A life in letters: Scripture Union - Beach Mission

For several years my parents had attempted to persuade me to sign up as a helper at a Scripture Union activity, but I had resisted this suggestion. But after the spiritual awakening I experienced in December 1973 and as a direct result of the change in attitude which resulted from this I applied to join the summer mission team working at St Andrews during the first fortnight in August, 1974, despite being terrified at this new challenge. That year I joined the Mission for the second week only as a ‘taster.’ Over the subsequent five years, however, I helped at S.U. Missions for a fortnight each summer. This involvement was one of the formative experiences of my life.

Martyrs' Church, North Street, St Andrews - now a University Library

That first year, my parents holidayed at St Andrews at the same time as the mission, and dropped me off outside the Martyrs’ Church in North Street with my camp bed and gear, before going off to stay at a local hotel where I joined them for the second week of my holiday. They visited Martyrs’ Church several times in the course of the week, bringing copious gifts of fruit, and a supply of sulphaguanidine tablets when we were smitten with an outbreak of the runs.

The day I arrived at St Andrews was the middle Saturday of the mission, the day the team, which was led by Hugh and Margaret McWhinnie from Stirling, had time off. We went off to Craigtoun Park in the afternoon, and sat on the grass in the sunshine, Mike Woodward, one of the team members said to me in all seriousness ‘I hope you don’t think this is how we spend all our time on Mission.’

Later we went back into town, and at low tide I walked along the rocks from the Castle beach to the old open-air swimming pool being inducted into the mysteries of rock pool life by Colin Taylor, a teenage enthusiast who would later become a marine biologist. As we picked our way over the seaweed Colin also shared with me his fascination with the C. S. Lewis Narnia chronicles, which he and his siblings had been read as bed-time stories as long as he could remember. And after that endless afternoon of clear sky and discovery we returned to base for a team meeting.

Martyrs’ Church lies near the heart of the beautiful Fife town, just across the road from the much older St Salvator’s Chapel, completed in 1450. Beneath its spire, Reformation martyr Patrick Hamilton was burned at the stake in 1528 for asserting that "man is justified by faith not works", and you can still see the smiling outline of a face in the tower’s stonework, high above the road which is said to have appeared by supernatural agency as the flames seared Hamilton’s flesh.

Each day began with breakfast at about 8am followed by a team meeting to finalise plans for the day ahead. On Sundays, this was followed by our attendance at local churches. Two team members were despatched to each church where they would ask if the Mission activities for the forthcoming week could be announced. I normally attended the small, traditional Brethren fellowship which met in a converted shop in the narrow road leading from the east end of Market Street. As I took the short walk round the corner from Martyrs’ Church the carillon in the tower of Holy Trinity Church cascaded jerky, mechanical hymn tunes across the town centre to encourage worshippers on their way.

On the Sunday evenings, we held an informal open-air service on the sloping, grassy hill in the centre of the Kinkell Braes caravan site, located high above the town overlooking St Andrews Bay. I especially enjoyed being driven around the site’s bumpy roads for a quarter of an hour or so before we were due to start with a battery-operated loud hailer stuck through the open passenger window issuing an invitation to folk to come along. And then we’d join the others for the service. I remember the orange sun dipping towards the horizon as the air grew cooler, and the smell of newly-cut grass, the singing and laughter and the sense of belonging.

Weekday mornings were taken up with work at whichever of the local caravan parks we’d been assigned to – my first time at St Andrews I was asked to help at the Kinkell Braes site, where for 90 minutes or so each day we colonised a small, cliff-top field downhill from the caravans. There we were joined by a group of thirty or forty kids who were initially attracted by leaflets we’d distributed. For most of the time we played team ball games with them, after which they’d divide into small groups each with a couple of leaders. During this group time we’d read a passage from the Bible together, think through its implications for our lives, and pray simply, asking God to speak to us through what we had read. The aim was to model Christian grace to the children in the way we related to them and played the games, and to introduce them to the Bible and to the concept that God speaks to us through it, and that God hears when we pray.

At the other caravan site where some of us worked, there was a barn we could use on wet days, but there was no such emergency provision at Kinkell Braes, and on the one or two occasions when it was wet we shipped the kids into the church hall by car. I remember on one occasion when the rain came on heavily when we were in the middle of playing games in our field squeezing eleven small boys into my Mini Minor for the group time.

