5 February 2026

‘The First Book of Discipline’ is one of the primary documents of the Church of Scotland. It gives direction and counsel to shape the life of the emerging Kirk. ‘Of Buriall’ deals with what is permitted to happen at funerals and remembering those who have died.

‘And so we say that prayers for the dead are not onely superstitious and vaine, but doe expressly repugne to the manifest Scriptures and veritie thereof.’ So much superstition had accrued to the disposal of the dead and their possible fate in purgatory that the Reformers made a clean slate of it.

This left the Kirk at a serious disadvantage when it came to the First World War. The Scottish National War Memorial records 134,712 casualties. This constituted approximately 15% of all British war dead. Interestingly, it represents a disproportionately high 26% casualty rate of those who served.

In his ‘Scottish Presbyterian Worship’, Bryan Spinks makes the point that following the First World War ‘the sheer numbers of deaths in the war had served to make some reference a pastoral necessity’. Somehow the dead who were very much a part of the daily round had to become a part of the Kirk too.

In the various orders for morning worship in the 1940 ‘Book of Common Order’, there are several examples of what is styled ‘Thanksgiving for the faithful departed’. There is the example of the saints and a prayer that we may witness accordingly. Counted along with them are ‘all Thy servants dear to us’.

It is interesting how pastoral necessity challenged the theology of worship which had become such a distinctive feature of the Kirk  separating it  from other denominations. It makes me wonder what contemporary societal changes have  had a similar impact on our pattern of worship?