A split church? Good

First, it renders the position of Scott Rennie, and his congregation at Queen's Cross, Aberdeen, very difficult. Rennie is now in effect isolated in the Kirk: on the one hand he is accepted by the Assembly, on the other he is being made an exception of because of the refusal to accept any other gay ministers for the time being. It is as if Rennie has been welcomed in and then, before his new ministry in Aberdeen has even started, told: "No, hang on a minute; we're not quite certain about the general principle. Maybe endorsing you was an aberration. OK, we have backed you personally but we cannot regard that decision as any kind of precedent." Thus the present position of the Kirk appears to be: Rennie is to be the minister at Queen's Cross, but perhaps we've made a mistake.

Secondly, the current divisions will not be healed by a two-year commission. On the contrary, attitudes will harden in the interim. Ministers and church members who are wrestling with this issue through their conscience, their understanding of scripture, and their commitment to a Christian life, are being given zero guidance. They are being told: "Just hang on for a couple of years, folks, and we may be able to give you a lead then. Or maybe not."

So the Kirk is leaving its membership to their own devices and I'm sure some of them will see that as tantamount to an abdication of responsibility. A church that cannot make up its mind but prefers to defer a hard choice is a church that invites and encourages division.

Thirdly, the procrastination means that people who are contemplating a split, however reluctantly, are being given plenty of time to work on their tactics. If the commission proposes a general acceptance of gay ministers, and the assembly backs this, you can be sure that several presbyteries - and quite a few individual ministers - will object and fight on; and, crucially, they will have had time to work out exactly how they intend to fight on.

I hated writing the above sentences. For a start, I know that those who proposed the two-year commission were acting in good faith and doing their best to hold together, not to divide. Further, for years I have believed that any schism would be a disaster for our national church. Apart from anything else, I have taken the view that in its present parlous financial state - the ministry remains seriously under-resourced, both in terms of personnel and money - it cannot afford to lose the services of any dedicated and experienced ministers.

I have also deprecated the tendency for the Presbyterian churches in Scotland to split and split again, although, as I shall explain, later divisions are embedded in the collective soul of Protestantism. I was aware of the tenacious and protracted efforts that led to the partial re-uniting of the church in 1929, after the grievous split of 1843. (Mind you, the Disruption of 1843 was just one of many. There were two serious secessions in the previous century. Various ministers withdrew from the Kirk and formed the so-called Associate Presbytery. This new body duly tore itself apart and broke into four separate groupings. There was also a significant breakaway in 1752 when the new Relief Church was founded. The truth is that, if you take the long view, splits and secession have been the norm, not the exception.) For all that, surely the Kirk would not want, and can ill afford, to go through such a wretched process yet again? For that reason, I thought that any breakaway would be an unmitigated catastrophe.

Suddenly, I am much less sure. In the context of individual conscience, a spilt now looks both realistic and honest. It might even do the church more good than harm.

During the past few days, I have spoken with three different ministers on the conservative evangelical wing of the church. Each of them was utterly miserable. They felt - though I stress that the word is mine, not theirs - betrayed. The quality of their ministry - their pastoral work, visiting the sick, comforting the bereaved, taking funerals and baptisms, and so on - all of this is bound to suffer.

How can any minister who is desperately, corrosively ill at ease with his or her own church continue indefinitely to undertake onerous duties that are already demanding and sometimes lead to burn-out? When the church itself, which should be a prop, a constant source of support, succour and renewal, becomes instead something not to be trusted, almost as if it is the enemy, then the life of the minister in this aggressively secular society becomes lonelier than ever.

So some ministers may well decide that their agony cannot continue for another two years. They may well walk out, and they may well take the bulk of their congregations with them.

What would this mean for the wider Scotland? Well, it would mean an immediate bonanza for lawyers and builders. There would be inevitable, complex disputes about the ownership of churches and manses. The Disruption of 1843 was followed by a huge, remarkable nationwide programme of building: new churches, new manses.

Nothing on the same scale would happen this time, but even so, a schism would give an unlikely but welcome boost to Scotland's recession-hit economy. The Kirk is currently seriously over-churched. The secessionists would not necessarily have to build too many new churches; they could rather take over, refit and refurbish some existing redundant churches. They could also rescue some venerable old churches from what might be regarded as profane use.