The ultimate intention of the group times was to give the children, gently and without any pressure, the opportunity to respond to what God was saying by making a personal commitment to him. In all my five years of involvement with Missions, there was only one occasion when a child came to me wanting to say ‘yes’ to God – I was unsure how to handle this, and took him to one of the other leaders. It was intended that after the fortnight had ended, each of us would keep in touch with the children in the group we’d been responsible for, and I did this fairly assiduously.

After we’d finished for the day at the caravan site, we’d drive back into town and try to find a parking space near the church. This was often difficult, and we weren’t sure whether it was right to pray that we’d find one easily. What I do remember about these searches for somewhere to leave the car was the sense of being relaxed, of knowing that whatever I was doing while on this St Andrews adventure there was no pressure. I had stepped beyond my comfort zone and was relying entirely on God, and God was there, and in God’s presence I was utterly secure. And so I knew that whenever I found a space to park the car it wouldn’t be a minute too early or a minute too late.

After lunch, we’d head for the East Sands where we’d hold a Beach Service on a sand pulpit around which thirty or forty kids would gather. There would be singing, competitions between the two teams into which we always divided the children and a Bible talk often involving drama. I remember once dressing up to represent the Ethiopian eunuch who, as is recorded in the book of Acts in the Bible was converted to Christianity through the ministry of the apostle Philip. I wore a stripy dressing-gown for the part, and blacked my face with coal dust. It so happened that the well-known evangelical theologian Jim Packer was holidaying in St Andrews at the time. He saw me dressed for action, and commented apparently without the slightest trace of irony that I was the most convincing Ethiopian he had ever seen.  On the Friday of the first week of the mission, the Beach Service was followed by a ‘tide fight’ on the sand, when two groups of children would each build a huge sandcastle beneath the tide-line, and competitively defend it against the inevitable onslaught of the encroaching sea.

In the late afternoon, we’d wander back to Martyr’s Church (or in my case, in the years when I had the Mini at St Andrews, drive back – often with bare sandy feet) and there would be some breathing space before tea, a chance for team members to chill out with one another. The evenings were devoted to activities for the children – crafts for the younger ones in the church hall, and games for the teenagers on the green playing fields of St Leonard’s school, just off the medieval Pends. We’d play (or in my case try to play) rounders as the shadows lengthened across the grass and then we’d go with the young people to the Rose Lane Centre at St Andrews Baptist church for refreshments, singing and informal Christian testimonies.  One evening each year, there was a parents’ night at Martyrs’ Church hall. I’ll never forget a powerful piece of drama on one of these occasions when a couple of team members, dressed entirely in black mimed the Bible story which describes Jacob wrestling with God all night ‘until the breaking of the day’; his hip is put out of joint by the deity, yet he refuses to let go of God. ‘I will not let you go, unless you bless me.’

As with all Scripture Union activities, a creative zaniness ran through the program alongside the serious stuff - there was plenty of room for laughter and fun. In that context, I was able as usual to mask deep insecurities with a flamboyant nuttiness. The McWhinnies put up a roll of paper on which you could write down amusing things team members said, and I featured on this list with my coinage ‘supermarvellous’, sometimes extended to ‘supermarvellous hyper-brilliant’ to denote something about which I was especially enthusiastic. Eventually, some of the comments on the list became rather risqué and the roll disappeared.

Another activity crammed into the hectic fortnight was the Serompie, the prototype of which had been held some years before by Jim Macnair, a previous leader of the team. ‘Serompie’ – simply an intriguing name for a party – was derived from the French se romper meaning ‘to jump around.’ All the kids attending the event were, according to their gender, either seromperers or seromperinas; the members or the team were seromeriferers or seromperifierinas; Hugh and Margaret as team leaders were seromperiferiferer and seromperifieriferina; and should Jim Macnair and his wife attend, they, as initiators of the Serompie experience, were seromperiferiferifer and seromperiferiferiferina.  The highlight of the Serompie was an arcane ritual in which we all ate ‘serrabombs’ (aka ginger biscuits) which were handed out with dire warnings that they were explosive and could go off at any time were they not handled with the very greatest of care – various sounds of explosions out of sight of the children, and convincing shrieks from supposed victims of the serrabombs wound up the tension. The only known antidote to serrabomb ingestion was serrasquash which, if drunk within a critical time-frame would successfully neutralise the explosive propensities of the biscuits. Of course we always made sure there was more than enough serrasquash on hand, and the children lived to serompie again, although there were always some excitable boys who dramatically feigned the consequences of inner eruption.

And then finally each evening we would be on our own as a team in the church hall, and someone would read and pray, and we’d sing, perhaps accompanied by Charles Young’s earnest guitar playing. I remember him singing, passionately, what I recall was his favourite hymn, Charles Wesley’s  O for a thousand tongues to sing.

