serves as a meeting place for our monthly social Tea and Chat on the second Monday afternoon of each month. Study groups, the Vestry, the Leadership Team and the church Film Group all use the space as appropriate.
We are an Eco-church and we support FairTrade
St John’s has supported FairTrade for many years. We use FairTrade supplies of coffee, biscuits and Communion wine, and we have regular FairTrade stalls in church and at our twice-yearly St John’s coffee mornings. One of our members has been a leader of the Selkirk FairTrade Steering Group and has made presentations about Fair Trade to a number of groups and other churches around the Borders. We have enthusiastically supported FairTrade fashion shows, wine and cheese parties, coffee mornings, chocolate fountains, and the successful campaign to get Selkirk officially recognised as a FairTrade town.
We are serious about the need to care for God’s creation and look after the planet, with each person in our congregation playing their part. When we received Eco-Congregation Scotland’s Bronze Award for eco-awareness in 2019 one of the assessors commented, “We were so impressed by the commitment and enthusiasm of the congregation. The variety of activity was amazing and wholehearted. It was very clear that each person has green threads running through them. Every person was committed to doing whatever they can, in their own special way, to the Glory of God.” We were delighted to have our efforts recognized in this way and continue to look for further opportunities to make a difference in this world.
We are a learning church
At St John’s we encourage each other to think about our faith so as to be confident about what we do (and don’t) believe as followers of Jesus. We recognize that thoughtful discipleship sometimes has to confront questions that have no easy answers, but we have found that faith is strengthened and hope is renewed when we explore what we believe (and doubt) together. In most years we have a study day for the whole congregation. Lent Groups meet in the early spring, and in the autumn we often run one or two modules of Travelling On, a course of theological study written and led by one of our retired clergy who used to be Principal of a Theological College.
We love to celebrate
Celebration is at the heart of the life of St John’s: after all, we meet to celebrate the Eucharist every Sunday! So it’s not surprising if we get together to party at regular intervals too. And friends from other churches or from none are always welcome to join in. While we’re always happy for an excuse to have a party, there are some regular times in the year when we get together to celebrate. The main ones are:
- St John’s-tide. The feast of St John the Evangelist falls on December 27th and we usually arrange a St John’s-tide party (often at lunch time after Sunday worship) in the period between Christmas and New Year.
- Shrove Tuesday. The St John’s pancake party in church on the day before the start of Lent is an established institution. Lots of self-catered good food (including pancakes, of course), wine, and usually a brain-teasing quiz.
- Harvest Lunch. After our annual Harvest Festival and Gift Day service on the first Sunday in October we celebrate the end of summer with a slap-up meal. This used to be at one of our local restaurants, but since the completion of the church re-ordering it takes the form of a bring-and-share lunch in church.
We also arrange parties to mark various special occasions, and church outings as the mood takes us. The 2010 Pentecost Party was an outdoor family event in the church grounds, which ended with the release of red and yellow helium balloons with a greeting from St John’s attached, though sadly, none of the cards was ever returned! We marked Queen Elizabeth’s Diamond Jubilee in 2012 with a party in Church House, the former rectory, with coloured bunting and photographic displays of the life and people of St John’s over the previous 60 years. An old-fashioned coach outing to Eyemouth, with a fish and chips lunch was very popular; so was a day-trip to the Museum of Scotland; we’ve had high tea in the garden of a local stately home and a hill-walk up to the Three Brethren, a local landmark. In 2022 we celebrated Queen Elizabeth’s Platinum Jubilee and the 50th anniversary of one of our retired priest’s ordination with bring and share lunches in church, and in 2023 we celebrathed the coronation of King Charles III. Upcoming events are signaled on our Facebook page.
We are a Scottish Episcopal church
St John’s is part of the Scottish Episcopal Church (SEC), a small but lively part of the world-wide Anglican Communion. It has 310 charges (parishes) and about 54,000 members. Influenced by the Oxford Movement in the nineteenth century, it approaches the twenty-first with an open-minded, inclusive and creative style.
Although often known locally as ‘the English Church’, the SEC is in fact one of a handful of provinces of the Anglican Communion that do not trace their origins back to the Church of England. Instead it looks back to the Scottish church of the middle ages and the Celtic saints who brought the Christian faith from Ireland. When the Church of Scotland became Presbyterian after the Scottish Reformation, it continued to include bishops as well as presbyteries for over a century, until the SEC became a separate denomination in the 1690s because of its Jacobite loyalties.
The SEC played an important part in sustaining the protestant episcopal succession in the USA. Before the War of Independence the American Episcopal Church had no bishops: all its clergy were ordained in England. In 1783 the clergy of Connecticut sent one of their number, Samuel Seabury, to England to be consecrated as the first American bishop. Seabury could not take the oath of loyalty to George III so arrangements were made for his consecration to take place in Aberdeen where neither he nor the bishops who consecrated him had to take the oath (since the SEC was not the legally Established Church in Scotland). To this day there is a saltire (St Andrew’s cross) in the shield of the Episcopal Church in the USA.