Episode notes
In this special first episode of the third season of the GoHealth podcast, Gillian talks with The Very Reverend Martin Fair.
Martin is a Former Moderator of the Church of Scotland, the Minister of St. Andrew’s Church in Arbroath that operates an inspirational community project called Havilah.
He is the incoming chair of the Scottish Pilgrim Routes Forum.
But arguably even more interesting than all of those significant accolades he was the Church of Scotland Minister in residence at Balmoral on the final weekend of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II’s life.
In this inspiring, challenging and touching episode Martin and Gillian talk about
- The two times Martin has been the Minister at Crathie Kirk where the Royal Family worship while at Balmoral. And the Minister in residence at Balmoral on those weekends.
- What a good death looks like and the good death of The Queen.
- The entanglement of Church and State.
- Martin shares about the mental health outreach set up by St. Andrew’s Parish Church in Arbroath.
- They discuss the cost of living crisis and how Christians and Churches are and can respond.
- The role of the Church providing a places of lament and listening.
- The distinctive hope the Church brings to such times of collective grief through the truth of Resurrection.
- Martin shares two personal memories from that final weekend of the Queen’s life that will remain with him.
Links:
Join the GoHealth Community gohealth.org.uk
Follow GoHealth on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook @guildofhealth
Havilah http://www.arbroathstandrews.org.uk/?page_id=94
Scottish Pilgrim Routes Forum https://www.sprf.org.uk
Transcript
Gillian Straine: I am Gillian Straine and welcome to the GoHealth podcast. We are in season three of the GoHealth podcast and our theme for this season is exploring flourishing together. And we’ve got a great series of conversations to release over the next few months. So far, nearly 3000 people have listened to this podcast and we’re just so grateful and thankful to you for listening and for sharing it in your networks to get these conversations out there, conversations at the intersection of faith and health.
If you want to explore this further, how to flourish together further, do join our GoHealth Community for more discussion, resources and inspiration. Our tagline in the GoHealth Community is together we flourish. We basically continue what we start in these podcasts. Good conversations, exploring health and healing with faith, with inspirational people. So why not join the community? Join in the conversation and join us in flourishing. If you haven’t done so already, please rate and subscribe to the podcast. This really helps others to find us.
So in this special first edition of series three of the GoHealth podcast, I’m chatting with the Very Reverend Martin Fair. Martin is a minister of St Andrews in Arbroath, in Scotland, where he has established a successful outreach program supporting those on the edges of society, particularly those struggling with addiction.
Martin was Moderator of the Church of Scotland, which is like the head person of the Church of Scotland, between 2020 and 2021, leading the church there through COVID. And he’s also about to become the chair of the Scottish Pilgrim Routes Forum. And we’re delighted that Martin agreed to join us for a podcast edition. But this is a special edition and we’re particularly chatting with Martin because he spent last weekend with the Queen at Balmoral as her chaplain, just a few days before the Queen’s sadly died.
So Martin very generously gave us some time to record this just a few days after she died, before the funeral as well. So we’re chatting on the 12th of September, and it was extraordinarily moving to hear about his time with the Queen and the close Royal Family just days before her death. So in the conversation we touch on a whole lot of things. His experience of Balmoral, he’d been there before and his final conversation with the Queen, which is really moving, comes at right at the end of the podcast. His very final conversation with the Queen.
We also got chatting about the place of the church, entangled as it is in Government and how we process that in our modern day. And then we also touched on wider questions about how the church and the people of faith can help others during this time of national mourning, but also looking further ahead into the winter and into the cost of living crisis to come.
We need to get Martin back. He is a really inspirational guy in terms of his personal faith, in terms of his vision of radical church leadership, open and vulnerable Christian living, not to mention his work in the community and mental health. So on with this episode.
[MUSIC]
So, Martin, thank you so much for joining me for this special edition of the GoHealth Podcast. And we’re recording this, I just had to work out my fingers, four days after the death of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. So how are you? How has your weekend been, where, where are you sitting as you chat to us today?
Martin Fair: Well, fine, Gillian, it’s great to chat with you. I’m at home in Arbroath, which is on the East Coast of Scotland between Dundee and Aberdeen. It’s been going for over 30 years since I’ve been parish minister here. I had a good weekend. On Sunday afternoon we actually traveled down past Dundee to watch the Queen’s cortege go past. Do you know, I don’t think I would ever have thought of doing anything like that before, but there’s just been something almost seismic about what’s happened and a sense of history and the changing of eras almost.
So Elaine and I, my wife, we just thought, let’s go! So we drove down and there were thousands of people lining the route, yes thousands across the whole country. But where we were, a lot of people and a very respectful, dignified silence, really, as the cortege drove by. So it’s just one of those things that I’m glad we did.
Gillian: Yes, it’s almost unpredictable how people are going to react. I’ve been watching it on the news myself, so I grew up in Petercoulter, which is just a few villages down from Balmoral. When I was a kid, my dad used to make me sit on my little chair on the pavement waiting for the Queen to go by and waving, as a kid, at her.
I’m sure it just so my dad would get me out of the road and get on with some jobs. And I remember I, my best friend, lived in the house that Queen Victoria built for John Brown. So I spent all my teenage days walking around Balmoral and getting stopped by the police incase we were up to anything naughty. So it’s been really interesting for me to see these are scenes of my childhood and seeing her coffin come through…And I was very struck by the crowds, because, you know, this is this has been a long time coming. She was a lady of a great age as well, but there has been…it just feels like a great sweep of emotion and people wanting to be part of it.