He breaks the power of cancelled sin,
He sets the prisoner free.

His blood can make the foulest clean; 
His bloodavails for me.

But often I felt on edge. My heart was not praying, although my lips might have been. I did not have the confidence which the others seemed to have that God heard and answered, nor did Wesley’s words resonate personally for me in the way they seemed to do for others. 

Eventually,  we’d drift off to bed. We guys lay on camp beds on the church hall floor, just a few feet from the pavement, listening to the sound of voices passing outside, and the throaty roar of motorbikes racing down North Street. The girls slept at the other end of the corridor. Each evening we’d be awake until just after midnight, and as we lay drowsily in our sleeping bags, I’d sometimes amuse my companions by singing silly songs, or rather by singing serious songs sillily, including the following from Gounod’s Faust

We were not born with true love to trifle
Nor born to part because the wind blows cold,
What though the storm the summer garden rifle
Oh Margarita
Oh Margarita
Still on the bough is left a leaf of gold,
On the bough is left a leaf of gold
On the bough is left a leaf of gold

How I tortured this piece (and probably my listeners as well) with long- drawn out ‘Margaritas’ and ‘leafs of gold’.  At midnight, Hugh turned on the BBC news, and we listened to the headlines which in my first St Andrews summer centred round the unfolding revelations of the imminent implosion of Richard Nixon’s Presidency before finally going to sleep.

The level of my involvement in organising the mission increased with each year I was at St Andrews. For a couple of summers, I had the responsibility of writing outlines for the beach talks which were used throughout the fortnight. One series, on living in the light of the reality of heaven was entitled The best place to go and how to get there, the other, Join the family,  focussed on the implications of becoming a Christian. I took charge of the bookstall – a collection of Bibles, Christian books and leaflets, and some of what used to be called in the trade ‘holy hardware’  - pencils and rubbers and fun things with Bible verses on them. This merchandise accompanied us to most of the events we organised during the fortnight in a wooden box which, when opened, acted as a display stand. This box I lugged from venue to venue, and even took it with us to the beach. Unsold stock went back to the Scripture Union bookshop at the end of the fortnight, and I’m sure more than one subsequent book purchaser must have been puzzled as grains of sand dropped from between the pages as she read.

I worked hard to promote my wares,  even I regret to say, assuming the persona of one Boris Book on several occasions by dressing up in a cardboard box. There was little Boris would not do to ensure a sale – he even offered to sign, personally, copies of any volume purchased from himself. I wonder if there are still in existence any copies of the Good News Bible with ‘Boris Book’ scrawled inside the front cover?

My last year at St Andrews was 1978, Hugh and Margaret were not leading the team, and there was not the same degree of focus and commitment as there had been when they were responsible. I remember it as a difficult summer, a fortnight of mists on the Kinkell Braes, and thick haar on the East Sands where small groups of kids shivered in their anoraks at the Beach Service. I felt a sense of responsibility for ensuring things went as well as possible given the circumstances, and I supported the leaders as best I could. I remember one morning towards the end of the fortnight when we were in the middle of a game of rounders at the Cairnsmill Caravan site, seeing Hugh and Margaret and their young daughters arrived to check out how we were getting on. I felt a huge sense of relief as I watched them climbing out of their car. I remember thinking this must be the way the kids in an Enid Blyton novel felt – they’d be deep in an adventure, mired in crisis, unsure what to do next, and then their parents would arrive, and they’d feel enormous relief at handing over responsibility for resolving the situation to people mature enough to handle it wisely.

I was blessed incalculably through these fortnights at St Andrews which were hugely significant milestones in my life. For the very first time I was living in community, and sharing breakfast with folk who medicated their early-morning scowls with black coffee in mugs bearing the legend ‘I am not a morning person.’ For the very first time I felt a sense of unconditional acceptance from people my own age; I appreciated the friendly respect I was shown by younger folk on the team; I learned a little more about relating naturally to girls.

I welcomed the freedom to discuss theological issues which were never raised in my home church. One year the Christian magazine Crusade had published a controversial article on the theology of childhood. This reflected on whether the correct approach to Christian education was to teach children that they were on the outside, requiring to be ‘born again’ before they could find God, or to emphasise that God loved them deeply, and that every day brought many opportunities to choose either to act in a way which pleased him, or to be driven by God-ignoring, self-focussed thinking. The fact that this debate – so central to what we were doing at St Andrews – was possible encouraged me.

