The United Free Church reunites with the Church of Scotland

The Church of Scotland’s record of its ministers, the Fasti Ecclesiae Scoticanae, revised “under the Superintendence of a Committee appointed by the General Assembly”, dates the union in its eighth volume: “Ministers of the Church from date of publication of volumes I–VII, 1914–28, to Union of the Churches, 2nd October 1929”. Its Prefatory Note describes the volume as completing “the Record of Ministers of the Church of Scotland as it existed before the date of the Union of the Churches on 2nd October 1929”.¹

Andrew J. Campbell, in Two Centuries of the Church of Scotland (1930), writes that with the Acts of 1921 and 1925 “all obstacles to the reunion of the Church were removed.” He describes the day: “On October 2, 1929, the General Assemblies of the Church of Scotland and the United Free Church were convened separately for the last time. Proceeding from their Assembly Halls to S. Giles’ Cathedral, they joined in a memorable service of thanksgiving; and in the afternoon of that day, the children of the Secession and the Disruption joined with the children of the Moderates to form together the first General Assembly of the re-united Church of Scotland.”²

Campbell adds that “A small section of the United Free Church decided to stand aloof; for it held strongly to Voluntaryism [the view that the Church should take no support from the State] and was not prepared to compromise.”³

The United Free Church had been formed on 31 October 1900 by the union of the majority of the Free Church with the United Presbyterian Church, while, in the words of the Royal Warrant of 1904, “certain other Members of the Free Church refused to enter the Union, and remained as the Free Church”.⁴