What is it about?
Looking at the records of the Church of Scotland in a selected group of Aberdeenshire parishes shows how systematic their record keeping was, with a close attention to funds raised and expended. The careful reconciliation of financial trasactions to decisions taken by church bodies suggests a very structured form of accountability, one which rested on detailed record keeping.
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Why is it important?
A good deal of historical work on religion focuses on theological disputes or churches as corporate bodies. Looking at practices at local level adds detail to these accounts but also reveals important aspects of belief. Belief has to be put into practice, which entails the development and maintenance of routines. Those routines can then become taken for granted ways of organising, available for activities in other domains. This presents a fresh way of looking at the debate inspired by Max Weber's Protestant ethic thesis.
Perspectives
I was brought up in the Church of Scotland in England, and so grew up with practices that I took for granted. However, I also have an uncle who was a Church of England vicar, so I was introduced to very different forms of worship. I have lived on both sides of the border, but it was only when investigating the work of the Scottish entrepreneur Andrew Barclay Walker that, informed by organization theory, I started to consider the practices that might lie behind rituals. This article is an initial exploration, guided in part by this being the area that my father grew up in. I have developed the findings at much greater length in my book, Religion and National Identity: Governing Scottish Presbyterianism in the Eighteenth Century, published by Edinburgh University Press in 2015.
Dr Alistair Mutch
Nottingham Trent University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Systemic Accountability and the Governance of the Kirk: the Presbytery of Garioch in the Eighteenth Century, Northern Scotland, May 2012, Edinburgh University Press,
DOI: 10.3366/nor.2012.0023.
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