I appreciated being with intelligent, creative Christians who shared my cultural tastes. I remember attending an organ recital at Holy Trinity Church one Sunday evening with Mike Woodward; I remember Pam Williams playing the second movement of Beethoven’s Moonlight sonata from memory on the piano in the hall at Martyrs’ Church, blonde hair cascading over her dancing fingers; I remember Fiona McLachlan thanking me for being like a brother to her; I remember Charles Young’s disapproval, signified by a shake of his head accompanied by a grin when he saw some of us on a Sunday afternoon eating some ice cream we had just bought despite the fact that it was the Christian Sabbath.

Though I had never before felt anything close to this degree of acceptance and belonging, I still frequently felt on the edge. One Friday evening the team had been out very late, and some of them, including Hugh McWhinnie got into conversation with a very intoxicated fisherman whom we had met down beside the harbour with his rod. I came back to the church hall with the others, and went to bed. Time passed, and those who had stayed with the fisherman still had not returned. By 3am, I was still surrounded by empty camp beds, and I began to be afraid.  For there was a subset of the doctrine of the ‘rapture’ – the reaching that Jesus would return to the air at some point before the end of all things, and take to himself those who had believed in him – according to which there would be a ‘partial rapture.’ Those who promulgated this view held, on the grounds of very shaky biblical exposition, that while faithful believers would be taken by the returning Lord, unfaithful Christians would be left behind to pass through the ‘Great Tribulation.’ And as I lay there in Martyrs’ Church Hall while the others who had returned with me slept securely, I saw faintly illuminated in the soft light from the streetlamps still rolled-up sleeping bags, I fought against the terrible fear that the Lord had come, and that I was among those who had been left behind. Eventually there were footsteps in the hallway, and whispers about how the drunk fisherman had had to be escorted back home to Cupar and I was greatly relieved. ‘I thought it was the partial rapture,’ I muttered to Hugh, but he looked at me blankly.

But there were many times at St Andrews when I had a sense of trusting God to help me undertake the tasks for which I was responsible. Every morning I’d get up before everyone else at about 6am, and go into the main church where there was a sense of stillness and calm, and the musty ecclesiastical smell of dusty kneelers and varnished pews. I’d read the Bible passage for the day and the accompanying note in Scripture Union’s Daily Notes; I often sensed that my prayers for help were heard as I prepared what I had to do in the day ahead. The church was on the other side of the long corridor running past the halls where we were living and working, and there was a slight sense of spookiness about it, especially late at night and first thing in the morning, especially since it was linked to the undertakers next door by a corridor through which coffins were wheeled prior to funerals. I always scurried quickly past the glass-panelled doors leading into the dark church when I was on my way to the toilet in the middle of the night.

Sometimes as I sat in the still church, I sensed that God was there, seeding my mind with creative insights.  There was one local lady whose approach to sharing the Christian faith scandalised me. It was reported that she pinned black hearts on to children’s jerseys as a reminder to them of their need of salvation. One morning as I read my Bible, I came across Jesus’ reminder to his disciples that anyone who wasn’t against him was for him, and  it came to me powerfully that no matter how misguided this woman might be, and no matter how potentially damaging her actions, she was on Jesus’ side, and I should regard her in this light. I was able to do this while not condoning her actions in any way. It was a reminder that Jesus has some very strange followers.

On the evening of the final Friday night of the mission we had a barbeque at the base of the Maiden’s Rock, a solitary outcrop of sandstone springing from the rocky end of the beach in the East Bay. Our routine those Fridays was even more frantic than normal. There was food to collect, and firewood, and then after tea we’d drive to the bottom of the Kinkell Braes caravan site and carry all we needed down the steep path to the beach. There, in the last hour before twilight, the kids we’d been working with and some of their parents gathered round the bonfire we kindled and we presented a programme of serious and fun items. One year I recited a mission alphabet, based on the one I’d done at the camp in Meigle a decade before, except that for family consumption I was advised to omit the line about V equally vomit “which means the same as spew.” I also remember taking part in a spirited rendition of Little Peter Rabbit had a fly upon his nose.

We’d sing some of the spiritual songs we’d learned over the fortnight, and then someone would give a brief talk on a Christian theme. It was in this context that I heard Hugh McWhinnie telling the unforgettable story of a strange, mythical hybrid animal to highlight the blessings of contentment both with what God has made us to be, and with the gifts he has given us.  The story was about a camel, who envied the elephant’s trunk, and wished that he had one, and had his wish granted, thus becaming a camelephant. Still, however, he was not content; nor was he after subsequent wishes were granted also and he acquired characteristics of the antelope, the pelican and the canary, and the story ended with a miserably discontented camelephantelopelicanary.