Martin: Absolutely. And I think I’ve been surprised at my own reaction. I’ve been more emotional than I ever thought I would have been. And I’ve heard people say that over and over again. My Facebook feed yesterday was flooded with photographs of people across Scotland, friends obviously, who had been out to watch the cortege go by and had snapped photographs as they went.
And people are quite honestly, I wouldn’t have thought that would have been their thing, and yet they were reporting themselves having shed a tear one way or another. So I think it’s almost a deeper reason than just the end of somebody’s life. It somehow impacts us all because, royalist or not, monarchist or not, whatever your kind of constitutional background, the Queen has been there. That’s it.
Gillian: Yeah.
Martin: She’s just been there the whole time. So even if we haven’t quite had time to process it all yet, it still has affected many of us in a way that we didn’t expect.
Gillian: Yeah, I’ve been surprised. This is why I’m so delighted that I can chat to you this morning, Martin, because we’ve known each other for a few years and we’ve been very supportive of the Healthy Healing Hub project when you were Moderator of the Church of Scotland and I knew you were the man to chat to about this, but also because you were with the Queen, weren’t you, just a couple of days before she died?
So for those of us who don’t know that much about why the Queen gets chaplains every weekend, can you tell us, had you been there before, what’s the official role? How does that work? Why were you in Balmoral last weekend?
Martin: Okay, good question. I’m pinching myself to work the answer out to that, but it was it was very much a privilege and more-so as I look back now. As many folk will know, the Queen and members of the Royal Family decant from London to Balmoral and and that really dates back to Victorian times. And more recently the Queen has gone there for two months really, from maybe mid-July through to the end of September. And during that time they very faithfully worship at Crathie Kirk, which is the local Church of Scotland. There’s some fascinating history around. Back in Victorian days, that’s when it started. Victoria began to worship at Crathie Kirk. Now the local Episcopalian community were slightly put out by this, that she’d be going to the the Presbyterian Church, the local church. So they actually developed, I think built from scratch or certainly refurbished and enhanced greatly the local Episcopal Church in, in Braemar, which is just a few miles away. And the story goes something like this, that she went to see it and sort of nodded in kind of a cool acknowledgment but never stepped in it and continued to go to Crathie Kirk, much to some people’s disquiet.
So our own Queen, of course, has continued to do that throughout her years. And the local minister, at this point in time, Reverend Ken Mackenzie, he is charged as the Queen’s local Chaplain, as it were, with inviting some guests preachers to come Sunday by Sunday to be at Crathie Kirk. I was first invited to go in 2014. It was the last week in September, Gillian, and what I remember most about that occasion was that it was the week after the the referendum on Scottish independence and I remember in advance thinking – you see if Scotland votes yes, this is going to make this a really interesting weekend being with the Queen and Royal Family. As it was, as you know, it didn’t turn out.
So that was 2014 and I really didn’t think I would ever be back. But there again I was privileged, as you said, just two weekends ago, to be there and to spend the weekend. And actually, I enjoyed it more this time because, one, I knew what to expect, so I was more relaxed within myself. And secondly, because it was just the Queen and her immediate family. Last time around, there were many guests, extended Royal Family and their guests. So there was a lot of people there, whereas this time it was literally just the Queen and the immediate family. And I spent the whole weekend literally just with them through the Saturday to the Monday. So it was it was quite wonderful. And I just honestly kept pinching myself and thinking, I’m sat here, I’m chatting with the Queen, I’m chatting with Princess Anne and chatting with Prince Charles, about everyday things. About Princess Anne and her husband Sir, Tim’s yachting holiday up the west coast of Scotland. Chatting with now King Charles, of course, about his long held concern for you know, environmental issues and in many ways he was ahead of his time. So, listen, we can talk more, but that’s the setting, that’s the background, that’s why I was there. And it would have been a privilege just to go anyway, but the fact that it turned out to be just before the passing of the Queen. Waow, I will alway remember that.
Gillian: And is there an expectation when you’re there that you will sort of dispense spiritual pearls of wisdom? Are they looking to you for that or is it company? Are they looking for you to a conversation with you to understand better what’s happening within the Church of Scotland and within the community? Or is it simply, as you say, the chatting about the weather and what’s going on around them?
Martin: All of the above I think is the best answer. You are there officially for the weekend as a spiritual adviser, a spiritual presence. And so, as I said, you lead worship at Crathie Kirk in the morning. But on both occasions that I’ve been members of the family have been fairly keen at lunchtime afterwards and so on to pick up the themes of of the worship, to pick up sermon themes and, and just to talk, talk more, more widely. And at that moment, you can bet that the conversations go deeper. And again, what a privilege to share with folks on inner matters, as it were, that, you know, they won’t often perhaps articulate publicly. Of course, the Queen in her Christmas Day messages, I think, in recent years became more and more up front by way of her Christian faith. And there have been other occasions, but for the other members of the family. So, for example, following worship this Sunday I had a long conversation with, with Prince Edward, and he he discussed what I’d said, he quoted Scripture verses himself that, you know, that were in his head and heart. So we really got good going conversations, know that and all the other stuff like cost of living and Ukraine and the Queen in particular, it was, you can’t overestimate or overstate how much she was completely up to speed with everything going on in the world. And that was just so recently as a couple of weeks ago, nothing got by her. Her memory for what had gone in years gone by and her awareness of what was going on right now just totally took me aback.
She was bright and sharp and keen witted and a glint in her eye, ready to smile and laugh. The person that we know and love but to have that up close opportunity so recently was, as I said, and I keep saying it probably, a real privilege.
