Records of the Church Service Society, learned society, 1865- , Scotland

Papers of the Church Service Society, mainly correspondence, 1858-1951

The Church Service Society was founded in Scotland in 1865 to study the liturgies of the Christian church and to prepare and publish forms of prayer for public worship and services for the administration of the sacraments in the Church of Scotland. The Society was founded by three Church of Scotland ministers; R H Story, who was then minister of Rosneath, Argyll and Bute, Scotland, and later became Professor of Ecclesiastical History and Principal of the University of Glasgow, Glasgow, Scotland, J Cameron Lees, minister of Paisley Abbey, Paisley, Scotland, and later of St Giles' Cathedral, Edinburgh, Scotland, and George Campbell, minister of Eastwood.

The work of the Church Service Society was presented in the publication of a service book entitled Euchologion. The first edition was published in 1867, and seven more editions were published in the following 30 years. The material included in the service book was gathered from a variety of sources, including the Church of Scotland's own tradition, writings of John Calvin and John Knox as well as Eastern and Roman liturgies. The Society had a lot of support and by the turn of the century a third of the clergy were members of the society. Although the Society claimed that they did not wish to impose a liturgy upon the Church of Scotland, the service book paved the way for official publication to be produced by the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland and led to a more orderly celebration of the sacraments.

By 1929, the Church Service Society encompassed members of both Free and Auld Kirk backgrounds and was a strong influence in the Committee on Public Worship and Aids to Devotion. After the 1939-1945 World War there was a general decline in the study of liturgy in the Church of Scotland, but the Church Service Society continued to be the dominant influence on the Committee on Public Worship and Aids to Devotion which was responsible for bringing out a number of publications on worship in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.

Source: Duncan Forrester and Douglas Murray, 'Studies in the history of worship in Scotland' (Edinburgh, 1984)

The arrangement of this material reflects the original order in which it was received

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Deposit : Thomas Davidson Kelly : 25 August 2000 : ACCN 4757

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GB 238 MSS CHU 31: Church Service Society, records 1865-1924, available at the University of Edinburgh, Special Collections Division