The Royal Mile

The most famous road in Edinburgh, Scotland is undoubtedly the Royal Mile. Picture a medieval castle at one end, a royal palace at the other, and gothic style churches in between. It’s sort of the spine of Old Town Edinburgh. It’s a road where men in kilts play bagpipes and where tourists explore a maze of 17th-century passageways preserved underground just below City Hall. And it’s actually a good place to start our own search to explore this question. How did Eric Liddell’s homeland go from a nation of churches to a nation that’s mostly unchurched and, in some ways, even unreached? And if that’s the case, who’s being reached today? I’m Jamie Dean, and from the team at Radical, this is Glory Road.

A Stroll Down The Royal Mile

If unreached sounds like an overstatement, consider the stats. Only around 3% of the Scottish population identify as evangelical Christians. More than 50% claim no religion at all. That means that while Scotland certainly has been exposed to Christian teaching in the past, a big chunk of the population today may have never really heard the gospel at all, and they may have no idea where to find a church that preaches it.

It’s ironic considering all the churches surrounding the Royal Mile. To find out more, we need to explore a street just off the Royal Mile that’s famous for something you might not expect, Harry Potter. And you also might not expect how that will lead us to discover a lot more about the church in Scotland. Victoria Street is renowned for its 19th-century architecture with a twist. The street winds on a slope downhill. The buildings curve with the road and pop with shades of pink, blue, and orange alongside the traditional sandstone. It’s a little bit like if San Francisco met London on cobblestone. Harry Potter fans see another resemblance. The street looks a lot like Diagon Alley. That’s the fictional alleyway where Potter buys exotic school supplies in the novels by JK Rowling. And the resemblance isn’t that farfetched. Rowling wrote big chunks of her famous books right here in Edinburgh. Here on Victoria Street, fans drop by the Elephant House, a cozy cafe with an intriguing Potter connection.

Upstairs, customers slurp on mugs of sugary butterscotch beer, the drink inspired by the books. Wander through the arched doorways toward the back, and you’ll find a little cove against a stone wall. Tucked inside, a small table sits empty with a plaque mounted on top. Rowling set here while she wrote Potter. Over the table is artwork of the view Rowling had while she worked. As she dreamed up make-believe worlds, Rowling looked out over a very real cemetery. The story goes, that she occasionally crossed the street and walked through the rows of tombstones finding inspiration for her book.

Greyfriars’ Kirkyard

But that cemetery is really important for a very different reason that gets a lot less attention today. It’s just around the corner, inside the gates of Greyfriars’ Kirkyard. On an early morning, it’s quiet in the graveyard of Greyfriars’ Kirk, a protestant church built in the early 1600s. The darkened tombstones tell the stories of people buried here centuries ago, and a 17th-century stone mural of a skull and crossbones offers the living some good advice, memento mori, remember death, but whose death is most remembered here?

Well, there’s one grave that’s especially popular. Thomas Riddle died in Edinburgh in 1806, but today he’s most remembered as the man whose tombstone inspired the name of the Potter character also known as Lord Voldemort. On a crisp morning, a dark-haired woman is standing next to Riddle’s grave site, wearing a long, black cape. She’s leading a tour group through the cemetery, pointing out spots that may have inspired Rowling as she wrote Potter.

The Covenanters’ Prison

Meanwhile, there’s a corner in the back left of the graveyard where very few people are stopping. It’s a section of the cemetery closed off behind a barred gate, but the bars are wide enough to easily look in and see a row of square stalls along a dirt path. It’s a prison in the graveyard. To be precise, it’s the Covenanters’ prison. To understand how a prison ended up in a graveyard, we need to know more about this particular church and what it tells us about Scotland. Greyfriars Kirk was the first church built in Edinburgh after the Protestant Reformation. It opened on Christmas Day in 1620, but any celebration was short-lived. Despite the Reformation, there was still conflict. Scottish Presbyterians became known as Covenanters after many signed a national covenant here at Greyfriars in 1638. They essentially declared the King of England was not the head of the church, only Christ is head of the church, and they would structure their church government and their worship accordingly. Eventually, this was viewed as treason, an offense punishable by death. An estimated 18,000 people died for the cause.

An Inspiring Legacy

At one point, this churchyard served as a jail while prisoners awaited their fate. Today, the Covenanters’ prison often gets mentioned as a spooky corner of the cemetery that’s supposedly haunted, but it’s actually a stirring testament to the faith of Scottish believers willing to lay down their lives for their convictions. It’s the kind of faith that motivated John Knox, the famous Scottish reformer who eventually served as the pastor of St. Giles, a church still standing on the Royal Mile. And later, as revivals swept through Scotland in the 18th and 19th centuries, this small nation, about the size of South Carolina, became a missionary sending force to the ends of the earth. John Peyton went to the New Hebrides in the South Pacific. Thomas Chalmers inspired a group of college students known as the St. Andrew Seven to declare the gospel in India. Mary Slessor modeled missionary service for single women in a four-decade career serving in East Africa. And, of course, Eric Liddell eventually followed in their footsteps heading to China after his Olympic victory in Paris.

