History

The following is drawn from Martin Allen’s address at the January 2020 gathering of the Crieff Fellowship, under the title of ‘Returning to roots’. The audio address and full transcript can be found here

The Crieff Fellowship began with a meeting at the end of August 1970 when William Still invited a number of minister friends to learn from the expertise of Geoffrey Dixon, a professional psychiatrist in the city and an elder in Gilcomston South Church in Aberdeen.

This was a small gathering of like-minded ministers and it was held in the manse of Crieff South Church. Everyone gathered to discuss the insights of psychiatry in relation to the work and ministry of Christian pastors. So the origins are firmly rooted in a pastoral purpose of learning and support.

Invitations were sent to 23 ministers, most of whom attended. Three additional meetings were held before the end of that year, 1970, with Geoff Dixon again as speaker. Thereafter he left to take up a post in Perth, Western Australia. However, the gatherings had been found to be so beneficial, that the desire was expressed to continue to meet at regular intervals.

At the next meeting early in 1971, it was decided that specific subjects should be addressed. Suggestions were to be submitted and William Still, acting as chairman with Sandy Tait as secretary, considered these. A subject was chosen and a speaker invited. Thus began the Crieff Fellowship.

That the Crieff Fellowship was able to develop as it did was due in many ways to the very generous and ongoing support from two American ladies, who wished to remain anonymous, but who provided monetary resources for holding the gatherings of the Crieff Fellowship.

The initial 20 attendees quickly became 30 and when the list became nearly 40, it was clear that a manse was not big enough. St Ninian’s Church of Scotland training centre in Crieff was hired, but still more space was needed. The Hydro was approached and a suitable room was rented three times a year.

In January 1973, the first overnight gathering was held. The numbers grew and wives and fiancées were invited for the first time in March 1975. In January 1976 there were 51 ministers present, but then the list grew and grew. There were 284 invited by June 1984, and in 1991 the numbers reached 300. The last figure recorded by William Still was that over 400 were registered. That was in 1994 and he claimed that this figure represented around a fifth of the ministers of the Church of Scotland.

Attendances peaked around the year 2000 when Dr J I Packer was the main speaker and about 230/240 were present. The same number came along in October 2011 to the one-day conference. Around 200 attended the January conferences in the first decade of the 21st century.

Mr Still retired as chairman in 1996 and the Crieff conference has carried on for the 24 years since. There have been three other chairmen—James Phillip, Martin Allen and the present chairman, Jeremy Middleton. A system was established where a number of Trustees were involved and that persists today.

Three simple principles guided William Still’s thinking at all times, and they remain the core values of the Crieff Fellowship.

There was over the first fifty years no ‘basis of faith’ as such; and there was from the start persistent resistance by the chairman to any and all overtures to structure the Crieff Fellowship as a kind of evangelical lobby within the Church of Scotland. The Crieff Fellowship was established, he affirmed, to minister to ministers. That is, it was to afford teaching, support, fellowship and love for those who were committed to the biblical gospel and preached the word systematically.

That remains to this day the primary focus of the Crieff Fellowship.

50th Anniversary

At our gathering in January 2020, the 50th anniversary of the Crieff Fellowship was celebrated: it was very fitting that 5 members of the Crieff Fellowship USA should have been present. (Attendance at January gatherings of the Crieff Fellowship had such an impact on a couple of American pastors that in 2000, with the permission of the Trustees of the Crieff Fellowship, they created their own American version!)