I do not think I had ever felt more happy to be me. When the sun had set, and the sausages and burgers had been eaten, and the fun was over, and the ‘goodbyes’ said, we tidied the beach and carried our stuff back up the path. My first year at St Andrews, after the barbeque was over Charles Young and I, and another team member who had personal problems with which Charles was helping him wandered off along the shoreline away from the town.  I walked a few steps on front of the others as they were deep in conversation. It was completely dark by now, silent except for the sigh of the rising tide fingering its way between the rocks at the water’s edge. I shivered slightly in the wind’s chill, yet I felt completely at home. It struck me that the cold, isolated shoreline could in some circumstances be a fear-inducing environment, but because I was there with others, and especially because of the joy I had within me, I saw the beauty of it. I realised the extent to which my perception of external circumstances depended on my state of mind and of heart.

Eventually, we made our way back to Martyrs’ Church only to leave again at 11.30pm as we did on the last Friday of every Mission  and head in a group along North Street and down to the harbour by the path which skirts the Cathedral graveyard (where some of us spun yarns about ghostly monks on the other side of the wall.) We walked along the harbour wall’s uneven stones until we reached the lighthouse at the end where we stood huddled together both for warmth and in order to be able to read in torchlight the hymn books we had taken with us, and we sang. I surveyed the bay, watching the moonlight reflecting on the water, and the regular pulse of lighthouses on the horizon, and the brooding shadow of Maiden’s Rock merging into the deeper darkness, and again I felt a profound contentment. Running through my mind was the peaceful evening hymn The day thou gavest Lord has ended, its serenity at one with my mood. Not long before, I had been tortured by the thought of hearing this tune in a very different context. I imagined that the Lord had come, and the saints had been taken, and I was left to fend for myself as clouds of chaos darkened the sky and the Day of Grace was ended, and in my anguish I heard celestial voices singing The day thou gavest Lord has ended, its sweetness a mockery, and there was no hope. Now I felt only the joy of inclusion, and I wished the day would never end.

The following morning we had the gargantuan task of cleaning and tidying the church halls, and restoring them to the condition they had been in six weeks before when the first of the three consecutive SU mission teams had arrived. Margaret McWhinnie drew up a rota, assigning everyone a task to do – one year I was given the job of cleaning the guys loo, which was caked with dry urine. It was one of the most humbling things I had ever been asked to do, and it was good for me. Besides, I’d never in my life cleaned a toilet before, and it was a good learning opportunity!

And then it was time to go home. In later years, when I had a car of my own, I would give folk lifts back to Stirling or Glasgow, and so preserve for just a little longer the sense of togetherness before, with a heavy heart, I turned the car in the direction of Carluke. There were reunions, of course, when some of the team and a few of the kids met for a Saturday afternoon in a church hall in Stirling, but I found it impossible on these occasions to recapture the camaraderie and joy which I had known back in the summer.

I was in Dundee one day in the autumn of 1976. My parents had urged me to apply for a post in the library at the city’s School of Art, and had advised me that I should go up and view the library and discuss the post as this, they felt, would show that my interest in the job was genuine. This advice I followed only with reluctance, since I felt that while casing the joint before you had even been called for interview might be standard practice in my father’s medical context, it wasn’t, as far as I knew what you normally did in librarianship. I think the folk at the College were slightly bemused by my request, although they accommodated me graciously – but I didn’t hear anything from them subsequently about the post. The things I remember most about that day are: the surge of gratitude I felt towards my mother as I opened up my packed lunch and realised the care with which she had prepared it; the pre-election speech of US presidential candidate Jimmy Carter which I listened to on the car radio; and above all my time in Stirling in the evening. I had phoned Hugh and Margaret – I’d be passing through Stirling in the late afternoon. Could I drop in and see them? ‘Of course,’ I was told – and I could also go along with them to a concert being given that evening by the Swedish Christian choir Choralerna.  And so I found myself in a packed auditorium accompanied by many of the Stirling-based members of the St Andrews team, and as the music boomed through the speakers, louder than anything I’d ever heard before, I once again felt accepted and at home.

At the end of that first week in St Andrews in August 1974, my parents came to collect me, and I spent the second week of my holiday with them at their hotel. But as I said a final ‘good-bye’ at the church door,  and walked across the pavement to the car, I realised that I must ‘resume the mantle of my former self’ and there was sadness in my heart.