But here in the quiet paths of Greyfriars’ Kirkyard, a lot of people sort of just pass by the Covenanters’ prison on their way to something else. The spiritual weight of all this history seems kind of buried, or at least distant. In other cases, it’s totally flipped on its head.

Stirring Compromise

Hang a left out of Greyfriars onto George the Fourth Bridge and you’ll see museums, libraries, restaurants, and more churches, or in one case, what used to be a church. What was once Martyrs Church is now Frankenstein Pub. The 19th-century building still has spires on the outside and a balcony on the inside, but it also has bar stools and booths and scientific formulas etched on the walls. The whole place is designed to look like a laboratory where Frankenstein’s Monster was created. There’s even a monster-themed show. This isn’t the only place in Scotland or in other countries where an empty church has been turned into something else. But it does point to how many churches here have closed.

One recent study reported that 2000 churches had closed in the United Kingdom in the last decade. Other churches are still open, but sometimes they’ve changed too. Augustine United Church stands just across the street. This building dates back to the 19th century as well. When Eric Liddell left Edinburgh for his missionary service to China, an overflowed crowd packed the pews here for a farewell service. Today, a poster next to the arch doorway lets visitors know the time for Sunday services and that the church is a trans-affirming congregation. It’s become a major emphasis of the church. Now, it’s true that churches departing from biblical teaching isn’t new, and it certainly isn’t unique to Scotland, but it is at least part of the story here. In fact, this church is in an ecumenical covenant with two other congregations, one of them is Greyfriars Kirk.

Two years ago, the Church of Scotland, essentially founded by John Knox, voted to allow ministers to perform same-sex weddings. Meanwhile, the same denomination has lost half its members since 2000. Many of those members haven’t left for other churches, they’ve just left church. And now there’s a whole generation of people who have never stepped foot in a church at all. But that doesn’t mean no one is interested.

Unchurched… yet Curious

It’s a rainy afternoon in Edinburgh, and I’m on my way to visit Neil McMillan. He’s the church planting pastor of Cornerstone Church, a congregation that meets just down the street from where Eric Liddell worshiped during his university days. These days, Pastor Neil says regular church attendance in Edinburgh is probably around 4%. The city’s evangelical population is around 2%. But this is where things get interesting. Though a lot of people stopped going to church over the last few decades, the next generation doesn’t really know much about church at all, and sometimes they’re pretty curious.

Neil McMillan: The young people I’m meeting now have had no encounter with church whatsoever. I’m reading the Bible with a couple of young guys just now, and they’ve never met a Christian in their life. They’d never been to church. They have no knowledge. So I’m kind of used to sitting down with people and they have lots of questions about suffering or ethics or morality or whatever it might be, but these younger guys really are saying, “We don’t have any questions because we don’t actually know what Christianity is. We’re just trying to see what you think and believe, and then we might have some questions.” So it’s a really different landscape. But the broad picture of religion in the UK is really interesting because the kind of headline is Christianity’s rapid and inevitable decline from half the population going to church, 80% of the population saying that they believed in God down to the majority of people of no faith and church attendance is very low figures.

But if you dig beneath that, then sociologists of religion are saying that what’s actually happened is that liberal churches have died and evangelical churches are actually growing. So what they used to call faith by obligation or cultural Christianity has vanished, virtually, but what they were calling faith by choice is actually growing.

When The Gospel Leaves, the People Follow

In other words, when the gospel departs from the church, so do the people, but when the gospel is preached, even a mustard seed can bear fruit. It’s a reminder to not only safeguard the gospel but to share it.

Neil McMillan: 97% of our fellow Scots do not have hope for life for eternity through Jesus Christ, and surely that should weigh on us and burden us deeply and shape how we see what’s going to happen next and what we want to commit to and where we want to spend our resources and our energy.

He says a good place to start is by asking this question, where is the gospel most absent? It’s a great question. Though everyone needs to hear the gospel, where is their least access to biblical teaching and faithful churches? Eric Liddell considered that question as he set his sights on China, even while he trained as a runner at the University of Edinburgh. Today, he’d probably ask the same question about Scotland. Where is the gospel most absent? Maybe not surprisingly, it’s often most absent in some of the most overlooked places, places tourists don’t usually visit, or at least the roads they don’t normally go down. And yet, that’s exactly some of the spots where God is also most at work. That’s next time on Glory Road.