Gillian: Just extraordinary. And what was your what was your sermon on on Sunday? What what were the text? And what did you preach? What was the final message our late Majesty got on her final Sunday?
Martin: Well. To be to be just clear about that, Gillian, in the preceding times, she had not been able to attend worship. So other members, all the rest of the family were there, but her Majesty wasn’t. And that was purely down to mobility. And she said to me on the Saturday night how regretful she was, that she wasn’t able to be at worship. But nonetheless, she asked me for the readings and for the hymns that we would be singing so that she could be aware, at least, of of what we were talking about. And I conversed with her after the service, and I was really reflecting on the way that we sometimes make plans in our lives, in fact, we do it every time we get out of bed I suppose, what we’re going to do that day, what we’ll be having for dinner, there are those everyday, ordinary plans right up to the bigger ones. What am I going to do with the rest of my life? But then I picked up on Joseph, for example, who, you know, had dreams and plans and my goodness they didn’t work out as he might have imagined. You know, loathed by his brothers, left for dead, sold as a slave, ending up wrongfully imprisoned. And sometimes it’s like that in life, you know, we have our hopes and dreams of how things are going to pan out. And, you know, so often things go awry. As you mentioned earlier, I served as a Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland just a couple of years ago.
Well, you bet I had plans for that year. We we’re so excited and looking forward to traveling internationally, to going around Scotland and then came COVID. And honestly, every single one of those plans was torn up. But that’s life and what I was doing with my reflection at Crathie Kirk that morning was saying, when life is like that, all the more we need to trust in the one who is from everlasting to everlasting and who is reliable and faithful through every change that life can throw at us. So that was the theme of it. And you know, just where our trusting should be and believing that despite everything we see around us, that God has plan and purpose not only for us but for His creation as a whole. So that was the idea of where I went on that Sunday morning.
Gillian: And it’s a fantastic message, I think particularly thinking around what’s going on with the cost of living crisis and so on. So maybe we’ll circle back to that later as well. I just wanted to ask you, was there any sense the Queen’s life was coming to an end? It seemed from the outside, from somebody sitting watching on Twitter as I was, that there was a big rush. This was somehow unexpected, despite her years. What was your impression at the weekend? Was there a sense that she was declining in a way that they hadn’t seen before? Or do you think it was a bit of a rush on the, on, on the Thursday that last week.
Martin: I had no sense of whatsoever, in fact, when I met Her Majesty, when we first met on the Saturday evening before dinner, I was really pleasantly surprised because one imagines that, of course, she was 96, we had seen less and less of her publicly. So I was expecting maybe to find her a lot frailer. And I will reiterate her mobility was compromised. That’s why we didn’t see much of her at the Platinum Jubilee and even since then. But take aside, take out the mobility, and I was so pleasantly surprised, she was, I found in a very good form and others that I’ve spoken to who have been with her in those most recent days said the same. They were they were very surprised and delighted to find her so well, so sharp and actually looking fine, looking well, really for, you know, for the women of 96 years of age. So I am not and I don’t suppose ever will be privy to exactly what unfolded in the last days. But if one was to surmise, one might think that it came quite suddenly in the end.
Gillian: I was talking to my neighbour yesterday who I, I can’t say is an elderly lady because that doesn’t feel right. But she was she does remember the coronation, but she’s an extremely sprightly lady and and a good friend to me. And she was thrilled. The word she used was thrilled. I was thrilled at the kind of death that the Queen had. And I was really struck by that, a lady of her age, her impression was had a really good death. Her family were all in the same country. I hadn’t thought of this, but very unusually her, all her family, were at least in Great Britain and could get to her. She dies in a place that she loved and it meant a lot to her. And she didn’t go to hospital as well. And I was exactly what a good, if we can say, a good death that was. And, and I’d love know your reflections on that and what a good death looks like and what that means to the nation? And then looking back, she’d been declining in a very, very public way. And there’s, you know, there’s something about we shut our elderly and our dying away in hospitals and hospices so we don’t have to see them. That didn’t happen to her, luckily not. Not everyone can avoid, avoid going to hospitals and hospices. But she did die a very good death in some ways, didn’t she?
Martin: She did. And I think we should absolutely embrace that phrase a good death. And the reality is that it’s not always that way. And some people have very painful and miserable endings, and maybe we need to get better at how we deal with all of that. But in terms of Her Majesty, I mean, I heard that said, I think many times that her wish was to die in Scotland. Now, I never heard her say that, but that’s what I had heard. So if that were the case, then that’s what happened. And it wouldn’t surprise me because she loved Balmoral, there’s no question of that. It was being off duty. It was just being themselves as a family much more than is ever normally able to be the case.
If it can just go back a little bit in 2014 when I was there, the form is over the weekend that there would normally be one dinner would be very formal, sort of black tie dinner in the castle itself, and one dinner the Saturday, the Sunday, a barbecue at one of the many lodges on the Balmoral estate. And so it was in 2014 it was decided that it would be a barbecue in the Saturday night. So we were to assemble at 8:00 at the front door of the main entrance to Balmoral castle, and there’s many people there. And then Her Majesty arrives through a corridor. She came right up to me and said, Minister, you come with me. So we walked out the door and there was a sort of fleet of Range Rover cars, and I was shown to the passenger seat in the front of these cars, and the queen got in the driver’s seat and no one else, just the two of us with her driving and we sped off from the castle over the, the rough trails and tracks of the estate out to this lodge. That has to stand as one of the, the most amazing experiences to go to a barbecue being driven by the Queen. But it’s the next bit that I absolutely loved – when we got there and the Duke of Edinburgh, Prince Philip, was manning the barbecue. And so he was literally there on his own barbecuing grouse and so on. And then we went inside and the Queen proceeded to set the table, you know, just do all of those kind of grandmother things that she was doing, just home-making. And it was just so lovely to see because, because normally we only have sight of very formal, almost regimented occasions. So at Balmoral it could be different and that I think was what made it so special. And you said it so well to have to be where she wanted to be, to have family near at hand, and to pass, by all accounts peacefully and quickly. Well, wouldn’t you choose that for yourself?
