What American Christians Can Learn from the Church in the United Kingdom

This post originally appeared on Substack: Chase Selcer.

Earlier this year, I visited Scotland and England. The trip was for work and some play. When I wasn’t meeting with area pastors, my wife and I enjoyed the free time. We drank tea from the tea makers that supply the Royal Family, stopped by the coffee shop where J. K. Rowling wrote Harry Potter, snapped pictures in front of Westminster Abbey, stood in John Newton’s vestry, saw the Magna Carta displayed at the British Library, ate fish and chips with mushy peas, and so on.

For work, my colleague Steve and I went to establish partnerships between Converge Heartland—the Baptist network of which the church I pastor is a part—and AT-3, an alliance based in the UK meant to train pastors and Christian workers. We started in the Highlands of Scotland and ended the trip in London. We visited four cities: Inverness and Edinburgh in Scotland and Birmingham and London in England.

Here are three observations from my time overseas and what I think American Christians can learn from churches in the UK.

The Church really is one people over all the earth.

On our first Sunday there, we worshipped with Living Hope Church in Inverness, Scotland. They are a ten-year-old church plant, leasing a gymnasium while renovating their permanent home down the road. Of course there were cultural differences between our church stateside and theirs. What we call “upcoming events” they refer to as “what’s on”, members preferred pre-service tea to coffee, and everybody had thick Scottish accents.

But we did not feel like outsiders. That’s because the members at Living Hope were our Christian family.

They welcomed us in immediately. We sang familiar hymns. Pastor Pete preached verse by verse from John’s Gospel. We prayed for the conversion of the lost in Inverness. We shared the Lord’s Supper together. The next morning, we ate breakfast with their elder team at a local garden centre, dreaming together about mentoring a new generation of ministers to start Gospel-centered churches in Scotland, in America, and around the world.

Cultural differences for the Christian are not unimportant; they just aren’t ultimate. The Nicene Creed confesses belief in “one holy catholic [universal] and apostolic church.” Jesus prayed in John 17 that His church would be one, our unity a reflection of the mutual indwelling of the Father in the Son and the Son in the Father (vv. 20–23).

Living Hope in Scotland was as much an outpost of heaven as our local churches are in America. And one day we will stand side by side with our brothers and sisters from Inverness in heaven. We are scattered all over today, but not forever.

Churches in Scotland are experiencing a crisis of leadership.

The average age of Evangelical ministers in the UK tips the scales at over 50 years old. Fewer and fewer young men are training for the ministry. One pastor we met in Inverness is nearing retirement age, expressing concern for who will take the helm.

The main recruiting pool is within the Church of Scotland, the country’s most influential denomination. But the pastor told us how that denomination is in a state of moral decline, its seminaries and top leadership infected with the cancer of theological liberalism. The last thing this pastor wants for his flock is to call a young preacher in who denies the essential doctrines of the Christian faith.

Aging ministers, few aspiring ministers, and an influential denomination descending into liberalism—what he described is a national crisis of church leadership.

The US faces a similar challenge, though not as dire. While the average age for American clergy is over 50 years old, we have no shortage of young men aspiring to pastoral ministry. Enrollment in conservative evangelical seminaries is up year over year. In our church alone we have eight men under the age of 24 who have expressed interest in vocational ministry.

What if we sent some of our young men to train for ministry in Scotland? The churches there could use the extra set of hands, and our guys could gain invaluable experience apprenticing in a post-Christian context. These are the conversations I’m having with the elders in my church, in Converge Heartland, and with AT-3.

British churches grow primarily by conversion growth, not transfer growth.

While just under a quarter of the US population identifies as Protestant evangelical (23%), the UK is one-third of that at only 7.5% evangelical. (To be evangelical is simply to affirm the Christian basics: the authority of Scripture, Christ’s death for the forgiveness of sins, and the necessity of repentance and faith in Jesus for salvation.)

American churches, especially in the south and midwest, grow relatively quickly. There are enough professing Christians in these areas to fill pews. New churches that start often experience the “transfer growth” phenomenon—rather than growing their membership primarily by conversions and baptisms, they grow by established Christians transferring from one church to the other. I’ll leave evaluating the merit of transfer versus conversion growth for another time. My point is that British churches grow almost entirely by conversions and not by membership transfers.

Churches in Britain have to grow this way because the days of cultural Christianity are long gone. The result is that churches are typically smaller. Two hundred people is a large church in Scotland. Even in the Birmingham, England metro, a city of three million, many of the large Protestant churches number in the hundreds. But what these churches lack in size they make up for in evangelism. The pastors and members are highly evangelistic, eager to share the Gospel with anyone anywhere so people can be reconciled to God.

Visiting these small but evangelistically sharp churches reminded me of how church health matters more than church size. Rather than asking, How big can our church get?, we should ask, How healthy can our church be?

Preach the Gospel. Love one another. Make strong disciples. Evangelize the lost. Send missionaries to the ends of the earth. These are the meaningful metrics.

“Give Me Scotland or I Die!”

John Knox (1514–1572), the great Reformer who reintroduced the Gospel to Scotland, prayed a bold prayer: “Lord, give me Scotland or I die!” He asked big things of God and expected great things from God. He labored for nothing short of a revival of true religion among the Scots. The legacy of faithfulness he left behind still fuels many of the men I spoke to who minister in Scotland today.

To be sure, there remains a lot of work to do, both in the UK and in the States. Let’s pray bold prayers. Let’s make strong disciples. Let’s build healthy churches centered on proclaiming Christ as Lord over all things. We do not labor alone.