Some of the evangelicals are already threatening to withdraw donations to the existing church. As they have pointed out - understandably, but with an implicit threat left menacingly in the air - their congregations tend to be particularly generous. Raising money to support schismatic ministers and build new churches and manses might be less of a problem than some imagine.

On the other hand, it could be argued that if the evangelical congregations are going to hold back money from the church to which they still belong, albeit funds they themselves have raised through generous giving, they are guilty of a move that is seriously anti-democratic. It would be sending out the message: we're half in, half out.

But the national church can ill afford to lose the cash. A former moderator once said: "Thank God for money, so powerful a servant of Jesus Christ." That particular servant is getting thinner and weaker by the day.

I have not so far said anything about the actual issue that is dividing so many good people. My own view, for what it's worth, is that a mature modern church should be able to accept frankly gay ministers, as long as - and this is crucial - they are in stable relationships. For me promiscuity - whether it be homosexual or heterosexual - is the sin. But my views on this are hardly pertinent. Where I think I have at least some locus is that I can fairly claim to have seen this coming, and indeed warned the Kirk to the best of my abilities. In my book Outside Verdict - which was commissioned by a distinguished Kirk figure, the Very Reverend Dr Andrew McLellan - I wrote that it was high time for the conservative evangelicals to be listened to more and to be given a voice in an organisation that prided itself on being broad and democratic and inclusive. (The irony being that their critics regard the conservative evangelicals as being exclusive and narrow.) Instead, I wrote, the conservative evangelicals felt they were being ever further marginalised. I concluded: "The danger signals are there and they should not, they must not, be ignored."

And on the specific issue of gay clergy, I wrote that if a far from negligible minority of ministers in the Kirk believed their concerns were not being taken seriously "then you are, at best, creating a debilitating sense of discontent, and at worst, sowing the seeds of secession".

I take no pleasure in pointing out that it would have been much better if the two-year commission had been set up in 2002 rather than 2009. At the heart of all this unhappiness is the very essence of Protestantism: the primacy of individual conscience. Because of this emphasis, there has been an unfortunate fissile tendency in Protestantism from the very start. The great Reformation movement started by Martin Luther in 1517 soon became a series of distinctive discrete movements.

Some of the national Reformations - notably the English one - were overtly political. The English embraced the Reformation not because of any spiritual concerns but because of the tedious matrimonial difficulties of their egregious monarch, Henry VIII. As for Luther, hardly had his Reformation started than he was engaged in bitter arguments with other reformers, notably Huldrych Zwingli.

Calvin and Knox, numinous reformers of the next generation, were able to give the young movement shape and substance, but by this time what were in effect a series of national reformations - all very different in character - had already taken place. Protestants evinced a dangerous, chronic propensity to dispute and argue with each other; division became endemic.

At the core of Luther's revolution was the notion of the priesthood of all believers. He said that all Christians were to be equal and subject to each other. In effect, he made the church - and all priests and ministers - redundant. He later resiled somewhat from this extreme position, but at the core of the movement which he began was the supremacy of individual conscience, based on individual reading and understanding of the Bible.

This being the case, splits and schism, disruption and division, were inevitable, and it has been that way for almost 500 years. One human being interprets scripture in a very different way from the next one. Protestant churches are not hierarchical; they are filled with fallible, struggling folk working things out for themselves. In that context, it maybe doesn't really matter that our national church is dithering about giving a lead on this contentious issue.

Indeed schism would fit in with the reformed tradition. While in the past I have been appalled by this - I was amazed to find, on a visit to the parish of Gairloch in Scotland's far northwest, that there were no fewer that five separate Presbyterian denominations operating within the single parish - I now accept that I may have been naive.

I now reckon that it is better to allow differences among the faithful and even relish them, instead of clinging to a false and phoney coalition held together by the fear of division more than any genuine unity.

In no way do I impugn the motives of those who set up the commission, and those who endorsed it. They are genuinely asking for time to try to resolve an almost impossible problem and then have another shot at endorsing the proposed resolution democratically.

But then I think of these wretched ministers, agonising about the church they love but no longer feel truly part of. It won't be easy for them, but I reckon it's time for them to quit the Kirk.