There was a woman in my congregation who was in a nineties similarly, and it was a royal occasion a few years back, I can’t remember if it was one of the weddings, but this particular women was as royalist as you can find, and she had been preparing for this day for long enough. Her house was bedecked with red, white and blue bunting. She had a cake ready and all of that, and she had her daughter watched this wedding. It was a beautiful summer’s day, as I remember it. And then a daughter went outside to do some gardening and came in about an hour or so later to find that her mum, this elderly lady, had just slipped peacefully away. She was still sitting on the seat that she had watched the royal wedding from and for her had been just the happiest of occasions to watch this wedding. And then she just slipped away in the minutes that followed it. And though her daughter was obviously shocked in the moment that it happened so suddenly and she found her mum like that, now a little further on, she describes that as that would have been exactly what her mum would have chosen. So a good death, a good passing. And I think we are glad that that’s what the Queen experienced.
Gillian: Yeah, absolutely. Now, can I ask, I want to ask some questions about some of the negative stuff that’s come up over the weekend, monarchists and anti-monarchists as well. Some of that dynamic and some some stuff’s kicking up around that. But as a background to that, I was very struck on and I’m losing track of the days, Saturday when there was the King’s Proclamation, and there we had the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Archbishop of York, stood on the platform.
Martin: Yeah.
Gillian: In, in the grand room they were standing in, and for the first time, you know, and I start to know the history – I’m from, I was a Presbyterian, I’m now a Church of England priest – now I know a bit of the history around all this, but it was like a visceral experience of the entanglement of church with state that I never quite experienced before, and then that, that oath to uphold the security of the Church of Scotland sent me straight to Wikipedia, because, oh, I sort of half knew but didn’t know well enough.
Martin: Yes.
Gillian: And I just wanted to know your impressions as a former Moderator of the Church of Scotland to speak into some of this dynamic that we’re picking up about the entanglement of church and state, how important that is for the governance of our country. And yet we are linked here, we’ve got the people in the robes up at the front here, linked into parish priest and parish ministers on the ground dealing with running a church and being the person of Jesus Christ, proclaiming servant leadership and the service of the poor in amongst it. It’s kind of messy, isn’t it Martin? How do we begin to process all of that?
Martin: Gillian, how long have you got? This is a fantastic question, and it is one that is trying us, I think, at the moment and has been for some time. You said, you know, a little bit about the history, but just to be a little clearer, the Church of Scotland is what we would describe as a national church, it is the recognised Church of Scotland. But it is not the established church in the same way that the Church of England is. So it is a free church in that sense. And what it means is that when our General Assembly comes around every year, the Monarch is invited to attend, or instead of the Queen, as it’s been these last 70 years, her appointed person is called the Lord High Commissioner. Now that person is welcomed to the General Assembly and addresses the General Assembly and so on, but has no part in it, so there’s nothing the same as the Queen being the, you know, the the head of the Church of England, defender of the faith and that kind of thing – it is markedly different. And yet you pointed to it, for a long time, and it really does go back into the history books, the Church of Scotland has been recognised and the Presbyterian form of government, the Protestant faith has been defended, as it were, and and so on and so on. But this does begin, you know, begin to raise all kinds of questions it has done through the years. But I think it is heightened now, it certainly is for various reasons. What does it mean to have that statement when we really want to be as ecumenical as possible? And last year at our General Assembly, we signed the St. Margaret Declaration, which acknowledges our friendship and our desire to work more closely together with our Roman Catholic neighbours. A couple of years ago, we signed the Colomba Agreement, which binds us more closely together with the Scottish Episcopal Church and so on and so on.
So we’re thoroughly ecumenical. There’s a very strong body, the Scottish Church Leaders Forum, which brings together church leaders from across the Christian spectrum. So we want to work with them and I for one therefore have this sort of sense of being uncomfortable that we are a little bit elevated or a little bit different. And I think many of us are feeling that, also of course, from the time when that would have been established, that sort of precedent, then we’re also multicultural, not quite to the extent of England, but of course we have significant populations representing other faiths as well, and that has to be factored in. But towards the end of your opening to your question, I think you really hit on the head that the Christlike model of leadership that he came not to be served, but to serve. I think that is what we are embracing more and more in this age.
And for me, it sits a little uncomfortably to have us against the apparatus of the state and the establishment. And I know, for one, I’m speaking very personally here. Some would agree with me, others wouldn’t. But when our General Assembly opens, for example, we have all the pageantry you can imagine. I’m not sure how comfortable I am with that when I know that back in my parish, I mean to bring it right up to date, I’ve got people who are massively struggling right now, and that’s before the cost of living crisis really begins to hit home hard. And my congregation, we’ve worked for 16 years now alongside people who struggle with addiction. I mean, we’ve got the whole gamut of socio economic problems going on right now. And then I just think what we do by way of our being snuggled up close to the state and the establishment, it just seems to jar with so much of what we do in our local parishes, not our local situations.
