We are approaching quickly October, the month the Church reflects and prays for the Missions. Once again we have a Diocesan Mission day on the Saturday before Mission Sunday. This year we gather on Saturday 18th October at Forebank for 9.30am to end at 3.30pm.
More and more questions are being raised about mission and how we do mission. The challenges of our modern world and Church are forcing us to question how to live mission in different ways.
Probably we Scots felt we were a well-established Church sending out lots of missionaries all over the world. However, Scotland has also always been a country receiving missionaries. We have always relied on missionaries! However, we were probably not aware of it! Why? Because they were generally white, their native language was English and they did not have to travel far. What would we have done without the Irish priests who often became Scottish Diocesan priests?
Many still regard Polish, African, Indian, Asian priests as a “stop gap”. Scotland has fewer priests than we are used to, so we need to appoint priests from somewhere to our parishes. The majority of these wonderful priests are from missionary orders or Dioceses with a missionary spirit. They are not here to fill up the gaps but to announce the Good News.
Europe, the UK, Scotland are now missionary territories. Perhaps this concept is a little strange to us but we will eventually have to take this on board.
In the past years we have had some wonderful speakers who have often questioned us and helped us. This year we are so pleased to have Duncan MacLaren a long time ago director of SCIAF and ex-director of Caritas International. Duncan has a vast amount of knowledge of our missionary Church.