Like most women doing a new thing, Dr. Alison Elliot wants to be remembered for her achievements as a human being, not as a woman. However, her gender is always mentioned in each introduction, from church chancels and AIDS hospice steps, to European political and church council lecterns, south Asian post-tsunami gatherings and Canadian academic auditoria. She is the first female moderator in the 445-year history of the Church of Scotland (and the second lay person, the last was named in the early decades of that history). She is the embodiment of the profound changes in her church. Professionally and personally she is comfortable with the change she leads, and the change she represents.
By profession, Elliot is an academic psychologist, with a PhD in children's language development. "Children are studies in change and growth. To be human is to be constantly changing and growing. If we are not experiencing change, we're probably dead. Much change in children comes incrementally. One can see it coming. Children's language and thinking and knowledge change with their experience of the world around them. However, some change seems to come out of nowhere. But yet, though unseen and unrecognised, growth and change continue, the pressures for change build and suddenly, something like a switch goes on and a whole series of changes are triggered. Likewise the church."
The 2001 Scottish general assembly was presented with a revolutionary document called Church Without Walls, which left little untouched within the institution, from structure to attitude. The report envisioned change from church focus to Christ focus, from institutional church to church as movement, from a culture of guilt to a culture of grace, from running congregations to building communities, from faith as security to faith as risk.
"There is a comfort in structure", says Elliot. "But the question is, what structures? For some, Church Without Walls has been enormously threatening. The misplaced contentment in specialised language, and history-laden buildings is challenged. The vision of dismantled walls or permeable walls, that refuses ancient categories, that rolls up its sleeves to consider the needs of those outside over the needs of those inside, elicits questions of vulnerability, of security.
"Wherein lies our security? Who is our security? What was different after September 11, 2001," Elliot recalls, "was that we could see the United States as vulnerable. Whether speaking of the actual or figurative removal of church walls or a radically different approach to questions of war and peace, vulnerability is part of the human condition. In times of insecurity, she says, we tend to build walls rather than take them down. The United States curtails freedoms; Israel builds a barrier; Belfast erects a "peaceline" down Manor Street.
"A church without walls makes connections, builds communities, even in the midst of vulnerability. And it's working. Church without Walls has become a measuring stick for change in Scotland, to check the direction of change, moving into the lexicon as adjective and verb. People are saying: Is this new structure or idea church-without-walls enough? How do we 'church-without-walls' this report?
"Church without walls is a sign of hope in a church — ecclesia reformata semper reformanda — with permission and mandate for change," she smiles. "That's exciting. And it's not just about changing structures, how we go about being church. It's about changing the very nature of the church. It's not about turning structure upside down, but about dissolving the structure; what needs to change is the very idea that one person should be greater than the other."
Asked if John Knox would have considered her one of the "monstrous regiment of women" of which Mary, Queen of Scots, was chief, Elliot replies: 'No doubt; he would have been apoplectic. Yet, as a reformer, he would have had to consider the challenge. However, in the end, he would never have been able to admit to changing his mind!"
Fifty years ago, like Canada, Scottish churches were full. Now there is a steeply declining church membership and attendance. There are many reasons for that, some are simply a feature of the society, others need to be taken seriously and grappled with. Some of that loss is not to be mourned. The Christian consensus that once existed in Scotland is gone. But its replacement is not all bad. There is a post-modern affirmation of diversity. New voices are being heard.
Elliot tells the story of a young girl "proud of her new trainers, just the right brand name", who struggles with the competing demands of conformity and belonging and a need to be herself. Both sameness and difference are valued. So how do to build a church that welcomes, offers belonging and relationship, but does not require orthodoxy? Elliot has brought into her moderator year these concerns that had already marked her work as Associate Director of Edinburgh University's Centre for Theology and Public Issues, as convenor of the Commission on Justice, Peace, Social and Moral Issues, convenor of the Church and Nation Committee and as member of Action of the Churches Together in Scotland and the World Council of Churches' Commission on International Affairs.
Through visits, sermons and speeches, she brings her compassion to bear on the "scandalous inequities" that contribute to poor health, violence against women, HIV/AIDS and war. The criminal justice system and women's prisons, in particular, have proven to be another theme of her year in office. During and following a post-tsunami visit to India and Sri Lanka, Elliot persisted in her application of the gospel to all she saw and did.
Speaking at historic and stately St. Andrew's, Simcoe St., Toronto, Elliot said the church must not be "seduced by buildings, instead it must get out of its buildings". She has uttered the same warning inside some of Scotland's many beautiful places of worship. When speaking at the Scottish War Memorial and at a Remembrance Day service, she wondered aloud about "the human ingredients of inhuman warfare, the gap between people's experience of warfare and the illusion that we know what's going on". She speaks of the "human pain of war and the defiant triumphalism of war". She challenges the tendency to deny the identities of war's victims, to reduce "each person to the single label of friend or foe, in a concrete denial of the specific love that God has for each of us." And she asks, "what are the things that make for peace?'"
As the British people were in the throes of debate about joining the United States in war against Iraq, the Scottish parliament asked the church to adjudicate a discussion on Just War. In response, the Church prepared a letter that said, "the decision is yours," she relates. "And, it went on the state, when that decision is made, keep the following things in mind: the need for restraint, the question of ongoing failure to bring about peace in the Middle East, the role of the United Nations in such disputes and the suffering of the Iraqi people under sanctions and the likely affects of war on the civilian population.
She has received the Order of the British Empire for a long history of service to her church, locally, nationally and internationally. But her election as Moderator comes as sign and portent of change already happening and more change to come. Though she is reluctant to suggest that her predecessors were in any way deficient, she is clear that a "patriarchal, hierarchical system of church is ill-disposed to reward the delicate and subtle qualities that make life a pleasure. Or in acknowledging the special spiritual gifts that the church fosters and that, characteristically, women are encouraged to nurture. Status, hierarchy, position are crude instruments when placed next to compassion or the power to heal. Yet compassion and healing are what the church is supposed to be concerned with."
Women are different, says Elliot. "We speak out of different bodies with different tenor and tone. People come to me with different expectations, they bring different things to me, expect me to be more ready to listen. Being moderator offers permission for the things of women to be brought and valued in the church. It encourages other women. The mould is broken!
"The Moderator as an institution is studiously impersonal; General Assembly is an abstraction and de-personalised." That doesn't need to be so. If Church without Walls is about a more relational way of doing church, the role and office of moderator should not be excluded in that programme for change.
"The tradition of asking the church for answers is tied up in the notion of the church as establishment rather than as an adventure of faith." The church is not adjudicator of orthodoxy, but facilitator of a process of growth and change. "On the issue of sexual orientation," she says, "if asked to tick a box, then I'm a liberal. But if we want to go deeper, that's where the church can play a role. And deeper is where we need to go on a topic that is a proxy debate for a lot of other things, from the essentials of humankind and original sin to biblical interpretation."
In an address to the Scottish Episcopal Church Synod on the tenth anniversary of the ordination of women to the priesthood, Elliot referred to the "ground-breaking admission of women as new life that exposed the fallacy of the idea that things could not be different, that the shape and process of the church is fixed.
"Perhaps, the really radical thing about it is that it gives the lie to the kind of world where God wraps everything up and the resurrection doesn't happen. But we know it does and that there's no going back now." No going back indeed.