Now, I think there are benefits in some ways of having relationships across the whole of society from top to bottom. But there is a jarring at times and that I think is an issue.
You mentioned right at the beginning there, Gillian, you were talking about Monarchy and anti-monarchist and so on, we’ve seen a little bit of that for sure. One very distasteful scene up north, little bit west of Inverness, I think, when somebody videoed themselves and put it all over social media sort of dancing and jumping for joy and singing things like Lizzie’s dead and so on, outside the establishment that this person ran.
And by all accounts, you know, it was all over social media within within an hour, the windows of that of that business had been broken, and there was crowds, you know, the woman had to be given police protection, I think, you know, that’s the sort of the very extremes of it. But mostly what I heard was this, and even from a respected friend of mine who’s a well-known journalist in Scotland, but Republican anti-monarchist, but he put on Twitter, he said, ‘those of us like me who are anti-monarchist, right now the best thing we should do is to say nothing. And if we can’t say anything kind, all the more-so to say nothing.’ And I think that is largely what has prevailed. That people have recognised that even though this would not be the constitutional arrangement that I would want to sign up to, we need to recognise and respect who Her Majesty was and her longevity of service and so on.
Gillian: And you mentioned the cost of living crisis and your work in the community there. I wonder if you can tell our listeners a bit about the charity you set up around mental health and suicide and am also comment and give a bit of advice and steer on how Christians in their communities can respond to what’s ahead. Because it seems to me there’s a bit of a shutting down going on, building up the castle wall, to use a terrible metaphor, really for what we’re talking about, you know, how, how will I get through? How will I save money? How will I be all right? When the Christian call is to serve our neighbours? How do we do that well, at this time?
Martin: Yes, but it’s a challenge, isn’t it? And we, we established that our our ministry a project in 2006. So it’s been running for some time. And that was in response to a very sure sense of the need across our community. You know, before that, Gillian, I’d been in my congregation for well over a decade and my business had been building up the congregation. That’s what I thought my job was, and to be fair we’d done it quite well. We’d a really good going congregation, strong numbers on Sundays. Our worship was, you know, vibrant, we’d lots going on in our church. But there was a growing sense within me, but well, okay, so what, you know, to what end, you know, you’ve got a strong church, but does that is it, is that the whole point? And from those questions and that uncomfortableness, we began to sense no, the point of having a strong church is that we might be, as it were, Christ’s agent in the world, his hands, his feet, and doing what he did and going to where the need is and so on. So we began to explore that. But to begin with, I think it was very piecemeal. I mean, many people would come to the door of our church looking for…they would spin all kinds of yarns, but we knew basically what it was. They were looking for some money, often around alcoholism and addiction and so on and so so it just came to us – we have to do something. We can’t be in here on Sunday morning singing, proclaiming these truths if it doesn’t really work itself out in practice Monday to Friday.
So we started very slowly, one one day a week we just opened our hall. That’s all it was. Interestingly, nobody came and that prevailed for some time. But then after a good while, people did start to begin to come and to fast forward, it started one day, now it runs every day of the week. It’s got its own premises, we employ three staff and through the years we have helped, I’m not exaggerating, thousands of people. Lots with addiction, mental struggles, homeless people, isolated people, broken people in every kind of way. And I think what’s been wonderful, Gillian, how it’s worked is, when people come, all they get, all they get is welcome, non-judgmental welcome and compassion.
Nobody ever mentions God, Bible, Jesus, heaven, but interestingly, often as not, after people have been coming for a wee while, they ask us. They’ll say something like how come you’re all being so kind to us, because you know, everywhere we go, we are treated as dirt – we’re called junkies, scumbags, you know, we’re treated like nobodies. We come here, you’re so nice to us – what is that about?
And then we tell them, because we believe you’re made in the image of God just as we are. We believe you are treasured and valued and that you’re special and in God’s sight and your special to us. And, and and so sometimes to begin with, people then say, Oh, don’t give me that religious stuff. Then a couple of days later, they’ll come and say, d’you want to tell me a wee bit more about that?
Now it was never – we’re not doing it to, you know, get people in our pews. We’re doing it because we believe it’s the right thing, that it’s an expression of Christ’s love for those who are on the margins. And so many, I mean, so many beyond count now, have been helped, supported to get on their feet. And, you know, and it’s a joy for me still today that I’ll meet someone who came to us with ten years worth of terrible heroin addiction, now working or at college, now in a steady relationship, now giving back into society. You know, people who were wrecks of human beings. Now looking happy and healthy. That’s all the reward we have ever needed. Just to see people discover a little taste of the life in all its fullness that Christ spoke of.
Now COVID made all of that really difficult because it was such a hands on ministry. It involved touch, it involved hugs, involved holding people physically sometimes, when they were at their lowest places. And all of it became very difficult. But we are rebuilding little by little, beginning to put these things back together again. In fact we want to extend it and the cost of living crisis is challenging us, how do we now cope? How do we support people? How do we walk alongside people? Because this isn’t the church doing good for people. This is us wanting to genuinely build community and, and be with people. How do we do that when there are going to be people who are not only hungry but are cold? And so we’re exploring that right now across our community, it seems happening across Scotland. We’re asking, how do we do this well, with people? You know, one of the phrases we’re using constantly at the moment is that we’re not doing it to people. We’re not even doing it for people. We want to do things with people that we might together build a stronger community. So we’re talking about open our spaces much more frequently. And doing so with food on the go and that we might just be alongside one another through what’s going to be a difficult winter.
