Born September 6 1938; Died ...

THE Rev Dr Bill Christman, who has died aged 73, was an American-born kirk minister of four very different parishes in Scotland over almost 30 years,. He also spent a short time as national prison chaplain for the Scottish Prison Service and chaplain of Shotts Prison.

He was born in Joplin, Missouri, and after graduating in history from Grinnell College in Iowa, he decided to study for the ministry of the Presbyterian Church of the USA at New College in Edinburgh, where he graduated bachelor of divinity with distinction in ecclesiastical history in 1963. He later completed a doctorate at the University of Texas, in Austin.

In his days at New College, there were no honours courses offered by the four Scottish divinity faculties, but he so impressed his lecturer, the Rev Alec Cheyne, that immediately after he had graduated and been ordained by his church in America, he was offered the post of assistant lecturer in New College.

It is more than likely that Mr Cheyne, who became both a close friend and mentor and was appointed professor of church history in 1964, wanted the young assistant lecturer to become a permanent member of staff.

However Mr Christman was unsure that he was comfortable in the Scottish academic context and decided to accept an invitation to become minister of the parish of Richmond Craigmillar in the Niddrie area of Edinburgh in 1965.

Niddrie at that time was largely a mining community, and the congregation of Richmond Craigmillar, like many similar congregations in those days, had been persuaded, or had persuaded itself, that its success depended on copying the worship and organisational styles of more middle-class Christian communities.

The new minister was not so sure, and he soon found that the time he spent with the miners, whether or not they had any interest in religion, or with the young people of the parish caused problems with his kirk session. Its members took the view that a minister was called to meet the needs of the congregation.

But Mr Christman persevered, assisted at first by the Rev Douglas Templeton, later to teach at New College, and the Rev John Miller, who spent his entire ministry in Castlemilk, and was Moderator of the General Assembly in 2001.

Nearly 10 years later, Mr Christman was to write an account of his ministry in Richmond Craigmillar, The Christman File, which illustrates how the hurt of a difficult ministry remains. He wrote that his ministry had been "a sustained attempt to understand the people of the parish, living alongside them, and suffering when they suffered, being afraid when they too knew fear".

In 1970 he left Scotland, to take up a fellowship in education at Harvard. But within six months he received a call from the congregation of Lochwood in Easterhouse, which he accepted because he believed that he had outgrown his "idealistic notion of the Church".

However he had also shed some of the vulnerability which had, at no small cost, brought him and his faith respect in Niddrie. At a time when co-operation both within the Kirk and ecumenically was a feature of church life in Easterhouse, Mr Christman tended to focus on his own ministry in Lochwood's congregation and parish. Having received little encouragement from the Church of Scotland it was, perhaps, an understandable strategy. It was while he was in Lochwood that he married Gina Boyle.

After just over six years in Easterhouse, Mr Christman moved to Glasgow's west end, to Lansdowne Church. Both geographically and socially this was a time of transition for Mr Christman. In 1981 he moved to Ayr, to the congregation of St Columba, which had just been formed by the union of three congregations, Cathcart, Sandgate and Trinity, and had nearly 1700 members. His most personally satisfying years in Scotland were the 10 years he spent in Ayr.

The present minister of St Columba, the Rev Fraser Aitken says that "due in no small measure to his commitment, St Columba very quickly became one of the greatest success stories of a union of three congregations". There he conducted more than 100 weddings a year, often three in a day, and his extrovert and gregarious personality still attracted people, as it had done in Niddrie, who had little or no connection to seek him out for marriages and funerals.

He had, however, worked out how to combine parish commitment with congregational encouragement. He refused to have a car, doing all his pastoral visiting on foot. Members of the congregation still enjoy describing the scene.

In 1991 he left St Columba Church in Ayr to spend a short spell as national prison chaplain for the Scottish Prison Service and the first full-time Church of Scotland prison chaplain.

After just over a year, he returned to Joplin, Missouri, where he was senior minister of the First Presbyterian Church. He then spent five years as minister of the Presbyterian Church in Tifton, Georgia, and later returned to the mid-west to be minister of churches in Kansas and Mena, Arkansas, where he drove four hours from his home in Joplin to preach, lead bible studies, and train the choir. In Joplin he founded the Community Clinic, he continued to be available to prisoners, and was named Outstanding Citizen of the Year in 2003. He loved the arts, played the piano and enjoyed classical music and opera.

Bill Christman was a complex character. Infectiously gregarious he was distinctly introspective. Radical churchmanship combined with conventional theology. A very high view of his ministry combined with liberal Protestantism and personal vulnerability was matched by steely determination.

In August 2011, he fell and suffered a serious head injury but took seriously ill just before Christmas. He is survived by his wife Gina and daughters Stephanie and Laura, one grandson, and his mother Jane