Minister in Edinburgh and Glasgow known for his work overseas

Born: June 14, 1922;

Died: February 5, 2018

ALWYN J C Macfarlane, who has died aged 95, was typical of the Church of Scotland ministry of his day, a noted preacher, an assiduous pastor, academically gifted, but not so typical in his education.

He went to the Edinburgh private school, Cargilfield, and then to the English public school Rugby. In 1940 he entered New College Oxford, to study history.

Graduating from Oxford in 1948 (during the war he served in North Africa, Italy and Greece) he then began his training for the ministry at New College Edinburgh. During his studies there he spent student assistantships at Palmerston Place Church in Edinburgh’s west end, with Revd Graham Hardy. He was ordained as assistant in North Leith for two years and in 1951 he was ordained there by the Presbytery of Edinburgh.

His ministry took him to a variety of parishes. In 1953 he went to the recently united church of Fodderty and Strathpeffer, where he stayed until 1959 when he went as associate minister to the fashionable Edinburgh west end church of St Cuthbert’s with Rev Leonard Small. Four years later he moved to the nearby Old Parish Church of Portobello, leaving in 1968 for Newlands South in Glasgow.

Newlands South was regarded as what then was called a “preaching station”, then defying the decline in Church of Scotland membership which had already started and would accelerate from the late sixties onwards. This was to be Alwyn Macfarlane’s principal ministry.

He initiated and oversaw projects to support other communities in difficult parts of Scotland and overseas, which in turn strengthened the community of Newlands. And in his approach to both church and community, pioneering and co-ordinating community recycling long before local authorities thought to do so. In his thinking and his work, Alwyn Macfarlane was always ahead of his time.

His sermons were described by someone who was a teenager and young adult during Mr Macfarlane’s ministry as inspirational. And he himself as “thoughtful and considerate, wanting to know more about our lives than telling us about his, which we later learned to be rich and varied”. He used his manse not just as his home but as a resource for the church, and regularly invited the congregation in groups for a social gathering.

Mr Macfarlane once briefly considered moving to one of the Church of Scotland's charges in Europe, but the matter was taken no further when he realised that he would have to become a member of the Presbytery of Europe and so be required to resign as a Queen’s Chaplain, an honour he held from 1977 until his 70th birthday, when he joined the list of extra royal chaplains. No loss of the royal appointment was involved when he went to be the associate minister of the Scots Church in Melbourne in Australia in 1984, returning to Scotland nearly four years later.

He is survived by his son Seumas and daughter Kirsteen.  His wife Joan, who he married in  1953,  predeceased him.

JOHNSTON MCKAY