Gillian: And I know across Scotland and also in England there’s a ‘warm rooms initiative’, I think it’s called. Yes, a lot of churches are getting involved in. I was really struck by, you know it’s a really powerful story and it’s what you’re doing up there. And proof of the pudding that people need to belong before they believe or, you know, sometimes it’s like, what comes first? Do we proselytise? I can never say that word, you know, or do you show them welcome? And just another, another proof that opening up our communities and demonstrating the love of Christ comes first and almost a secondary thing, isn’t it? Building congregations, which sort of goes against a lot of the senior church leadership we’re getting all the time, you know – numbers, growth, you know, what is your mission action plan, your map? We get that all the time here and the other half my little time I seem to spend with disillusioned clergy going I’m so exhausted and I can’t do…I didn’t join the church, I don’t feel called to just lead meetings and fill out forms. I want to do good in the community.
Martin: Yeah. I mean, there’s a balance to be struck because if our congregation numbers dwindled to such a point, then there’ll be no church left to do the kind of work that we want to do. So, so, you know, I’m all for seeking to build up church, but it’s how we go about that. I think if we build community, if we seek to serve, if we look to give ourselves away, then we find life.
And as I was saying, and particularly in relation to that project, we have never pushed faith in that sense and in that proselytizing kind of way. But when the love of Christ is demonstrated, then all the more so people begin to interested. But it must never be a sort of an excuse, as it were, you know in other words, we’re not going to be kind to you all the while secretly our plan is to get you into our church.
Some years ago, a woman came to me and said her neighbor, who lives in our parish, that her neighbour, an elderly gentleman, was was facing up to six weeks of chemotherapy – I maybe misspoke, probably radiotherapy. But he was going to have to go to Dundee, a journey of about 20 miles to Dundee at Ninewells hospital every day on the bus, he had no car and on the bus every day for intensive therapy. So she told me this and immediately I said, he’s in our parish, we mobilised. So we got a rota together and we drove him there. Members of my church drove him every day, stayed at the hospital and brought him back. About two or three weeks into that one of the one of the drivers said it’s a real shame he hasn’t started coming to church yet, as if that by us doing that for him, you know, maybe we were doing hoping that he would come to church. And I said, look, if the man chooses to come to church, I’ll be as happy as anybody. But we’re not doing it for that reason. We’re doing it because it’s the right thing to do to be kind, to help our neighbour in this moment. And that particular man never did come to church. But if the same thing happened tomorrow we would do the same thing.
Gillian: Yeah, yeah. It’s the differences between the doing the work of God and keeping an institution going. There’s nothing wrong with the institution, but our work is around God and God’s mission in the world – the Missio Dei, we had a great conversation in our team and I think, you know, Graeme and Wendy both work for the Guild of Health and we run the Healthy Healing Hub project, and we’re drilling down who are we doing this for? Who are we doing this for? Over and over again and what we’re doing it for, it’s for disillusioned church leaders or folk that want to do this? And actually what we came down to is we’re doing it for the folk who stand outside McDonalds on a Saturday night because they’ve got nowhere else to be? Do you know, so we’ve got this – we’re not doing it for the church, church happens to be the place we are working through. We’re doing it for God to reach those that we, we believe it will change their life, to have faith. It’s not up to us whether or not that happens, but we have this gift that we want to share with others. We’re less about running an institution or holding up an institution, but our focus is beyond and just hope…and that’s that’s where faith comes in, hoping that, you know, the faith it will sweep along behind us and grow the church and keep the institution going in some ways as well, but that’s not the main focus.
Martin: No, it’s not. And I couldn’t agree with you more. I think this brings us back to the ceremony on Saturday morning and this business of, you know, the defending the, you know, the rights of the Church of Scotland and so on. But what does that what does that really mean? I’m very keen on a phrase that I picked up from the theologian Walter Bruggemann some time ago, he said that ‘you have to relinquish before you can receive’, which I just love. I mean, if your hands are absolutely full of whatever then you can’t have anything else, because they’re already full. Sometimes you have to lay down to, to receive the new thing and this is certainly how I feel about the whole business of the institution and the established church. As long as we cling on to it and try to try to make it last as long as possible, then we’re sort of closing ourselves off to the new thing that God may well be wanting to do among us, even now, but will we be bold enough to let go and to and to acknowledge that that form of church, that form of how we’ve done things and organised ourselves, was appropriate in a certain time, but perhaps less so, now, and will we be bold enough to to let go, that genuinely green shoots begin to come and we see what God would have us be and how God would have us live in the time to come? That’s what excites me, and I’ve got, well, give or take, ten years left of working life before I could officially draw a pension and I want to see that I’m not going to spend those ten years, you know, trying to keep the show on the road. I want to spend ten years almost looking to see what God is doing. You know the phrase we sometimes use – a red sky at night, shepherd’s delight and so on – and Jesus, of course, said, you folks you’re very good at reading the, you know, the skies for the forecast but, but, but you’re not necessarily so good at seeing what God is doing. And I think that’s what we’re called to right now. Just and there’s a wonderful book called Red Skies, which I’ve just read and and it’s that, isn’t it just seeing what’s God up to, where is God going to lead us? And I think it’ll be more so outside McDonald’s, as you described it, more so working with those at the margins than the church trying to be right at the heart of the establishment. That’s that’s gone.
Gillian: So what is God up to right now, to circle back to the times we are living through in the moment – we’re living between the death of the Queen and her funeral. And you brought up Brueggemann there so when you said Walter Brueggemann, I was right back in theological college because he was a great Psalm man for me when we studied the Psalms, but he particularly talked about the Psalms of lament and their use within the ancient Jewish temple worship, but their use today to help us process difficult things that are going on. Lament not just grief, but lamenting, crying out to God in order to process difficult times in our lives and what God is up to in that. So these are strange days, we live in uncertain times anyway, the Queen’s death has brought in another period of uncertainty. We’ve talked about in legal governance terms, but also what’s going on in our community. How can people of faith be of service in these days as we process the Queen’s death, I want to say but, you know, we all know there’s a lot of unprocessed grief going on as well. I was at, I was in (Lichfield) Cathedral over the weekend doing a bit of chaplaincy work and just chatting to people who talked about the Queen, but then they talked about their mum who died or something else has gone on. So this this is bigger grief that’s going on.
How do we lament well, Martin, in these days as well as we try to seek out what God is up to for…in our communities and for our church today?
Martin: Well, I think there are there are many, many ways in which we can begin to. I’d love to see our buildings open much more regularly. And, of course, you’ve talked about the setting you’re in, and that is naturally so a cathedral location – people will come and go all the time. And of course we’ve got St Gile’s Cathedral in Edinburgh will be opened at the moment for mourners to file past. But there’s one thing in cathedrals, we need to see more of that locally because, you know, people may not articulate it in anything like the religious language that you and I might be comfortable and familiar with, but nonetheless, people are processing, people are working through stuff. And as you described it there, I’ve heard people saying the same, it reminds me of when I lost my mum, that kind of thing. So maybe what we need to do above all, is to be listening. Now that’s not new or novel in any way. I mean it goes back to the very beginning, I think, of the very basis of all ministry – it begins by not telling people but but by listening to people. I was thinking about it recently. I’m coming up to 31 years since ordination and when it comes pastorally, Gillian, do you know in those 31 years I don’t think I’ve ever ever once told somebody what to do or you know, advise them to that, to that length where I’m saying this is what I think you should do. I don’t think I’ve ever done that. But in listening, I think I’ve helped people to work it out for themselves and ultimately then they own that, you know, it becomes theirs rather than sort of a wisdom, a pearl of wisdom dispensed from on high. And right now, that’s what pastoral work needs to be. We listen to people who are going to walk into our churches. We’re opening this afternoon, for example, for a few hours we will be beaming the service from St Giles, which takes place at 3:00, but we’re open before and after and I’m just hoping that people can walk in and we’ll be there, but they might want to sit quietly. There’ll be an opportunity for them to light a candle or such like as you would find in cathedrals. But they don’t have to, they can sit at the back and not speak to a soul.
Two and a half years ago, a young man took his life and our community. It was tragic. He went missing for about four days, I think, before he was found and he was 21. All the young folks in our town were searching, you know, looking for him. He wasn’t found. Eventually he was, he was found by a police search team. My own boys were involved. You know, it was ages with them, he was friends with them. It was absolutely tragic in a smallish town – right across. And when I heard he’d been found dead, I mean literally just spur of the moment I went on Facebook our local Facebook page and just said, St Andrew’s church is going to be open tonight from 6:00 if anybody wants to just come in. That’s all, that’s all we did. And that night, Gillian, upwards of 300 young people came into the church. I mean I can’t tell you when that might have ever happened before, probably, probably not. It was packed with just young people and me and my people. We just mixed and mingled with some, but we didn’t interfere almost. We just made the space. But many did want to come up and speak. So this business of creating a space where people can come into even, you know, with no particular religious baggage or language at all. And yet so people sometimes seem drawn to, you know, to church buildings and that and to do that right now will be will be really important, but also to articulate, I think, when there is an apt opportunity. What I was saying earlier, yesterday one of the songs we sang had a line in it – Kingdoms rise and fall – and that’s true. And over a thousand years kingdoms have come and gone particular reigns and now this one has come to an end and all of that is the case. But somehow, sensitively and appropriately, we can point to that which passes not. That which you know, is here, was, is and is to come. And I think to balance out that listening to people and yet pointed to something more I think is our task right now.
Gillian: Thank you. You put it so beautifully and this sort of…it’s almost like embodying the resurrection a bit for people. Not ramming it down their throats, but…I’ve got a friend who’s a retired bishop and she said what she found helpful yesterday, she put on, they’ve got this is very unchurch of Scotland, big black vestments she said that’s hardly ever been worn before because they don’t we don’t do national mourning that often. Just once a year on a Remembrance Sunday they wear them, so they’re quite thick as well because it’s winter in November. And she said there’s something about putting on the black stiff robes. She felt like she was putting on the armour of God. You know, she’s put a kind of great of St Patrick’s breastplate kind of thing. And and wandering through the cathedral, I’m lucky enough to live in, past the, there’s no graves of Kings, but there is there is the memory in that building of we’ve done this before. We’ve been there before and going right back to Easter Sunday. And the in our being and in our welcome, which is, which is counter-cultural at the moment, isn’t to be that radically open in our day and age is radical. It shouldn’t be, but it is. I remember I moved from London when no one talked to each other. It’s a weird if you do, to a smaller place and even I was like, well, this is weird, why are people talking to me in shops like what’s going on? And then getting used to that, it’s much more…we should be much more connected in the community, but we’ve lost it to have that radical openness now with armour on ourselves. Armour is a bit of a military metaphor, but you know, we live and embody the hope, the hope of the resurrection of Jesus Christ into our communities right now can be such a powerful healing presence for what we’re going through.
Martin: I think so. And I love the word radical because it absolutely must define church. I mean, it was radical in the very beginning. And Jesus embodied something that was a challenge to everything that was known, understood. And of course, we’ve allowed the church to be tamed, horribly tamed through the years when – one of my colleagues in the Church of Scotland, he has a book out called Rewilding the Church. And, you know, I love that phrase, Steve Aisthorpe – rewilding the church. And that appeals to me. It really does. Rather than, I mean, think of a garden that’s beautifully tended and everything is in neat rows and the colour schemes have been beautifully laid out. I mean, I can admire that, but I love to see something that’s much wilder and more natural and just happens.
So I’m really looking for church to be rewilded and radical as you’ve spoken about. And gosh, if there’s anything radical in the whole of human history, then it’s resurrection. We’ve got right across the door from my church, we’ve got Arbroath Abbey, which was founded in the 12th century. And it’s a constant reminder to me that, you know, we have this thing as human beings, we kind of think we are it. It all revolves around us and maybe that COVID’s the biggest thing that ever happened in life and that abbey across the road, a thousand years nearly of, of history. It’s seen it all, you know COVID’s the blink of an eye and the and what’s happening now with cost of living. It’s the blink of an eye. I mean, it matters now. I’m not dismissing it, it absolutely matters now, but I think what else we can bring to the, to the conversation is perspective. And also to say that I guess we’re passing through, that would be almost Christian language, isn’t it? We’re we’re passing through. We read in church yesterday day from Psalm 103, we’re as, you know, flowers in a field and then, you know, the wind blows over it and it is gone. And that’s the mortality that we human beings own. And so we should talk about that and we should be absolutely upfront about that – our mortality, but setting it against a much bigger picture.
Gillian: We need to draw the conversation to a close. Thank you so much for being on the GoHealth podcast. You’ve ended there with a beautiful image – the flower blooms, the wind blows and the place knows it no more. Could you summarise the place that has been left behind by the Queen. What will be your abiding memory of her, of the time you spent with her in the last weekend and what she leaves behind us in terms of her witness and her work as our monarch.
Martin: I’ll share two things Gillian, in closing. I’ll try to do it quickly – personal insight really from this last couple of weeks. We sat at dinner on the Saturday night and literally I was there and her Majesty was on my right side and Sophie, Countess of Wessex, was sitting on my left and I and in chatting I said, Mam of your Platinum Jubilee, what was your highlight? And she said, Trooping the colour, because I remember that all through the years and, and I said, Mam if I might be so bold, for me and for many others, it was the little Tea Party enjoyed with Paddington Bear. And she, she smiled the broadest of smiles and said it was really fun, wasn’t it? I said it was more than that, it was absolutely wonderful. So I’ll long remember that, to see her smiling that way. And then when I took my leave of Her Majesty at the end of my stay, I said to her two things. First of all, I said, I want you to know Mam, that Christian people right across this country are upholding you in prayer. And she said to me the very same words she said at the end of the Paddington Sketch, because I rewatched it, and Paddington took his hat off and then he said, ‘Thank you, ma’am’ And he paused and said ‘for everything’. And she said, ‘That’s very kind’. So when I said last weekend, people are praying for you, upholding you in prayer, she paused for a second and said, ‘That’s most kind’.
And then I said to her also, ‘I hope you know just how much you regard and loved’. And she said, ‘Perhaps you’re right’. And that was my last conversation. to try to well, I’m sure she knows, but I assured her of how much she was regarded and loved. So talk about a privilege to be there in that moment, just to share these things.
Gillian: What a lovely thing to say to her as well, that she heard that.
Martin: Yeah, she heard that. She heard that for sure. Yeah.
Gillian: Martin, thank you so much for giving us your time and God bless you in your work in Arbroath, your next ten years of ministry there and what God is up to in your community and your radical passion to keep following Him and his Word with your community is an inspiration to me personally. I’m so grateful I know you, but also I’m sure it’ll be an inspiration to everyone who listens to this podcast.
Martin: Thank you, Gillian. And every blessing on your own ongoing work with the Guild and everything that you seek to do for the Kingdom. Bless you, Gillian.
Gillian: Thank you so much, Martin.
Martin: Bye for now.
Gillian: So that was my conversation with The Very Reverend Martin Fair. Thank you so much for listening. What did you think? What a moment to be at Balmoral with the Queen. What a moment to experience. I was left thanking God that it was him, that he was there with the family in the last days, was able to say those words to her. And I also thank God for his work in the community and his leadership. You know, Martin is one of those people and we tried to chat to these people in the podcast, one of the people I feel inspired just listening to his work and his vision, of course, but also his, his humanity and his honesty. You know, this is you know, he works hard, he’s living honestly and openly with the struggles of faith, the struggles of life lived honestly as well, and a very inspiring person to connect in with.
We’d love to know what you thought of the podcast. This podcast is freely available to all, but we pick up the conversation in the GoHealth community. If you’re not already a member, why not join us? It’s only £4 a month. We’d love to welcome you. Our tagline, as I said earlier, is Together we flourish. And that’s just what we try to do through resources, events and conversations. Together we flourish for our good and for the communities we live in, for their good and in the name of God. Thank you to Wendy for the production of this podcast, for producing it really quickly in this week between the death of the Queen and her funeral. Thank you.
Please rate and subscribe to the podcast – why not share it on your social media streams. We want as many people as possible to experience these conversations and to connect into us. That would be amazing. So in the meantime, God bless. Let’s connect and chat. Let’s keep learning to heal because together we flourish.